The Citizens of Morley College

Abstract

I n October 1885, four young men presented themselves at the side door of the Royal Victoria Hall, Waterloo Road, Lambeth. They were enrolled in the first regular scientific classes that were being attempted as an experiment inspired by interest shown in the hall’s Friday night “penny science lectures.” The experiment proved a success and soon led to the establishment of Morley College for Working Men and Women, an institution dedicated to bringing to the working classes courses of study in liberal arts subjects. This was not the first attempt to introduce higher education to workers. There were, by the latter half of the nineteenth century, a number of institutions for adult education. The Mechanics Institute had been established by George Birkbeck in Glasgow in 1823; lyceums and Useful Knowledge Societies had more or less flourished through the nineteenth century; the Working Men’s College (dedicated to teaching the liberal arts to working men) had been established in Great Ormond Street in 1854 by Rev. F. D. Maurice, Thomas Hughes, John Ludlow, and Charles Kingsley, all Christian Socialists; and Oxford and Cambridge universities had been running extension lectures since 1867. But the sudden enfranchisement of so many working men by the Second Reform Act of 1867 made education for all these new voters a serious subject for debate. By the time the four young men came to the side door of the Royal Victoria Hall, educating working men was less a virtuous ideal and more a pressing imperative. For many, the only questions were what sort of education ought they receive and who was to set the curriculum. A good deal has been written on the subject of the education proffered to Britain’s working men in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century. Much of the debate turns on different aspects of a single issue: was worker education a way of offering higher learning to those hitherto denied the opportunity to engage in nonvocational, academic inquiry? Was adult worker education more a means whereby workers’ efforts to acquire learning was harnessed and shaped by elitist