The Origins of Civic Universities

Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool

David R. Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000012477
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book, first published in 1988, examines the origins, purposes and functioning of the civic universities founded in the second half of the nineteenth century and discusses their significance within both local and wider communities. It argues that the civic universities – and those of the northern industrial cities in particular – were among the most notable expressions of the civic culture of Victorian Britain and both a source and a reflection of the professional and expert society which was growing to maturity in that time and place. This title will be of interest to students of history and education.

1
Background

The new civic colleges of Victorian England were part and parcel of an active, dynamic era. The air of stability and even placidity which sometimes seems to us to have pervaded the latter decades of Victoria’s reign is largely a figment of hindsight. The Victorians themselves saw their society as in a state of flux; even complete dissolution seemed possible. Growth and change in almost every field from population and territory, through commerce and industry, to knowledge and education brought great uncertainty.

The period began with a growing awareness of massive problems. Industrialism was creating new wealth, new classes, new slums, and new ideas, all of which were unsettling. A half reformed parliament was unlikely to offer effective political solutions, while religion was hardly in a more stable or flourishing state. Chartism, the Oxford Movement, and cholera revealed malaise in the body politic, religious, and physical. Carlyle spoke both to and for the Victorians when he told them that theirs was a critical, revolutionary, age.

By the 50s some of the violence, if not the uncertainty, had gone out of change. Industrialism was a fact of life in the Midlands and North, London and the newer cities were developing the range of institutions suitable to modem metropoli, and political violence appeared to be a thing confined to the Continent. It was this cooling of passions which led Bum to refer to “The Age of Equipoise”,¹ and to date its commencement in 1852. And in many senses the era was a calm one. The Great Exhibition had signalled Britain’s industrial supremacy to all the world, and its philosophy was the replacement of conflict by peaceful social and commercial intercourse. The Exhibition also symbolized that faith in “progress” which, when acquired by both the middle and working classes, provided what Thorsen calls “The Intellectual Origins of mid-Vic-torian Stability”.² Burn’s catalogue of the legal and social disciplines which were applied to mid-Victorian society provides further reminders of a growing stability: the ostensibly laissez-faire state was increasingly willing to coerce its citizens when it came to matters of public health, social betterment, and the abatement of nuisances; the worship of home and the family, the concept of gentility, and the importance of religion were all stabilizing factors. Many of these phenomena are important for the growth of education, perhaps most notably economic strength and the idea of “progress”_.

The age had not entirely lost its revolutionary, or at least its stressful, character, however. The idea of progress is neither static nor stable. Rising real wages, technological change, and the expansion and changing character of business and industry were signs of a progressive, not simply stable, economy. Political stability was merely relative, apparent only by comparison with the Continent. The years from 1846-67 saw eight administrations and even these frequently lacked a reliable majority in the Commons. The family, that apparently perfect symbol of the calm of the Victorian era, was actually a living embodiment of many of the stresses of society. For the working class family, geographical mobility, industrial employment, and consequent alteration in social norms replaced the certainties of an earlier era³ with a far more problematic state of social and economic affairs. To rise through education and self-help, or to sink through unemployment or drink both seemed much easier.

The middle class family of fiction and photographs is perhaps the centre-piece of our vision of Victorian stability. Yet it embodies many of the gravest stresses of the Victorian world. Two of these, the role of women and the need to preserve social status, are particularly relevant to education. Education could serve as social, professional and economic preparation for achieving or improving middle class status (see Ch. 4), and this was the class which was expanding most rapidly in number and prestige.⁴

The position of women was unimportant in Owens’ first years, but by the 70s it concerned all the colleges. Women’s supposed position on a pedestal was, after all, only the ideal of one class, and short-lived in its most exaggerated form. Secure elevation only occurred in the 50s and by the 80s increasing numbers of middle class women were determinedly climbing down, and the largest new class, indeed a potential majority, were beginning to enter the system of higher education.

In catering for the middle classes, the new colleges were affiliating themselves with a group that was not only growing, but also steadily increasing its economic and political power. Most of its upper strata had been enfranchised since 1832, 1867 saw the vote given to the rest, and its representation in parliament, office, and the Civil Service grew commensurately. And, while a great deal of England’s wealth remained in the hands of the aristocracy, a growing amount, and a particularly high proportion of new wealth, belonged to the middle classes, ranging from the merchant like Owens who could found a college and the engineer/industrialist like Whit-worth who could create a national scholarship scheme, to the ninety or hundred a year clerk who could contemplate paying the admission fees for his children. In the late 19th Century the combination of decreased infant and child mortality, followed by reduction in family size, made greater investment in the individual child both safer and more likely.

The life of the mind was even less settled than that of the family. Science was not new, but its ramifications and applications were both expanding at a great rate, and the expansion interested an unprecedented proportion of the population. While its applications transformed such fields as transport and communication, more theoretical work such as the Origin of Species (1859) was equally unsettling, especially when non-scientists also questioned the state of religion. (Essays and Reviews followed Darwin’s work almost immediately.) The expansion of knowledge also implied the expansion of the agencies for its creation and diffusion. A brief sampling of this sort of activity in the “Age of Equipoise” would include the establishment of free libraries under the Act of 1850, the Working Men’s College movement begun in London and Sheffield in the early 50s, and such signs of parliamentary interest as the Military Education Commission (1857), the Museums Committee (1860), the Newcastle Commission (1861), and the Clarendon Commission (1864).

The events catalogued in the previous paragraph all appear in the “Chronological Table” of Young’s Portrait of an Age,⁵ and a further look at the list suggests other mid-century events which, though less immediately connected with education, offer food for thought. 1853 saw the institution of competitive examination in the Indian Civil Service, reform of recruitment to the Home Civil Service, and the establishment of Charity Commission which would both reform educational trusts and divert other funds to them. In 1855 the growth of big business was legislatively recognized and encouraged by the Limited Liability Act, and while the age of the self-taught businessman was certainly not over, professionalization would soon begin.

The growth and movement of population formed one of the most powerful dynamics of the Victorian era. The population of England as a whole grew quite steadily.⁶ The cities and surrounding conurbations which the colleges served also acquired their modern scale during this period. By 1871 South East Lancashire had a population of 1,386,000, West Yorkshire 1,064,000, and Merseyside 690,000. (London at the same date had 3,890,000 inhabitants.) After 1850, more Englishmen lived in urban areas than everywhere else. This growing and shifting population was also increasingly employed in new ways. Booth’s analysis of occupations shows substantial expansion in all the middle class occupations between 1851 and 1881 and a growing proportion of the population engaged in literary and scientific professions closely linked to advanced education, and in commerce and trade.⁷

An enlarged electorate and a liberal administration after the Reform Act of 1867 suggested the possibility of further change in Victorian society. The most obvious monuments of the 60s, 70s, and 80s are perhaps those great municipal buildings which seem to embody monumental stability. And yet they reflect the rise of an enlarged power and scope for public action and administration, a new and apparently unpredictable force arising out of great changes and considerable strife.⁸

At a national level organized change was also proceeding and even accelerating. In 1870 it was finally admitted unreservedly that elementary education was a responsibility of the state; competitive examination became the rule in the Home Civil Service in the same year. The corps of Her Majesty’s Inspectors enlarged its roles and powers.⁹ Centralization was decried in theory and extended in fact.

The economic life of the public and the economic position of the nation underwent changes in the late century as well as in the earlier era of expansion and supremacy. New industries, which would eventually and belatedly replace the old staples, began to appear. The so-called Great Depression created concern, without disrupting the economy so far as to make responses impossible. Internal and psychological life was as increasingly uncertain as the externals of politics and economics. The certainties of religion, society, and the family were disappearing for many members of the middle classes; education, whether as social insurance or intellectual stimulus, was a possible response.

Religion and Education

Religion was undoubtedly a great stabilizing force in Victorian society. But, simultaneously, it was the subject of great controversy, and of controversy with tremendous impact upon all levels of education. Religion and religious tests were two bitterly debated and enduring issues in Victorian Britain, and most people were involved, if only in attacks on the state’s support of a church. The duration and intensity of this debate arose out of the conjunction of several factors. The complacency of 18th Century religious opinion was supplanted by new enthusiasms. Religious fervour moved some Anglicans toward Rome, others toward Methodism, and still others toward the revival of enthusiasm within the established Church known as Evangelicalism. At the same time, political theories argued against a religious establishment and various secular philosophies attacked the spiritual and more frequently the worldly position of religion.

The Church of England was accustomed to view education as an Anglican monopoly in theory, with dissent a de facto but not de jure competitor, and purely secular education an abomination. Primary education before 1870 was largely in religious hands, divided, in descending order of importance, among the Church of England, Dissent, and the Church of Rome, and debates among these were to hinder the creation of an efficient school system at least until late in the century, as each wished either to control state support or prevent it from going to the other competitors. Endowed secondary education was predominantly Anglican, though efficient proprietary and private schools were founded by other sects and in general the grammar schools did not restrict admission. The public schools were, of course, largely Anglican. The debate between Establishment and Dissent remained important until it was overwhelmed by the secular wave of the 20th Century. Higher education was equally bedeviled and yet encouraged. Like the question of religious instruction and control in schools, university tests were a national battleground. Under the circumstances there were demands both for the opening of old institutions and for the creation of new ones which would offer new subject and admit new people.

Education for the ministry of dissenting sects had long been provided in academies of various kinds, but these neither answered the demands for secular education, nor possessed the funds and breadth of vision necessary to offer the new sciences and modern education to larger numbers. Many of the early exponents of new universities had attended one of the great dissenting academies of the Midlands and the North.¹⁰ The religious freedom of foreign institutions provided a more direct and obvious precedent than sectarian academies. Continental and American institutions were cited, and advocates of non-sectarian education like James Yates ranged from Belfast to the Academy of Fine Arts in Mexico for their examples.¹¹ The founders of London University had the American example conveniently at hand. Brougham, Horner, Birkbeck and others who were to establish London had entertained a representative of Jefferson’s non-sectarian University of Virginia in 1824.¹²

Conservative arguments were also bolstered by supposed foreign examples. In an 1834 article advocating the abolition of University tests, the Edinburgh found it necessary to refute a Tory argument based on German examples. It had been claimed that the non-sectarian admissions policy of many German universities had led to much aberrant theology, abhorrent to a good Anglican possessed of the true Protestant doctrine. The Edinburgh replied with detailed arguments. In general the weight of foreign example was with the reformers while their opponents depended on the tradition of insularity so strong in many Englishmen.

The problem of providing non-sectarian education was complicated by the fact that few reformers were willing to countenance a complete lack of religious instruction. Though the backers of the “godless college” in Gower Street could find no workable compromise on religion except its removal, they consistently argued that this indicated not its insignificance, but its extreme importance, and the impossibility of a makeshift, compromise solution of the problem. They expected the student or his family to find religious instruction and welcomed the establishment of religious teaching of various kinds in the near vicinity of Gower Street.¹³ The trustees of Owens College faced similar difficulties. John Owens, who had attended both Church and chapel in his life, expressed the new liberal principles both in free trade where he battled against the Corn Laws and in education where his will declared that in his college members: “… shall not be required to make any declaration as to, or submit to any test whatsoever of, their religious opinions, and that nothing shall be introduced in the matter or mode of education or instruction in reference to any religious or theological subject which shall be reasonably offensive to the conscience of any student ….”¹⁴ The trustees nonetheless considered religion to be a necessary part of education and reconciled their position with the testator’s directions by offering voluntary lectures on presumably non-controversial religious questions. The debate did not end there. When the college fell upon hard times, Manchester’s more radical critics were quick to seize on the theology lectures as a cause of the decline. However, the compromise was maintained in various forms until late in the century when a cooling of religious passions allowed the formation of a separate theology faculty.

Religious reaction to criticism and innovation produced additional higher education. Thoughtful ecclesiastics realized that criticism of a worldly and wealthy established church was bound at some point to focus upon the immense revenues of the Bishop, Dean, and Chapter of Durham. In the 1830s the ecclesiastical authorities therefore founded a university in the interests both of orthodox education, threatened by such new trends as London, and of establishing a use for their revenues less open to criticisrn.¹⁵ Perhaps it was a combination of the orthodoxy of the education and the remoteness of the region; at any rate ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1. Background
• 2. Preconditions
• 3. Colleges and Cities
• 4. The Dynamics of Demand and Supply
• 5. Founders and Benefactors
• 6. Governance
• 7. The Colleges and Their Environment
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index