While Bloomsbury is now associated with Virginia Woolf and her early-twentieth-century circle of writers and artists, the neighborhood was originally the undisputed intellectual quarter of nineteenth-century London. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival resources, Rosemary Ashton brings to life the educational, medical, and social reformists who lived and worked in Victorian Bloomsbury and who led crusades for education, emancipation, and health for all.
Ashton explores the secular impetus behind these reforms and the humanitarian and egalitarian character of nineteenth-century Bloomsbury. Thackeray and Dickens jostle with less famous characters like Henry Brougham and Mary Ward. Embracing the high life of the squares, the nonconformity of churches, the parades of shops, schools, hospitals and poor homes, this is a major contribution to the history of nineteenth-century London.
While Bloomsbury is now associated with Virginia Woolf and her early-twentieth-century circle of writers and artists, the neighborhood was originally the undisputed intellectual quarter of nineteenth-century London. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival resources, Rosemary Ashton brings to life the educational, medical, and social reformists who lived and worked in Victorian Bloomsbury and who led crusades for education, emancipation, and health for all.
Ashton explores the secular impetus behind these reforms and the humanitarian and egalitarian character of nineteenth-century Bloomsbury. Thackeray and Dickens jostle with less famous characters like Henry Brougham and Mary Ward. Embracing the high life of the squares, the nonconformity of churches, the parades of shops, schools, hospitals and poor homes, this is a major contribution to the history of nineteenth-century London.
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While Bloomsbury is now associated with Virginia Woolf and her early-twentieth-century circle of writers and artists, the neighborhood was originally the undisputed intellectual quarter of nineteenth-century London. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival resources, Rosemary Ashton brings to life the educational, medical, and social reformists who lived and worked in Victorian Bloomsbury and who led crusades for education, emancipation, and health for all.
Ashton explores the secular impetus behind these reforms and the humanitarian and egalitarian character of nineteenth-century Bloomsbury. Thackeray and Dickens jostle with less famous characters like Henry Brougham and Mary Ward. Embracing the high life of the squares, the nonconformity of churches, the parades of shops, schools, hospitals and poor homes, this is a major contribution to the history of nineteenth-century London.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300154481 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/14/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Sales rank: | 715,750 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
Victorian Bloomsbury
By ROSEMARY ASHTON
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Rosemary AshtonAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-15448-1
Chapter One
Godlessness on Gower Street
On Monday 6 June 1825 an article entitled 'The London College' was printed in The Times. It gave an account of a meeting at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand the previous Saturday of 'about 120 of the gentlemen who have taken a principal interest in the formation of the London College, or University'. In the chair was Henry Brougham. Among the 'public characters' supporting him were several prominent Whig and reforming members of parliament, including Lord John Russell, third son of the sixth Duke of Bedford, and Joseph Hume, famous for his dogged attacks on royal and aristocratic profligacy and the scandalous expense to the public purse of the navy and other national services. Also there was Dr George Birkbeck, founder of the London Mechanics' Institution in 1823. At the foot of the table sat the poet Thomas Campbell, whom Brougham graciously described as having been 'most active' in the many private meetings which had recently taken place in Brougham's legal chambers in Lincoln's Inn to plan the new institution.
All those present were agreed, The Times reported, on 'the necessity of establishing for the great population of this metropolis a college, which would comprehend all the leading advantages of the two great universities', while allowing the students to remain at home with their parents, thus both catering for their 'domestic supervision' and offering an education much cheaper than that at the ancient residential universities of Oxford and Cambridge. In his grandiose way, Brougham announced at the meeting that he had sounded out the Chancellor of the Exchequer and William Huskisson, the President of the Board of Trade, about the possibility of applying for a royal charter to establish the new university, but had been discouraged. He was now in the process of putting a private bill to the House of Commons, explaining to his fellow MPs that there was no intention at present of 'founding fellowships, or conferring degrees, or giving a theological education'. Despite not being able to take degrees at the new institution – a concession to the vested interests of Oxford and Cambridge which Brougham saw as an unfortunate necessity for the time being – the young men of London would be offered a full higher educational syllabus. The founders' most radical and contentious step was to exclude theological teaching. The syllabus would be much expanded to include, in addition to the traditional subjects of mathematics and the classics, 'science, literature, and the arts'.
There would be no sinecures or residences for the professors. Nor would there be any religious tests such as those operating at Oxford and Cambridge, where students were obliged to sign the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England in order to take their degrees and where all teaching fellows had to do likewise. At the new university there was to be 'no barrier to the education of any sect among His Majesty's subjects'. Medical studies were envisaged, and London students would have the advantage over their peers at Oxbridge (though this was diplomatically left by Brougham to be inferred) of combining the academic study of anatomy and physiology with attending practical medical classes at one of the London hospitals.
Treading thus warily to avoid stepping on the toes of the two ancient universities, which would be unlikely to welcome a London rival, Brougham described how the money would be raised for the new institution. 'The capital intended for the undertaking was estimated at £200,000, and the mode of raising it by transferable shares of £100 each', The Times reported. At the meeting a committee was appointed to take the plan further, and letters of support were read out from the Dukes of Bedford and Norfolk, the former a leading Whig and the latter a Roman Catholic who would naturally take a close interest in the founding of an institution which would not discriminate against his fellow religionists.
The editor of The Times, Thomas Barnes, a friend of Brougham, continued to report the doings of the fledgling institution in some detail, and usually in an encouraging spirit, from its conception in 1825 to the opening of its new building on Gower Street to welcome the first intake of students in October 1828. The newspaper had been the chosen vehicle for the very first public suggestion of a university for London four months earlier, in February 1825, when it carried a long, diffuse open letter from Thomas Campbell to Henry Brougham entitled 'Proposal of a Metropolitan University'.
Though Campbell did not put the case as succinctly as his colleagues would have wished, it is apparent from his letter that the aim of the planned university was fourfold: to offer higher education in the politically and financially most important city in the world, and thus remove the ignominy of London having no university; to educate the sons of the expanding middle class; to welcome non-Anglicans of every kind by avoiding the religious tests for entry (Oxford) or graduation (Cambridge) which had excluded them from English universities for so long; and to enlarge the curriculum beyond the traditional classical, mathematical, and theological education offered by Oxford and Cambridge. The radicalism of the proposal did not go as far as to propose higher education for women, though when women were finally permitted to take degrees in 1878, it was at University College London that the innovation was introduced.
One attraction for parents stressed by Campbell was the relative cheapness of keeping their sons at home instead of sending them away to live in a college: 'Say a man has £1,000 a year, he can hardly send one son to an English University. To send three sons, would cost him at the least £750.' Each son kept at home in London would cost about £25–£30 for his education, with perhaps clothing and pocket money amounting to another £25. Not wishing to alienate the two ancient universities too much, Campbell does not state explicitly the further advantage to parents of being able to keep a close eye on their offspring, and so to thwart the well-known propensity for young men at university to run up wine and tailoring bills, not to mention such costly and tempting pursuits as gambling and visiting prostitutes.
In the end, once the new university had been launched and the dust settled on the controversy it aroused, the two aims which were to prove truly important and influential for the education and culture of the whole country were the opening of higher education – and from 1836 of full degree status – to people of all faiths and none, and the expansion of the curriculum. The University of London was the first to include a range of subjects not taught before, including several branches of science and medicine, geography, architecture, modern history, English language and literature, and other modern languages and literatures including French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Hebrew.
These progressive aims of the proposed institution were vigorously opposed from the start by newspapers supporting the Tory government and defending the special position of the Church of England. None entered the lists more combatively than John Bull, the newspaper founded in 1820 to support the unpopular George IV in his efforts to keep his estranged wife Caroline from attending his coronation as queen. (Brougham was Caroline's legal adviser.) John Bull immediately seized on Campbell's letter in The Times to 'his friend Brougham' and began a campaign, taken up by other newspapers, to ridicule the new university. It reminded readers of its founders' recent involvement in establishing Mechanics' Institutions, and suggested that the new university was intended for the same clientele. It also carried broad, exaggerated warnings about the potential threat to 'Church and State' of a non-Anglican university. For good measure it hinted, despite Campbell's remarks designed to forestall such objections, that London was a place of moral danger to young men. A short article on 14 February 1825 begins the onslaught. Campbell, Brougham (whose name, pronounced 'broom', was a gift eagerly accepted by all satirists), and Birkbeck are placed firmly in the paper's sights:
It is understood that this magnificent national establishment will speedily be undertaken, under the immediate surveillance of a learned and liberal committee. Its objects are evidently of first-rate importance, and its end will be most salutary – for instance, it is proposed to instruct butchers in geometry, and tallow-chandlers in Hebrew – tailors are to be perfected in Oriental literature, and shoemakers finished up in mathematics – servants out of livery are to be made good Grecians, while lacqueys are only to learn Latin. Campbell Fellowships (so called after the great founder) are to be created for the benefit of dustmen and chimney-sweepers; and a Brougham exhibition appropriated annually to erudite house-maids.
To Dr Birkbeck the nation is already indebted for a great work of enlightenment – journeyman carpenters, and tailors, and bricklayers, and plaisterers [sic], now dignified into operative artisans, listen with wonder and advantage to the lecturing of popular professors.
The article finishes with a 'prospectus' invented by John Bull, asserting that the new university will be built in Tothill Fields, a notorious slum near Westminster Abbey, and that pub owners and prostitutes will make a killing:
The morality of London, its quietude and salubrity, appear to combine to render the Capital the most convenient place for the education of youth....
It is therefore intended to erect a spacious College, with proper residences and offices, for the reception of the metropolitan and suburban youth, in Tothill-fields; and in order to meet any objections which heads of families may make to the perilous exposure of their sons to the casualties arising from crowded streets, a large body of plain respectable females, of the middle age, will be engaged to attend students to and from the College in the mornings and evenings of each day.
Attacks and squibs like this became commonplace as the new university slowly became a reality. Traditionalists feared the changes which reform agitation inside and outside parliament sought: the removal of Catholic disabilities, which passed into law in 1829 and which many bishops and others viewed as putting the Church of England 'in danger', and the enfranchisement of a proportion of working men, which came about through the Reform Act of 1832. The fear of a working-class revolution on the French model was also prevalent. A new university intended to open opportunities to hitherto marginalised groups might encourage social unrest.
Campbell and his colleagues were aware of the prejudices which would greet their project; hence the cautious statement of their aims in the letter to The Times. Campbell was a man of some fame as a writer, and though his reputation was in decline, he was a well-known and well-connected London literary figure when he proposed the idea for the university. He was editor of the New Monthly Magazine and still residually celebrated for his youthful poem, The Pleasures of Hope, published in 1799, in which he had expressed, in trite and flowery rhyming couplets, his sympathy with political reform and in particular the anti-slavery movement. Just at the time when Wordsworth and Coleridge were inaugurating a new Romantic poetry with their Lyrical Ballads (1798), in which they experimented in both form and subject matter, Campbell's much-reprinted poem harked back to the pallid Miltonising of much eighteenth-century poetry, even as it exhibited impeccable reforming political views:
Primeval Hope, the Aonian Muses say,
When Man and Nature mourned their first decay;
When every form of death, and every woe,
Shot from malignant stars to earth below;
When Murder bared his arm, and rampant War
Yoked the red dragons of her iron car;
When Peace and Mercy, banished from the plain,
Sprung on the viewless winds to heaven again;
All, all forsook the friendless guilty mind,
But Hope, the charmer, lingered still behind.
Much more useful to the cause of reform than this versifying was Campbell's experience as a Scot who had graduated from the University of Glasgow and saw a partial model in the Scottish system. Four long-established universities (Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews, and Aberdeen) flourished; they had a proud tradition of lecturing to young men who usually lived at home, as distinct from the college tutorial system that prevailed in England. In Scottish universities there was no religious requirement in order to graduate. Several of the founders of the new metropolitan university had studied at a Scottish university, either because they were Scots or because they were Englishmen who did not subscribe to Anglicanism; Brougham was born and educated in Edinburgh, for example, while Birkbeck, the son of a Quaker merchant from Yorkshire, studied medicine at Edinburgh.
Campbell also brought to the new venture a knowledge of the German educational system, having visited Bonn in 1820 (where he was fêted as an admired poet) and been struck by the tolerance of all religions at the recently established university there. In September 1825, with the new London university plan going ahead, Campbell went on a fact-finding visit to Berlin, where he attended lectures and spoke with professors, coming away impressed by the 'encouragement given to universities' in Prussia, a country where the roads were still mainly 'sandy tracks', the carriages 'bone-shaking', and the streets of Berlin as yet unpaved, but where the universities were havens of philosophical scholarship. Campbell's father had had trade connections with America and his brother was living in Richmond, Virginia; these contacts meant that he could also bring forward the example of the new University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819 with the intention of educating American youth not only in all the traditional subjects, but also in medicine, modern languages, law, politics, and economics.
Until the Crown and Anchor meeting of 4 June 1825, when Brougham took over as the public face of the university, Campbell was its prime mover. He was also responsible for ensuring that the institution did not become a university exclusively for Protestant dissenters and that – in the interests of openness – it did not teach theology of any kind. As the plan took shape in the spring of 1825, a number of interest groups came together to discuss how they might co-operate. Brougham, like Campbell, Birkbeck, and Joseph Hume, was an agnostic and against the teaching of religion, but he was aware of the need to secure the support, not least financially, of the often wealthy set of Presbyterians and Unitarians who were also keen to found a non-Anglican establishment. At a meeting with dissenters led by the charismatic Scottish preacher Edward Irving, Brougham and one or two others gave ground, to Campbell's disgust.
According to Campbell's account in a letter of 30 April 1825, Brougham had decided they would have to 'have a theological college' for dissenters, whereupon Campbell had gone to some liberal Church of England supporters of the scheme and told them this, getting a reply from them that 'either the Church of England must predominate, or else there must be no church influence'. This threat brought Brougham and others back to the original idea of avoiding religion altogether. Irving and his group withdrew their support at this juncture, while other dissenters conceded that the only way forward was to have a university 'without religious rivalship'. Campbell (somewhat prematurely, as it turned out) basked in the success of his ruse: 'You cannot conceive what anxiety I have undergone, whilst I imagined that the whole beautiful project was likely to be reduced to a mere Dissenters' University! ... I regard this as an eventful day in my life' [Campbell's italics].
Having set things in motion in this way, Campbell soon faded from the scene. His domestic circumstances were difficult; he had a mentally unstable son and a sick wife, who died in May 1828. His election to the rectorship of Glasgow University in 1826 meant that his energies and interests were divided, and he missed the ceremony and dinner at the laying of the foundation stone of London University in Gower Street on 30 April 1827 because he was fulfilling his duties in Glasgow. The newspaper reports of the London occasion highlighted the contributions by the great orator and master of ceremonies Brougham, and when he read these Campbell felt understandably slighted. Though he was a member of the first council of the university, he resigned on grounds of ill health as early as January 1828, several months before the doors were opened to students: 'I feel it a duty to my Electors to give up a situation the duties of which I can no longer perform.' With that Campbell's contribution ended; in due course his name faded from the record, while his first collaborator, the phenomenon that was Henry Brougham, became the chief figure, adept alike at self-promotion and promotion of the interests of the university of which he was the first president from 1827 until his death, aged eighty-nine, in 1868.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Victorian Bloomsbury by ROSEMARY ASHTON Copyright © 2012 by Rosemary Ashton. Excerpted by permission of YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations....................viPreface and Acknowledgements....................ix
Introduction: Surveying Bloomsbury....................1
1 Godlessness on Gower Street....................25
2 Steam Intellect: Diffusing Useful Knowledge....................58
3 Gower Street Again: Scandals and Schools....................82
4 Bloomsbury Medicine: Letting in the Light....................105
5 The British Museum, Panizzi, and the Whereabouts of Russell Square....................131
6 Towards the Millennium....................155
7 A 'Quasi-Collegiate' Experiment in Gordon Square....................183
8 Educating Women....................215
9 Christian Brotherhood, Co-operation and Working Men and Women....................249
10 Work and Play in Tavistock Place....................274
Epilogue....................305
Notes....................311
Bibliography....................347
Index....................360