In 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.Footnote ¹ 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 forces that blunted and conformed it into a respectable, reformist, working-class model? That these were also contemporary questions can be seen both from the founding, in 1908 at Oxford, of the Plebs League, an organization dedicated to independent worker education along Marxist lines, and from the strike at Ruskin College the following year, led by students apprehensive about what they perceived as the growing assimilation of working-class students—often quite assertive regarding the legitimacy of their rights to higher learning—into nonoppositional collaboration. The strike at Ruskin College led directly to the forming of the Central Labour College, which sought worker education free from any control or direction from Oxford University. Roger Fieldhouse has made the case that many educational programs for workers were either created or promoted by the elite, who sought to divert the working classes away from any potential Marxian-tinged militancy.Footnote ² Lawrence Goldman and Ross McKibbin have, conversely, argued that regardless of whether such diverting was deliberate, the late Victorian and Edwardian working-class educational movement largely reflected the essentially moderate, socially conservative, and upwardly mobile aspirations of much of the British working class of this period.Footnote ³ John Reed has pointed out that even F. D. Maurice and the other founders of the Christian Socialists’ Working Men’s College sought not to assist working men to enrich themselves and thereby rise into the middle classes but to cultivate their inner selves—to be better men—while encouraging them to remain in the social positions they currently occupied.Footnote ⁴

But Morley College has another strain in its pedigree: the “social missionaries”—the middle-class men, and more often women, who worked in London’s slums, attempting to “lift up” the poor—for example, Octavia Hill, the Women’s University Settlement, or Henrietta and Samuel Barnett at their Whitechapel settlement of Toynbee Hall. Much has been written about those who volunteered these well-intentioned efforts. Gillian Darley, Jane E. Lewis, and, more recently, Nigel Scotland, have identified weltered motivations: part Christian spirituality, part neo-Franciscan socialism, part self-conscious benevolence.Footnote ⁵ Seth Koven has also observed that slum visitors were often partly impelled by reasons, often voyeuristic, which they neither fully acknowledged nor entirely comprehended themselves.Footnote ⁶ Using these two strands of Morley College’s genealogy, this article looks beyond the declared intentions of its founders to ask if they sought to enable their students to rise into the middle class or whether their—and their students’—intentions were more subversive.

The original penny science lectures from which Morley College sprang were very much the result of the Royal Victoria Hall’s recenought to give the working poor of Lambeth and Southwark some alternative to the pub, as little then existed. They quickly reformed the Royal Victoria Theatre into the Royal Victoria Hall, although it would still be known to the neighborhood as the “Old Vic.” Emma Cons was charged with deciding what programming to put on stage, and the Old Vic’s character changed overnight: gone were the blood-soaked melodramas, and interwoven with the acrobats, magicians, and troupes of performing dogs were regular concerts of classical music and opera. Friday nights, before the weekly temperance meeting, she had speakers in to present lectures on scientific subjects, often featuring magic lantern slides. These lectures quickly became as popular as any item on the weekly playbill, and after a few weeks, four men of the neighborhood approached Cons to see if the lectures could be turned into regular classes.

The original four young men quickly became sixty students, and additional teachers giving other courses were promptly added. By the winter, the classes (held in the evening so students could attend after work) had expanded into the rehearsal rooms and what had once been the saloon bar. But the classes were not the technical training usually offered to working persons. Instead, the classes were in liberal arts subjects: sciences, French, botany, music, literature, economics, and politics. Within three years, the Charity Commissioners were persuaded that the courses deserved annual funding, and a charter was drawn up for an official college. The Royal Victoria Hall’s Board of Governors decided to name this new college in memory of the late temperance advocate, philanthropist and Member of Parliament, Samuel Morley, who had been a great supporter of the hall’s endeavors. Thus, Morley Memorial College (for Working Men and Women) officially opened its doors in September 1889. Its purpose, as set out in its charter, was to “promote the advanced study by men and women belonging to the working classes of subjects of knowledge not directly connected with or applied to any handicraft, trade or business.”Footnote ⁷ It was clear that the studies were, in the words of an early instructor and supporter, to be “pursued for themselves alone and the pleasure rather than the pecuniary profit.”Footnote ⁸ Although Cons retained supervision, she delegated day-to-day operations to the woman whom the board, at Cons’s suggestion, appointed as the college’s first principal, Caroline Martineau.

These two unusual women were close colleagues despite the differences in their backgrounds. Cons came from a long line of handicraftsmen who, for generations, had made musical instruments.Footnote ⁹ Better than any member of the board of governors, she knew what it was to support herself by working with her hands. She had originally trained as an artist, both in silver engraving and stained glass but, having to earn her own living, had come, through her childhood friend, Octavia Hill, to managing model dwellings for workers. As Cons gained both experience and reputation in this field, and herself established the Surrey Buildings in Lambeth, it was she who had persuaded the duke of Westminster, Lord Mount Temple, and their other reforming colleagues of the Coffee Music-Halls Company to take up the lease on the nearby Old Vic. Caroline Martineau had been raised in a world of comfort and privilege. She was the daughter of Richard Martineau, a director and partner of Whitbread’s Brewery and a father who had encouraged his daughter’s education. Like Cons, Martineau had also worked with Octavia Hill, and when Cons began her own enterprise in model worker tenements in Lambeth, Martineau became her right hand at the Surrey Buildings. When Cons began the job of managing the newly acquired Old Vic, she had turned to Martineau, a good amateur scientist who had attended the lectures of Tyndal and Faraday, to organize the Friday night scientific lectures.

Caroline Martineau’s appointment as principal tells us two things about Morley College in its earliest days: first, appointing a woman principal was an explicit sign of the level playing field regarding gender that Emma Cons sought to create at Morley College. Second, it is also a good example of the dynamic of power between Cons and her board of governors; they did not much question Cons’s choices. “Dominating but not domineering” was how one early supporter described her.Footnote ¹⁰ This may have been partly to do with the fact that Cons had very strong support from one of the board’s most forceful and powerful members. The Honorable Lucy (Lady Frederick) Cavendish was able to bring much to the board of the Royal Victoria Hall as one of its original governors.Footnote ¹¹ Lucy Cavendish stood in the midst of power. She was the eldest daughter of Lord Lyttelton; the niece of William Ewart Gladstone; a former maid of honor to the queen; and a great friend of, among others, the Conservative politician Arthur Balfour; the social doyennes the countesses of Pembroke, Brownlow, and Meath; and Archbishop Temple and his wife, Beatrice. Lucy Cavendish brought more than her glittering array of social connections to the hall’s board of governors. She had exceptionally good judgment; experience on a number of effective committees; and, by the time she came to the Royal Victoria Hall, fifteen years of experience with soup kitchens, workhouse visiting, and parochial missions—a variety of hands-on work with London’s poor.Footnote ¹² Cavendish also felt strongly about the importance of women’s education, serving as one of the first board members of the Girls Public Day School Trust and the president of the Yorkshire Ladies Council of Education. As she made clear in a speech she gave at the hall on 15 May 1888, Cavendish knew how valuable a college for working women could be. When Emma Cons made a recommendation to the board of governors that Caroline Martineau should be appointed as Morley College’s first principal, Lucy Cavendish concurred. When Cons made it clear to the Royal Victoria Hall’s board of governors that, in her opinion, they should stipulate in the college’s organizing charter that the college’s governing council (which would aid the principal in the smooth running of the college) should always include at least three women, it was easy to accomplish: Lucy Cavendish, Emma Cons, and Caroline Martineau were appointed as Morley College’s first governing councillors. Between the three of them, Morley College was run by women. Moreover, Cavendish actually ran the Royal Victoria Hall’s Board of Governors even though she was never its president; it was she who did the vast majority of fund-raising for the hall; it was she who conducted salary negotiations with the Morley College staff; it was she who negotiated with the Lord Chamberlain’s office to have the hall’s music-hall license changed to a theatrical license without many of the required structural changes.Footnote ¹³ As Cons wrote to her in 1904, “you are our real President, the others are only figureheads.”Footnote ¹⁴ Notwithstanding the fact that these three women came from very different worlds, they shared priorities, experience, and they spoke the common language of effective social improvement through education.

The courses in liberal arts subjects that these women decided to offer in the college’s first official year were the kind that could arguably have given working persons ideas above their station. But the curriculum established by Caroline Martineau responded directly to the interests of the first students. It also reflected Martineau’s particular expertise. Having written books on physics, she established a set of courses that quickly weighted toward the scientific.Footnote ¹⁵ These courses were popular. Both pure and applied science courses soon formed the bedrock of the college’s curriculum: botany, elementary physiology, chemistry, electricity and magnetism, geometry, and Euclid were offered. Astronomy was a favorite subject, and a university extension course was established, “Suitable to Artizans.” But humanities courses were also requested, and in the next few years, courses in economics, political science, logic, and history were quickly set up. Music was also popular (singing, orchestra, and violin), as was early Italian art (which included field trips to the National Gallery), sculpting, and drawing. Modern languages were offered almost from the start. German and French were particularly popular; instruction in Spanish became available in 1892.Footnote ¹⁶

A small number of students were interested in learning classical languages, and, in response to this demand, Latin was offered and Greek added later. This latter offering is significant, as knowing Greek was viewed as the exclusive purview of educated elite men; it was the essence of learning for its own sake, the farthest thing from the practical or profitable. At the same time, not having studied classical Greek was also a practical bar in one sense; for example, the Foreign Office, even well into the twentieth century, tended to recruit only Oxbridge graduates who had read classics. A display of Greek, a superfluous knowledge, was also a way for elite men to signal or confirm their inclusion to each other.Footnote ¹⁷ This was not simply a matter of class exclusion: the inaccessibility of Greek cut along lines of gender as well. Not knowing Greek was seen by many otherwise well-educated women of Martineau, Cavendish, and Cons’s generation as a significant handicap that excluded them from the world of the truly educated.Footnote ¹⁸ Writing to her niece and namesake, Lucy Lyttelton in 1903, Lucy Cavendish applauded her: “Only think of your learning Greek!!!! Eve and Gwen are the only she’s of your generation who have flown so high.”Footnote ¹⁹ Thus, Morley College’s offering not only Latin but also Greek established it as an institution that made hitherto inaccessible knowledge available to men and women of the working classes.

That said, Morley College also gave a few classes in subjects that directly bettered students’s chances of acquiring a white-collar job: shorthand, machine drawing, building construction, and bookkeeping. The commercial courses pointed toward upward mobility for the working men and women who, it was hoped, would be attracted to Morley College. The idea was that if they could draw students to the College by means of a shorthand class, they might well stay for the class on political science, or botany, or French. This inclusion of practical courses of study goes directly to the issue of what was the best sort of education for Britain’s working classes, which was the subject of heated debate at this time. Ought educators to focus on greater technical training to enable workers to improve their skills and enrich themselves? Technical training at this time was very much seen as the way for Britain to surpass Germany in the race for scientific, industrial, and thereby economic, supremacy, and a surge of interest in technical training for British workers grew popular and gathered momentum. There were many, however, who held quite divergent opinions. Should not there be some attempt to expose the working classes to the liberal arts? Was it not better for the nation if all could be as well educated as possible? There were strong advocates on both sides and infinite gradations in between.

For example, an editorial in The Times in December 1877 on the subject of technical education pointed out the difficulties inherent in teaching the working classes beyond rudimentary education and concluded that there was little need to educate the sons of handicraftsmen in the liberal arts.Footnote ²⁰ In October 1886 the liberal and philanthropic earl of Meath, in a letter to the editor of The Times, wrote with great concern that trying to teach the working classes the humanities, particularly foreign languages, brought technical education into disrepute and left the working classes “desirous of engaging in work which is neither manual nor what is mis-termed menial … the country wants handicraftsmen and we produce scriveners. The colonists are crying out for men who can handle a plough, shoe a horse and mend a cart and we send them out clerks or would-be gentlemen.”Footnote ²¹

But not all concurred. Fabian and university extension lecturer, Graham Wallas, was of a different opinion: “The workmen themselves … feel that the only hope for the working classes lies in their future intellectual education. … Their way of looking at the question is very difficult for an ordinary middle-class politician to understand. To him the need of technical education, ‘if we are to compete with foreigners’ is perfectly obvious, the need that the working classes should be taught to think is not obvious at all.”Footnote ²² The idea of helping working men to think for themselves was also the basis of the Workmen’s Social Education League, which was established in 1876 with the objective of “organizing lectures and discussion, especially at working men’s clubs and institutes on history, social, political and economic science, in order to assist in the formation of instructed and intelligent opinion among the people on these and kindred subjects.”Footnote ²³ This sort of education for the working classes had nothing to do with training in technical skills. It had everything to do with workers becoming citizens.

In the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, questions of citizenship preoccupied many thoughtful persons. Julia Parker has examined how citizenship became linked to public service by, for example, Arnold Toynbee and T. H. Green, Ruskin, William Morris, and R. H. Tawney, a view increasingly embraced by women.Footnote ²⁴ Lydia Murdoch has pursued the differences in how social welfare authorities saw significant distinctions between working-class and middle-class citizenship.Footnote ²⁵ Jane Rendall and Anna Clark have observed that the question of who qualified for citizenship in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain was also a deeply gendered issue, arguing that, as citizenship became synonymous with voting rights, it solidified as a male preserve.Footnote ²⁶ For the working men and women who came to the side door of the Old Vic for the classes at Morley College, exclusion from citizenship was not an abstract notion. At the time that Morley College was founded, even after the Third Reform Act of 1884, approximately 35 percent of Britain’s men, and all of Britain’s women, still did not have the vote. These were men who paid less than £10 a year in rent, or who moved so often they did not meet the twelve-month residency requirement for rate paying and, as Cons noted in the college’s first annual report, her students tended to change residences frequently. “The working class population of London is distinctly nomadic in its habits and moves hither and thither in search of work, or cheaper or more convenient lodgings. The erasures in our address books prove how frequently the students change their abode.”Footnote ²⁷ The unenfranchised were also young men who were not “heads of households,” those who did not have the means to leave their fathers’ houses and acquire their own lodgings, even if they were over age twenty-one. This exactly described the men and women who came at night to Morley College. For these men and women, the question of whether to be trained or educated was important because one path could lead to inclusion and citizenship whereas the other might well not. For exactly these reasons of accessibility and inclusion, Cons was a strenuous advocate of keeping the scale of college fees as low as possible. The fee for the first set of classes was set at one shilling, sixpence a term; a second or third course could be added for only an additional sixpence each.Footnote ²⁸

The theme of citizenship ran like a ribbon through much of Morley College’s curriculum. Cons understood the connection between an education in the liberal arts and citizenship. Sir Frederick Black, an early teacher at Morley College, and subsequently a senior civil servant, recalled that Cons “had a remarkably clear conception of what such a College as Morley could do for working men and women. … Her ideal in education was that which brought out all that was best capable of development in men and women intellectually and in character.”Footnote ²⁹ Caroline Martineau, too, understood this well. One student recalled the “delighted interest” she took “in the growth of the young minds about her!”Footnote ³⁰ Their principal objective was not to train Morley College’s students but to teach them to think, reason, and judge for themselves. For example, to offer a woman of the working classes in 1888 a course in how to be a better dressmaker is a perfectly good thing. To teach her Latin and history and music and economics and literature is not only to show her that her mind is an innately valuable thing but also teaches her to question, construct theories, and think critically. Lord Curzon encapsulated this idea perfectly when he described the value for artisans of, as he put it, “that liberal and humane scheme of mental training which is indispensable for the part that they desire to play in the national life; thus the best among them seek that training in citizenship which the study of political and economic science and of social and industrial history will give.”Footnote ³¹ But Lord Curzon was writing in 1909, by which time the idea of workers seeking higher education and increasing their understanding of the nation’s affairs and their citizenly capacities was a perfectly reasonable position. Morley College’s classes had started in the rehearsal rooms in the mid-1880s, at a time when the wisdom of educating working men and women in the humanities so that they might think for themselves—might more fully appreciate their citizenship (or their exclusion therefrom)—was a more contentious question. The view of many—even the most well meaning—was that it was self-indulgent, impractical, pointless, and perhaps even bad for the empire to teach languages or literature or history to the laboring classes.

Contemporary debate regarding adult education for working people also involved discussions of gender. Elizabeth Bird and June Purvis have both observed that reformers of working-class education, even those who supported a liberal arts education for working men, did not usually embrace an equally broad education for women of the working class.Footnote ³² University extension lectures were invariably attended by working men and middle-class women, thus, as June Purvis has pointed out, relegating working-class women to the educational margins.Footnote ³³ Moreover, those who sought to establish colleges for workers did not extend themselves much to integrate women into this movement. The need was not as pressing; women did not vote. Working-class women were typically offered classes that were aimed at making them either better workers or better housewives (dressmaking, cookery). Cons clearly saw Morley College for Working Men and Women as helping to fill various gaps in the education offered to working women, who were explicitly welcomed to all Morley College’s classes from its inception.

Those who had attended the earliest classes signed O.V.S. (Old Vic Student) after their names, “as proudly as though the letters stood for some distinguished degree.”Footnote ³⁴ Declared one student, signing in, “We’ll make that as good a degree as any of them.”Footnote ³⁵ This was a common feeling among the students. Cons wrote in her first annual report, “They come to learn and mean to do it. … Their eagerness is very gratifying; and the progress they make shows what the best class of working men can do.”Footnote ³⁶ Certainly the people of Lambeth seemed to embrace Morley College. The Charity Commissioners observed, when they were first approached, that they had been most impressed, not by the presentation made by Lord Mount Temple and the members of the committee but by a petition, organized by thirteen working-class Lambeth residents who took time off work to gather over two thousand signatures (to support the Royal Victoria Hall’s application for charitable funding for both the Old Vic and Morley College), which they laid before the commissioners. As was reported in the Daily News in May 1888, “the Commissioners have spoken since of the impression which the intelligence and earnestness of these working men deputies left upon their minds. All that ought to be known. It speaks volumes. ‘We have a love for the old “Vic”’ say these men; ‘it is a favourite institution of the neighbourhood.’”Footnote ³⁷

We have a good picture of the 1,270 men and women who enrolled in Morley College that first year. Most were men. Most were local. About 18 percent were clerks of one type or another, often occupying the gray area between the working class and the lower middle class. But most students worked with their hands, many on the railroads, likely out of nearby Waterloo. Six masons enrolled, as did twenty-two printers, thirty-one warehousemen, nineteen who identified themselves simply as “laborers,” and three brush makers, in addition to numerous other occupations involving manual labor. There were also a number of skilled artisans in the first year, including tailors, bookbinders, and carpenters. The women’s working hours generally ran very late, and the hours of the classes, which generally started at eight o’clock, acted as a deterrent; still, women comprised approximately 20 percent of the student body. The general youth of the students in the first year can be readily seen in their descriptions of themselves (“post boy,” “entering lad”) or from their occupations as apprentices or as junior assistants in one sort of trade or another. Approximately 45 percent of the first-year’s students were under age twenty; another 45 percent were between twenty and thirty years old. There were also three mature students in their midsixties.Footnote ³⁸ Cons was herself pleased with her demographic reach: proudly listing the occupations of her students in the annual report, she noted that they “prove that this College has really reached the class it was formed to help, working people.”Footnote ³⁹ There was a drop in the college’s second year, as the initial flurry of interest shook out those students who had overestimated their capacity, interest, or available time, but annual enrollment soon began to steadily increase, settling at just under a thousand, where it stayed until 1913, whereupon it rose again to around eleven hundred. The number of women enrolled as students also steadily increased; whereas in 1895 men had outnumbered the women four to one, by 1913 there were 569 men and 556 women attending classes.Footnote ⁴⁰

We also have a portrait of a Morley College student from fiction. E. M. Forster was giving a series of lectures at Morley College at the very time he was building, in Howards End, the character of Leonard Bast, a young clerk who stood at the “extreme verge of gentility … not in the abyss, but he could see it” from where he stood.Footnote ⁴¹ Leonard Bast loved beauty, played a bit of piano, liked Grieg, attended lectures, and hoped to “come to Culture” as evangelicals hoped to come to Jesus. He felt that “if he kept on with Ruskin, and the Queen’s Hall concerts, and some pictures by Watts, he would one day push his head out of the grey waters and see the universe.”Footnote ⁴² The description of Bast’s country walk into the dawn could have been taken almost verbatim from the reports of the Morley College Walking Club’s forty-mile moonlight tramp.Footnote ⁴³ There are many aspects of Forster’s Leonard Bast that recall the sort of young man who attended classes at Morley College. That said, the character of Leonard Bast probably tells us more about how Forster saw his students than about what his students were actually like. As Jonathan Rose has perceptively indicated in his examination of the richness of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British working-class intellectual and autodidact culture, workers who sought out intellectual activity, the classics, and culture were usually not as insecure or as unformed as Bast was painted. They usually had a more solid sense of their own worth, and their consumption of literature, history, theater, and music was more often consistent, perceptive, passionate, intelligent, and joyous. One of the great strength’s of Rose’s work is that it is packed thick with working-class memoirs showing the texture and depth of appreciation that Edwardian workers often held for ostensibly elite education; for example, W. J. Brown, the junior clerk who usually spent his “glorious” hours of freedom after work at the Post Office Savings Bank, reading Dostoyevsky in the Battersea Public Library; young Allen Clarke, who worked in Lancashire’s textile mills but who also spent his spare hours in the public library, devouring Chaucer, Marlowe, Shelley, and Goldsmith; A. E. Coppard, the laundrywoman’s son and clerk who used prize money from running races to buy the works of Shakespeare, Homer, and William Morris.Footnote ⁴⁴ These accounts, more than the portrait of Leonard Bast, are closer to the reality of Morley College students.

Just as the opera and classical music that Cons put on stage at the Old Vic were designed to divert the working poor of Lambeth from the pub, so Morley College also offered recreational activities as an alternative entertainment for young working men and women. She understood, from living in the tenements she managed, that working men and women often suffered from social isolation. “We can’t make friends in our rank of life,” a shoemaker with ten children had once said to her—“How can I tell my boys to bring home a pal in the evenings? We’ve not room for it!”Footnote ⁴⁵ Cons knew that Morley College’s students would have few opportunities, beyond the pub, to mix in collegial, let alone intellectually stimulating, company. As she wrote, shortly after the college opened, “If we can bring into the lives of our students, books and an intelligent interest in the affairs of the world and the beauties of nature, we do much for them. If we make friendship possible to them, we do perhaps still more.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Thus, a common room was established and kept open to all students before and after classes. Lucy Cavendish donated rugs and chairs and passed on her copies of Punch.Footnote ⁴⁷ A refreshment stand was established in the basement so that students coming directly from work could have their tea and relax a bit before class. A smaller room was rigged up as a library, and it stocked books donated by members of the governing council. From the start, the college encouraged students to form clubs. Those involving sports were invariably well attended. The cricket club fielded both a First and a Second Eleven teams. Swimming clubs for men and women met weekly at the nearby York Baths. A women’s basketball team was organized. A Natural History Club organized outings, for example, to the Royal Botanic Society or Kew Gardens. The Archaeological Society took field trips to such places as the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey. An Astronomy Club, a Literary Society, and a Chess Club were also established. The students themselves set up both a Cycling Club and a Rambling Field Club for both men and women. Students also organized their own monthly Saturday night social evenings where they would provide their own music, singing, or elocution recitations. Morley College thus presented a way for working men and women to meet each other in reputable, even creditable surroundings, on a level playing field.

The issue of citizenship and inclusion was just as much a part of extracurricular activities at Morley College as it was a theme in the curriculum. If one of Cons’s purposes in establishing Morley College was to inculcate in her students “an intelligent interest in the affairs of the world,” she found a variety of ways to do it. A college magazine was set up in 1892 and appeared monthly during the term. At first it was edited by one of the governing council members, but it was soon ceded to the students to run themselves. Students were co-opted onto the governing council to teach them the rudiments of governance. A colleague of both Lucy Cavendish’s and Emma Cons’s from the Women’s Local Government Society, Walter McClaren, MP for Crewe, organized a Debating Club.

Students felt strongly about Morley College. From the outset, students caught the idea that Morley College was offering not simply training but a door to a different sort of life; students offered to give away the college’s first prospectus in the streets, “as if they were tracts.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Letters from former students received by Cons attest to a sense of gratitude about how the college enabled them to “rise in life.”Footnote ⁴⁹ But this clearly meant more than simply material advancement; the classes and clubs incited a sense of belonging. It was often, as Cons put it, “something less tangible but certainly not less important, a grateful acknowledgement of awakening intellectual life, or sympathy in intellectual interests which are already awake. … Such men speak most warmly not only of the means of further study afforded by the classes, but of the Society of those like-minded with themselves to be found in the Clubs and Common Room.”Footnote ⁵⁰ As George Macaulay Trevelyan, who often lectured at Morley College, wrote to his Morley colleague, Graham Wallas, “they are Morley men, just as I was a Trinity man; the esprit de corps, which means the social and intellectual life, is real and valuable at the Morley.”Footnote ⁵¹ Morley College evidently gave the men and women of Lambeth a sense that they themselves were of significance, their opinions had merit, and their minds were worth cultivating. The students’s loyalty and affection was the return of respect. “I never felt so much at home anywhere in my life,” said one.Footnote ⁵²

Seeing the college as theirs, however, students often had views that crossed the intentions of the administration. The first student representatives to the Consultative Committee were vocal in voicing their disagreement with, for example, the authorities’ vetoing a dancing club or roller skating in the gymnasium. Student protests led to the ban on smoking in the basement refreshment room being lifted and, in 1893, students persuaded the council to permit scenes from plays to be performed, on the condition there was no “dressing up,” something seen as potentially embarrassing for working women unable to afford finery.Footnote ⁵³ The following year, students united to reject the principal’s ex officio seat on all student clubs, arguing that it was undemocratic; the secretary of the swimming club threatened to immediately adjourn any meeting that the principal attempted to attend.Footnote ⁵⁴ That same year, a quarter of the students protested and petitioned, unsuccessfully, against the firing of a popular member of staff. Students were increasingly assertive of their own stake in the college, and the Consultative Committee often had to work hard to retain a state of equipoise.

A common understanding of the importance of citizenly participation can also be seen through those hired to teach at Morley College. For example, Graham Wallas, just down from Oxford, first came to Morley College in November of 1893 when he gave a series of lectures on “The English Citizen past and present.” His lectures were consistently well attended and well regarded. Wallas thought favorably of his students, writing to Caroline Martineau that “the average of intelligence is, I think, higher than in any of my other centres.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Wallas was not simply being polite; F. W. Maitland, Downing Professor of Law at Cambridge, who served as external examiner for one of Wallas’s courses, held a high opinion of Wallas’s students: “I am well satisfied with the results of the examination. I consider the subject a very difficult one for those who have had no previous training in history or law.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Wallas had not only prepared his students well but had given them the confidence to write a difficult exam that they knew would be read by a demanding judge. He sought not only to help his students venture into new intellectual territory but to see that they had a perfect right to be there.

As Caroline Martineau became increasingly unwell in the late 1890s, many of her duties were taken up by her vice principal, Mary Sheepshanks, the energetic daughter of the Bishop of Norwich. It was she who secured the Cambridge historian George Macaulay Trevelyan to lecture on various aspects of history.Footnote ⁵⁷ Sheepshanks was also responsible, in 1907, for hiring the young Gustav von Holst (not yet a renowned composer but still a well thought of young teacher of music) to create a music department. Sheepshanks also secured the young Virginia Woolf to teach and persuaded Woolf’s siblings to teach at Morley College as well. Woolf’s sister Vanessa Stephen taught drawing, her brother Thoby and his friend Clive Bell taught Latin, and brother Adrian Stephen taught history and Greek.

Virginia Woolf approached her students much as an anthropologist studying a distant tribe: “On the whole they were possessed of more intelligence than I expected; though that intelligence was almost wholly uncultivated. But of this I am convinced; that it would not be hard to educate them sufficiently to give them a new interest in life; they have tentacles languidly stretching forth from their minds, feeling vaguely for substance, & easily applied by a guiding hand to something that [they] could really grasp.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Woolf’s diaries at this time reveal the best of intentions, but they also show an almost complete absence of a basic understanding of Morley College’s mission: “Ain’t it ridiculous—teaching working women about the ancient Britons!”Footnote ⁵⁹ She similarly questioned the point of a course of eight lectures that her students were to be offered by George Trevelyan on the subject of the French Revolution: “And what, I ask, will be the use of that? Eight lectures dropped into their minds like meteors from another sphere impinging on this planet, & dissolving into dust again. Such disconnected fragments will these eight lectures be: to people who have absolutely no power of receiving them as part of a whole, & applying them to their proper ends.”Footnote ⁶⁰

If Virginia Woolf failed to grasp the purpose of Morley College, the young Gustav Holst understood it entirely, but Holst came from a very different social bracket than Woolf’s. Like Emma Cons, Holst was from an emigrant, Continental, musical family—his father was a music teacher and composer, descended from generations of music teachers and composers. Also like Cons, Holst believed in art and education for working men and women. He was enthusiastic about the works of Walt Whitman and George Macdonald, who had written plays for Cons’s tenants to perform. Holst became a member of William Morris’s Hammersmith Socialist Society, headquartered at Kelmscott House, where Holst conducted the Hammersmith Socialist Society choir.Footnote ⁶¹ Holst was a good fit with Morley College.

Holst accepted all comers to the orchestra he established at Morley College in 1907; no one would be turned away because they were “not good enough”; the only condition was that they be prepared to work hard. The Morley College orchestra and chorus soon became popular, and within four years had grown to a size where they could, in 1911, give the first concert of Purcell’s Fairy Queen performed since 1697. Holst encouraged the development of his students’s critical faculties and their growth as musicians and composers and had them tackle challenging pieces such as Handel’s Acis and Galatea, Monteverdi’s Dido and Aeneas, and Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture.Footnote ⁶² He also insisted on including at least one student composition at every Morley College concert and took pleasure in their developing discernment. Holst’s pedagogical vision of inclusion and holding his students to high standards and encouraging their development as musicians and composers was very much part of the Morley College ethos.

Gustav Holst, E. M. Forster, George Trevelyan, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell, and Adrian, Thoby, and Vanessa Stephen were not the only notable and often eminent teachers whom Mary Sheepshanks secured for Morley College; she tended to aim high. For example, the Cambridge historian, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, was prevailed upon to give a class in philosophy. The zoologist Peter Chalmers Mitchell was the secretary of the London Zoological Society when he began to teach at Morley College in 1903. The Cambridge philosopher, G. E. Moore’s defense of the evidence of an external world was first articulated in a series of lectures he gave at Morley College in 1910. The young R. H. Tawney became a member of Morley College’s Governing Council about the same time. Tawney would go on to a distinguished career as an economic historian and, after the war, was one of the Labour Party’s chief theorists on educational policy. Mary Sheepshanks was indefatigable in persuading good minds that it was worthwhile teaching Morley College students.

The presence of so many elite instructors raises the issue of whether Morley College sought to divert its students from Marxian radicalism and direct students’ paths toward upwardly mobile assimilation and conformity. Many of the courses offered at Morley College not only implicitly prepared students for citizenly participation but many lecturers returned explicitly and repeatedly to the subject of the inclusion of the working class in political and public life. In 1909, the economist J. A. Hobson took charge of Morley College’s first university tutorial classes in economics, starting with the subject “Making and Sharing Wealth,” a subject so popular it was instantly oversubscribed. Graham Wallas gave more than one series of lectures on the English citizen; in 1892 he gave a series of lectures on government generally, another on “The Making of the English Constitution,” and one on the English citizen of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶³ Moving systematically through British history, Wallas consistently used as his pivot point the struggle of the English working class to reclaim and retain the “rights of freeborn Englishmen.” He stressed the subversive aspects of the working-class struggle to become active citizens. For example, in his lecture on the effects of the French revolution on English working men, he described how “colliers in the mines would go out at night on the moor, light a peat fire and sit down and read Tom Paine hour by hour through the night—taking care after the meeting to bury the proscribed book down in the peat.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Two weeks later, he brought his students back to much the same place, observing, in his lecture on the evolution of Britain’s Poor Laws, that “no nation can be wealthy in which the individual citizens themselves do not feel their own responsibility.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Similarly, the following week, speaking on the battle to bring public elementary education to the working class of Britain, Wallas deliberately chose for his lecture some of the most provocative quotes from the House of Commons debates concerning Samuel Whitbread’s 1807 education bill, observing that it had been derided in the House as being “Jacobinical” (“What produced the French Revolution? Books!”), quoting Sir Samuel Romilly’s observation from that debate: “The fact is, the greater part of the House desire that the people should be kept in a state of ignorance.”Footnote ⁶⁶ In these lectures, Wallas engaged just as much in raising the citizenly consciousness of his Morley College students as instructing them in a narrative of British history.

If this was the objective of Wallas, and, indeed, of other Morley instructors, were they successful? The responses of some students seem to suggest so, or alternatively, that Morley College attracted those predisposed to hear the message. C. H. Hartley, one of the first student representatives to the college’s Consultative Committee, recalled himself and his student colleagues as “the most ardent of Socialists were we all.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Alfred Arnold, who enrolled in the college in 1892, described himself as “an active Socialist propagandist,” and, indeed, he was not only a member of H. N. Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation but also contributed to its weekly journal, Justice.Footnote ⁶⁸ Arnold was an active debater and successfully led the argument at one of the debating society meetings in 1893, in favor of “Socialism” and, as he put it, “astonished certain worthy people by the vigorous manner in which I maintained my opinion on the subject, notwithstanding the fact that the Principal of the College had expressed herself against it.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Virginia Woolf, writing to her friend, Violet Dickinson, about one of her students, observed that “he thinks he must bring the Parasite (the Aristocrat …) into an essay upon Autumn.”Footnote ⁷⁰ There were other indications that some of the students of Morley College were politically and critically alert. When, at the conclusion of a gymnastics display in 1892, when the band struck up the national anthem, a “vigorous hissing” was heard and attributed to “republican” students.Footnote ⁷¹ When the earl of Lytton spoke on imperialism, a few years later, he was heckled.Footnote ⁷² The advertisements of Johnson and Son (“first-class tailors”) in the Morley College Magazine, conscious of the readership, prominently averred that they employed no sweated labor and invited inspection of their workshops.Footnote ⁷³ In 1889, when, following the end of a bitter dock strike, a demonstration was held to aid dock-workers’ families, the Daily News reported that the organizers chose to “muster at the Morley College for Working Men and Women [and] with Bands and banners, perambulated the streets and roads of Lambeth and Southwark, gathering in great quantities of copper and silver as they went.”Footnote ⁷⁴ If one of the objectives of Morley College had been to steer students away from working-class consciousness, it was not working.

The resolutions of the student debating society can also be instructive. Extrapolating from the subjects they discussed and the resolutions they passed, students seem to have held broad-minded political philosophies but, certainly in the early years of the college, more liberal than socialist. Students supported an imperial federation but were simultaneously “anti-militarist”; they were in favor of “women’s rights” generally and women’s suffrage specifically; they held that the power of the House of Lords should be curtailed and MPs should receive a salary; but the formation of an Independent Labour Party, the society resolved, was “neither necessary nor desirable.”Footnote ⁷⁵ After the turn of the century, students’s views began to manifest a trend to the left. One debate resolved that the Boer War was “unnecessary and grossly immoral”; at another, the vote unanimously supported trade unions.Footnote ⁷⁶ The following year, the first resolution in favor of “Socialism” was passed. This is not altogether surprising considering the political complexion of many of the popular speakers that Caroline Martineau and Mary Sheepshanks brought to the college to address the students between 1889 and 1913: the suffragette Charlotte Despard argued for providing school dinners for children; the Fabian (and later, historian) Robert C. K. Ensor spoke on the necessity of minimum wage laws; a young Herbert Morrison spoke on children’s care committees; Christabel Pankhurst and Margaret Bondfield each spoke on women’s suffrage; and Amber Pember Reeves debated free will, in what the club secretary described as “the best discussion we’ve ever had.”Footnote ⁷⁷ If Morley College students were becoming politically more radical than had been the college’s earliest students, this might also reflect an increasingly liberal political temperament in Britain generally between the years 1889, when the college opened, and 1913. That said, holding radical political views does not necessarily mean that one does not, simultaneously, seek to better one’s material position.

This brings us back to the question of the intentions of the women who established and ran Morley College. We know that beyond simply broadening students’s horizons, one of Cons’s motivations in establishing the college was to bridge the gap between the classes. She asked benefactors and those who would have donated money instead to cross the river and play games with the students in the college gymnasium, preside over a class, or simply chat with the students in the common room and share their experiences. As she put it, the gentlemen and ladies who support Morley College should meet minds “essentially like their own, but differently shaped by the different circumstances and experiences to which they have been subjected. It has well been said that the old Roman fable of the gulf in the Forum applies to the gulf between classes in our modern life. What is needed to fill it up is not gold nor armour nor any material thing but the best life of the nation. In places where that is forthcoming, the gulf closes.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Her words echo those of Rev. F. D. Maurice, founder of the Working Men’s College, who himself preached of “closing the gulph between the classes.”Footnote ⁷⁹ This is not surprising; Maurice’s words had been a great influence on Cons since she and Octavia Hill, as teenaged friends, had accompanied Mrs. Hill to hear him preach. But Maurice’s vision was one of fellowship within a defined patriarchy. Maurice sought to inspire a spiritual and moral fellowship, where all men, regardless of class, could recognize their commonality beneath one heavenly Father.Footnote ⁸⁰ When he and the other Christian Socialists established the Working Men’s College in Great Ormond Street in 1859, it was to preclude the growth of Chartist frustration into a more pernicious strain of radicalism, not to encourage or enable working men to question the established societal structure or their place in it. This was an ethos readily understood and adopted by, among others, Octavia Hill and the Barnetts at Toynbee Hall.

But when Cons spoke of bridging the gulf between classes, her purpose—and her perspective—was diametrically different. As Beatrice Webb observed, Cons was “not a lady by birth.”Footnote ⁸¹ Unlike Rev. Maurice or the Barnetts, she understood what it was to support oneself by working with one’s hands. Cons simply did not see working men and women as Octavia Hill or F. D. Maurice or the Barnetts did. Although many may well have thought her intention, in asking college supporters to play games with the students or chat over tea, was simply to expose her students to refined minds, lives, and manners (and indeed that was certainly an ancillary objective), in fact, her main goal was the converse. She wanted the college’s elite benefactors, by meeting “minds essentially like their own,” to realize their kinship with working men and women. In the same way, Cons’s desire to “bridge the gulf between classes,” just as much as her wish to show her students a different life, led her to ensure that, one way or another, Morley College would subsidize attendance at the Oxford and Cambridge summer university extension sessions by students who had passed Morley College’s set examination.Footnote ⁸² The occupations of the students who participated are illuminating; they were not always the clerks one would have predicted. For example, the Morley College students who took part in the 1892 Cambridge session included two pipe fitters, a carpenter’s improver, a pattern maker, three clerks, a shorthand writer, and a music teacher (the one woman), who gained her place on the basis of passing examinations in two courses in Shakespeare. University authorities were quite assiduous about entertaining their extension guests. One student, whose experience may be considered representative of the usual Morley student experience, received invitations to tea every day and was also invited to luncheon by the Master of Peterhouse, to a reception by the Master of Trinity, luncheon by a don at King’s, to a dessert by the Master of Selwyn (Lucy Cavendish’s brother), and to a garden party at Downing.Footnote ⁸³ There was another purpose to this. Cons, in pushing her students to venture out of the familiar world of Lambeth, to risk the potential social pitfalls and petty, patronizing humiliations lurking in luncheons with dons, was encouraging them not only to see a broader life but also to assert their own inclusion as participants and citizens. Cons’s vision of fellow citizenship was accomplished not simply by changing how the elite saw the working persons she sent to Oxford and Cambridge for the summer extension sessions but also by altering how the students saw themselves. Consciously or not, Cons diverted Maurice’s rhetoric for her own purposes.

Moreover, the culture of Morley College was fundamentally different from Maurice’s Working Men’s College or Toynbee Hall. First, Morley College was not part of the usual construction, by Oxbridge men or elite reformers, of adult worker education; Morley College had been established and was entirely run by women. Although the original shareholders of the Coffee Music-Halls Company and the Board of Governors of Morley College were certainly part of the elite, Morley College was not their brainchild. The idea for it had spontaneously emerged from the popularity of the Friday night penny science lectures, growing out of the desires and interests of the working men who attended them. Second, Morley College’s objectives were different. Morley College offered the study of the humanities to enable its students to think critically and to more fully understand the culture in which they had the right, as citizens, to participate. When Cons spoke of bridging the gulf between classes, she also meant inculcating in her students a sense of their right to inclusion. As a woman who understood exclusion and knew what it was to work with her hands, Cons questioned authority from a different perspective than that of the Barnetts or Octavia Hill. And unlike the Barnetts or Hill, what Cons determinedly established at the side door of the Old Vic was both a specific and a virtual space where Lambeth’s working men and women could taste the intellectual exercises of the elite, creating for them new practices of inclusion and participation.

We know this not only from Cons’s own words but also partly because Cons, Caroline Martineau, and Mary Sheepshanks personally, fiercely valued citizenship and citizenly participation. All were strong supporters of women’s suffrage and profoundly conscious of their own disenfranchisement. All were members, as was Lucy Cavendish, of the Women’s Local Government Society, a body that agitated for women’s election to school boards and town and county councils. Cons became the first woman alderman on London’s first County Council, when she was elected in 1888. When her right to sit was challenged in the courts, Cons stood firmly, declaring she would continue to sit as “a protest on behalf of women against the courts ignoring their ‘rights of citizenship.’”Footnote ⁸⁴ In this campaign she was supported by the women of Morley College. Mary Sheepshanks also ran for the County Council (unsuccessfully) while vice principal of Morley College; when she eventually left the college in 1913, it was to edit the international women’s suffrage journal, Jus Suffragi. These women understood and valued participatory citizenship and, more to the point, understood what it was to be barred from it.

This brings us back to the question of whether Morley College, notwithstanding its having been founded by and run by disenfranchised women, was yet an instrument of elite power, attempting to steer working-class educational ambitions away from Marxian militancy and toward respectable reformism. Was Morley College’s liberal arts curriculum designed to transmit the kind of cultural capital that would enable the working men and women of Lambeth and Southwark to assimilate more easily into the middle class and away from a sense of working-class consciousness? Cons may have been a daughter of the artisanate, but Caroline Martineau, Mary Sheepshanks, and Lucy Cavendish certainly were not. Even Graham Wallas, Fabian though he was, bent on raising the consciousness of his students, was still, like Tawney and Hobson, part of a tradition of elite, Oxbridge-educated reformers.

On the one hand, we know that, increasingly, more Morley College students were clerks of one kind or another, a group that tended to value upward mobility. By 1913, clerks, having initially comprised less than 20 percent of the student body, now represented almost one-third of the college’s students; the remaining two-thirds continuing to be evenly split between skilled and unskilled workers.Footnote ⁸⁵ But “clerk” is a broad term, particularly when employed in self-identification, and could have included, for example, young women who stood behind a counter just as much as black-coated scriveners. Moreover, this increase in clerks at Morley College may also have been equally a factor of changing gender enrollment, as the numbers of women attending Morley College steadily increased year after year; by 1913, half of Morley College’s students were women. Many clerks of either gender, however, would likely have attended classes at Morley College precisely because they already sought to better their lives materially and socially, as we can see from letters to Cons from former students, grateful at having been enabled to rise in the world. That would be consistent with the steady popularity of elocution classes, introduced in Morley College’s second year of operations. Bettering one’s presentation, and one’s accent, was axiomatic with upward mobility. This picture of Morley College’s students would entirely comport with Lawrence Goldman and Ross McKibbin’s depiction of the prevalence of upwardly mobile aspirations among the late Victorian working class.Footnote ⁸⁶

We also know that Morley College, in the first decade of the new century, became a main center of the activities of the Workers Education Association (WEA), an organization founded in 1903 by a cooperative cashier, Albert Mansbridge, stirred by his belief that university extension classes had been colonized by the middle classes and were no longer as inviting to working-class students as they once had been. The WEA was a reformist and progressive organization, dedicated to creating a variety of avenues to higher education, from Sunday lectures to tutorials led by dons, made available to workers. To the Plebs League and the strikers at Ruskin College, the WEA was seen as assimilationist, seeking to strip the working class of its sense of self. This was not a view shared by Cons, Martineau, or one of the WEA’s most enthusiastic champions, R. H. Tawney. Like Cons, Tawney was motivated by both a desire to inculcate cross-class fellowship and by a confirmed sense that secondary education was the optimum way to inspire assertive citizenship among working men and women. This was also the vision of the WEA; one of Albert Mansbridge’s earliest papers, written to show the need for such an organization as the WEA, was entitled “Co-operation and the Education of Citizens.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The Plebs League may have found the WEA assimilationist, but, as Lawrence Goldman maintains, the WEA saw their mission as enabling workers to understand their nascent citizenly capacities. These objectives fitted in well at Morley College.Footnote ⁸⁸

If many of Morley College’s students were interested in study as a means of entering the middle classes, many others were interested in learning simply as a way of broadening their horizons. Goldman makes the point that a rejection of materialism, a disdain for moneygrubbing, and the search for a “higher life” characterized many workers’ desire for more, and higher-quality, education.Footnote ⁸⁹ Morley College’s students’s interest in courses that did not axiomatically lead to better jobs is a good example of Goldman’s point, as, for example, with the sixty-year-old Lambeth cabbie who took the prize for French in 1890. This was entirely in keeping with Cons’s goal of bringing “out all that was best capable of development in men and women intellectually and in character,” not a philosophy that has anything to do with material upward mobility.Footnote ⁹⁰ The kinds of clubs students formed and the debates in which they engaged all indicate an active interest in acquiring greater familiarity with elite learning and culture but not necessarily for the purpose of directly increasing their material well being. This was wholly concomitant with the mission of the college to “promote the advanced study by men and women belonging to the working classes of subjects of knowledge” and not “directly connected with or applied to any handicraft, trade or business.” Moreover, the classes that Morley College offered became less vocational, not more so: history, geography, and logic were introduced early on; soon after courses in Italian and Greek were added; in 1894, physiography, geology, and art history were offered for the first time; and in 1896, courses were offered in poetry, psychology, and ethics.Footnote ⁹¹ The featured presentation at the 1913 college prize-giving ceremony was a production of Sophocles’ Antigone, with a cast of forty women students who had spent “many months” studying not only their parts but “Greek art and culture with Professor Richardson.”Footnote ⁹² Becoming comfortable with culture hitherto monopolized by the elite may or may not lead to the middle class, but it had its own satisfactions.

Jonathan Rose has made the interesting argument that, for many workers, the pursuit of elite culture was not indicative of assimilation but was often an act of rebellion against the strictures and confines of the British class system. Internalizing literature and classics often sharpened, not blunted, their radicalism. In exactly this way, learning Greek and Latin and Shakespeare could be seen by Morley College students and their teachers as not only a worthwhile activity in its own right but also as a way of gaining access to “forbidden” power. Penelope Corfield has made the compelling argument that the professions, particularly law, medicine, and pharmacy, retained much of their power in the nineteenth century through their use of Latin, Greek, and law French, keeping their knowledge as a mystery known only to the initiated.Footnote ⁹³ Thus, in the same way, if Shakespeare and Milton and Antigone are what the ruling elite learned, discussed among themselves, and read for pleasure, then that was just what they, too, would have at Morley College. Certainly David Vincent’s study of nineteenth-century working-class autobiography reveals a consistent understanding among his working-class autodidact subjects that knowledge was power.Footnote ⁹⁴ The liberal arts courses at Morley College suggest that Martineau and Cons were aware of the power of elite knowledge and of the subversive aspects of giving working persons access to it.

Emma Cons, Caroline Martineau, Lucy Cavendish, and Mary Sheepshanks structured Morley College to have great inclusive capacity; it could bring different things to people with different needs and aspirations. Certainly some students sought to use its classes as a means of rising in society. Others wanted the personal fulfillment that comes from learning new things well. These personal ambitions and the cultivating of a more radical consciousness, however, are not mutually exclusive. Some students surely sought the satisfaction at mastering hitherto forbidden knowledge. The founders’ intentions were not wholly directed toward giving their students a prescribed, middle-class curriculum, acceptance of which would enable them to enrich themselves and rise in the world. Neither was their intention solely to provide Morley College students with a form of cultural capital that would enable them to flourish, although that may well have been seen as an adjunct goal. Rather, their objective was to create Morley College as a big tent that could encompass all those objectives and more. Because they also sought to offer Morley College’s students knowledge as a kind of power, giving them the tools with which they could engage in clear, inevitably critical thinking and enabling them to engage in public affairs as citizens. In short, the purpose of Morley College was not simply embourgeoisement; it was just as much concerned with empowering. The students could use the power as they saw fit.

We know that these women who ran Morley College wanted to teach their students how to think and how to question. During his time as president of Morley College, from 1928 to 1933, Graham Wallas had an opportunity to reflect on what Morley College, since its founding in 1889, had contributed to the lives of the working men and women of Lambeth and Southwark. In a lecture he gave in November of 1931, he suggested that one of the most important things Morley College brought to Lambeth was that it made its students dissatisfied. “When Ferdinand Lassalle, seventy years ago, attempted to organise the recently industrialized men of South Germany, he implored them in the new crowded and bewildering factory towns to escape from their own ‘damned wantlessness’. Here at Morley, owing first to the genius of that little bright-eyed artist—saint Emma Cons, our founders set themselves to create and quicken ‘wants’ among the ‘wantless’ inhabitants of the dreary streets and drearier workshops.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Inculcating discontent is not an element of assimilation or embourgeoisement. Whether deliberately or instinctively, in their passing on elite knowledge and cultural capital to the working men and women of South London through Morley College, the women who ran Morley College were also acting as Promethean agents of subversion.