He was born in Southwark, south London, on 25 November 1778, into a large family, the son of Richard Lancaster who had been a soldier and made cane sieves, and his wife Sarah Faulkes who was a shopkeeper.

Without wishing to "detract from he praise so justly due" to Lancaster, Elizabeth Hamilton noted they had been also "anticipated" some forty years before by the Belfast schoolmaster David Manson (1718-1792).

Lancaster described a "mechanical system of education" whereby "above one thousand children may be governed by one master only, at an expense reduced to five shillings per annum".

He did, however, make a stipulation, critical in the Ulster context, that pupils should never be asked whether they belonged to "Church, Meeting, or Chapel".

[22] "A Churchman", writing to the British Critic in October 1805, commented that Granting [...] that a dissenter may teach only what he calls "the leading and uncontroverted principles of Christianity," is it not to be feared that the disregard shown to all religious systems and creeds, may so confound the distinctions between right and wrong, that it may eventually occasion the rejection of Christianity altogether?

Lancaster had rejected corporal punishment, but misbehaving children might find themselves tied up in sacks, or hoisted above the classroom in cages.

[1] In 1818, backed by the mill owner David Holt and other friends, Lancaster and his family sailed to the United States.

[28] Clinton had founded a Lancasterian school in 1806, prompted by Thomas Eddy, who knew of Lancaster's work via Patrick Colquhoun in London.

[31] A Lancasterian school was set up in New Haven in 1822, with the help of Timothy Dwight IV, and was run successfully by John Lowell, an American disciple.

Visiting England was therefore politically disappointing for him, but Lancaster's education system was one of the things he found interesting in the country.

In 1823 Lancaster apparently felt that living in the tropics would be good for his health, and he took advantage of an opportunity to renew contact with Bolívar, who was by then president of Gran Colombia.

British investors took an interest in Venezuela in the 1820, and a commercial treaty between Great Britain and Gran Colombia was ratified in 1825.

The engineer Robert Stephenson visited Venezuela in 1824 with a brief to survey the route of a railway line between La Guaira and Caracas, but the project was considered unviable.

As well as his educational work, Lancaster involved himself with Scots settlers based at an agricultural estate called Topo.

The Scots were brought to Venezuela in 1825 by John Diston Powles and associates,[1][37] as part of a project which has been described by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as a predictable failure.

[38] Lancaster and Robert Ker Porter, the British consul from the end of 1825, concurred in supporting the relocation of the Scots in Canada.

(Bolívar endorsed the separation of church and state in his Cartagena Manifesto, but he struggled to control the vast Gran Colombia).

Thaddeus Osgood had set up schools using Lancaster's system in Lower Canada, one in Quebec in 1814, another in Kingston, Ontario.

[43] Lancaster was there in 1829, and opened a school in Montreal, but his attempts to obtain funding floundered and he moved back to the United States.

The BFSS was widely successful in the early part of the 19th century, but the waning popularity of monitorial methods during the 1820s and 1830s meant that it became a more conventional school society.