Britain has a notoriously dreadful record for the education of anyone except it's wealthy upper classes. It only started considering funded public education around 1925 or so, real education, not just attending some sort of school 50-100 days per year for a year or two, to try to keep up with the US and other european countries.

Forget where I grabbed this quote from but a search for the 'history of public education in england' will pull more detailed info.

Campaigners for reform found themselves up against vicious hostility to the very idea of universal education. One Justice of the Peace, for example, opined in 1807 that:
'It is doubtless desirable that the poor should be generally instructed in reading, if it were only for the best of purposes - that they may read the Scriptures. As to writing and arithmetic, it may be apprehended that such a degree of knowledge would produce in them a disrelish for the laborious occupations of life.' (quoted in Williams 1965)

And when the Parochial Schools Bill of 1807 was debated in the Commons, Tory MP Davies Giddy warned the House that:
'Giving education to the labouring classes of the poor ... would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants in agriculture and other laborious employments to which their rank in society has destined them; instead of teaching them the virtue of subordination, it would render them factious and refactory ... it would enable them to read seditious pamphlets, vicious books and publications against Christianity.' (Hansard, House of Commons, Vol 9, 13 July 1807, quoted in Chitty 2004)

Darwin was quite the artist, have you seen these?
http://darwin-online.org.uk/graphics/Zoology_Illustrations.html