of London University in the autumn of 1840, he began to preach in Unitarian pulpits, but declined a permanent engagement as minister at Lancaster in order to accept a scholarship for three years' study in Germany.
After two years there he spent eight months in Berlin, where he was admitted to the family circles of August Neander and Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg.
[1] In 1846, Lady Byron invited Herford, on James Martineau's recommendation, to undertake the tuition of Ralph King, younger son of her daughter, Ada, Countess of Lovelace.
Herford grew close to von Fellenberg, became a temporary teacher on the staff, and took to Pestalozzi's and Froebel's educational ideas.
[1] In February 1848 Herford resumed his pastorate at Lancaster, deciding also to work out in a systematic way educational ideas which he had developed at Hofwyl.
The original announcement in the Manchester Guardian stated that Mr and Mrs Herford planned to start a school for boys and girls for children up to the age of thirteen.
In 1893 he published The Student's Froebel, adapted from Die Menschenerziehung of Friedrich Fröbel (1893; revised edit., posthumous, with memoir by Charles Harold Herford, 1911).
In 1902 he published Passages from the Life of an Educational Free Lance, a translation of the Aus dem Leben eines freien Pädagogen of Dr. Ewald Haufe.