At the launch of the tourist season in the spring of 1895, John Cook, the director of Britain's largest commercial travel agency, Thomas Cook & Son, sent a series of missives to the Education Department demanding redress. In the letters, Cook accused Quintin Hogg, the founder of the London Regent Street Polytechnic and Young Men's Christian Institute (YMCI), of using—perhaps even misappropriating—government educational grants to fund the Polytechnic Touring Association (P.T.A.) and its “educational and co-operative tours.” “Pray do not misunderstand me,” Cook advised in one communiqué, “I am willing to admit that travelling is an important feature of education, but at the same time, I maintain that Thos. Cook & Son have done, and are doing more toward that particular line of education than anybody else in the Kingdom.” Thus, Cook reasoned, “if the Polytechnic is entitled to a Government allowance, then I must ask, what is Thomas Cook & Son entitled to?”Footnote 1
Had the Polytechnic, in fact, been misappropriating government grants to fund its own travel agency, Cook would have had a legitimate complaint. The Polytechnic originally developed educational tours for its students and members: young artisans, mechanics, and clerks. But, according to Cook, when the Polytechnic extended its travel services to the general public at bargain prices, it used the same government grants allocated for the education of its students to turn a profit. As Cook shrewdly pointed out, not only was the Polytechnic taking the government for a ride, but government taxes obliged him to supply the Polytechnic, albeit indirectly, with capital—the very ammunition it needed to compete with his own firm.
Cook's grievance found little purchase with government officials. In the inquiry that followed, Hogg—as uncompromising as Cook (but better connected)—satisfied the Education Department that Cook's complaint amounted to no more than a mean-spirited ploy to discredit the competition. Moreover, the inquiry revealed that Hogg had subsidized the tours himself.Footnote 2 Yet, there is more to this story than the rivalry of two travel titans for market shares.
Cook's tongue-in-cheek claim that his firm deserved a government subsidy for its own “educational” tours was not as far-fetched as it first appears. The late nineteenth century witnessed considerable debate about both the role of government in secondary and adult education and the appropriate curriculum to train technical and clerical workers. Educational travel, broadly defined, was part of the conversation. Moreover, Cook initiated his case against Hogg at a political juncture at which conservative reaction threatened not only the democratizing ambitions of the school boards but also over two decades of educational innovation often subsidized, at least in part, by the state.Footnote 3 Wittingly or unwittingly, Cook plunged into the debate and, pulling the Polytechnic along with him, implicitly challenged the state to define the purpose of educational travel, to identify who would have access to it, and to explain the government's own role in facilitating it. Cook's dispute with Hogg, in other words, goaded the state into conferring to educational travel either the status of a “right” or of a “privilege.” As such, the dispute marks a crossroads of sorts in the institutional formation of educational travel.
This article retraces the steps leading to this crossroads. Entering into the world of the Polytechnic, the analysis examines how tensions surrounding the nature of citizenship influenced the Polytechnic's travel practices and their meanings. Celebrated in its own day as a progressive social institute and technical school for thousands of London's wage-earning youth, the Polytechnic connected mobility to the teaching of citizenship and to the fulfillment of its promise. The Polytechnic therefore has a story to tell about educational travel, its ideological foundations, and the students and administrators who contributed to its formation. Indeed, scholars most often point to the eighteenth-century travels of young aristocrats on the “Grand Tour” as the origins of modern, educational travel.Footnote 4 This analysis will show, however, that the exigencies of the nineteenth century stemming from mass society in Britain and from international economic competition in Europe and the United States created the conditions for what was truly modern about educational travel: that is, the mobilization of ordinary youth, rather than elites alone, to acquire personal growth and new skills around the world.Footnote 5 The mobilization of a young and, in a sense, cosmopolitan working class—one that was bilingual, open to learning from diverse cultures, and at ease occupying foreign spaces—hinged, in part, upon the creation of new travel practices designed to educate future voters for citizenship, a project in which the Polytechnic had a role to play.Footnote 6
Nineteenth-century social reformers had long used travel (and culture more generally) as a pedagogical tool with which to regulate, elevate, and instruct working people in the middle-class values of respectability and self-governance.Footnote 7 John Cook's father, Thomas Cook, for one, viewed mass travel as a “true agent of civilization.” Founding his agency during the revolutionary tumults of the 1840s, Cook promised that cheap excursions offered workers a “national education” and fostered “patriotism” from which “the broad distinctions of classes are removed without violence or any objectionable means.” A transformative experience, travel, Cook enthused, changed the “minds and morals of men.”Footnote 8 Although John Cook eventually steered his father's agency toward a more affluent, even royal clientele, other philanthropists, such as Hogg, stepped in to fill the gap.Footnote 9 Thus, in the 1880s—in another period characterized by elite fears of mass democracy as well as the failures of classical liberalism—the Polytechnic expanded travel opportunities for London youth and aligned them to its educational and social agenda.
Embedded in the progressive movements of the time, particularly within the “new liberal” imaginary that sought to reconcile capitalist production with social welfare, the Polytechnic's overriding goal was to integrate its working- and lower-middle-class students into the nation as active citizens and moral beings. The Polytechnic shared the political convictions of the Oxford idealists, for example, in recognizing the necessity of an interventionist state, one that would enable working people, through education, to realize their human potential; and it shared with other youth-oriented philanthropies the ambition to teach students their reciprocal obligations to the “common good.”Footnote 10 Reformers anticipated, therefore, that student experiences of these rights and duties within the Polytechnic community would ultimately serve as an antidote to the class divisiveness and alienation of modern mass society. The Polytechnic thus viewed its travel practices, much like Thomas Cook four decades earlier, as agents of reform.
Since its founding as the Young Men's Christian Institute in 1871, the Polytechnic had fostered an institutional ethos that encouraged students to travel and dignified their experiences abroad as a duty. The Polytechnic created its own labor bureau that facilitated students' emigration and work overseas. To assist this process, it also developed informal networks between the Polytechnic in the metropole and its far-flung students in its self-described “Poly colonies.” And, presaging study abroad programs today, it launched its own travel agency to organize holidays and educational tours that enabled self-improving students to cultivate their talents as individuals within group contexts. In the aggregate, these collective practices fostered students' corporate identity as “Poly boys” and underscored the importance of travel as a responsibility to engage the world as British citizens and in service to the empire, a facet of social imperialism that incorporated ordinary people into the imperial collectivity and that subordinated diverse class identities to racial and ethnic identities.Footnote 11 The Polytechnic's travel culture thus became a basis for what historian Aihwa Ong terms “cultural citizenship,” a “process of self-making and of being made within webs of power linked to the nation state and civil society.”Footnote 12
As a facilitator of mobility, the Polytechnic attracted urban and skilled working- and lower-middle-class youth who associated it less with disciplinary power than with positive change and innovation that, for them, defined modernity and fueled their ambitions.Footnote 13 Yet, as Cook and Hogg's dispute illustrates, the Polytechnic was also a source of conflict, one that suggests the limits to student agency within the new liberal project and of educational travel itself. This article thus analyzes the Polytechnic and its travel practices as a case study in modern mobility. It examines the new opportunities for advancement that the Polytechnic courses and clubs promoted. However, it also examines enduring economic and cultural obstacles that students experienced in seeking to improve their lives.Footnote 14 In so doing, the analysis ranges widely to explore the links between travel and citizenship “discursively and experientially” in the life of the Polytechnic at home and around the world.Footnote 15
All but hidden from history, the Polytechnic barely registers in the historiography of the era despite its influence on multiple generations of London youth. This analysis, therefore, veers off the beaten track. The first leg of this journey begins with an introduction to the institute's diverse student population, its leaders, and its educational courses and social clubs. The analysis pays particular attention to how the Polytechnic bears the stamp of Quintin Hogg's individual personality and vision. It explores the ideological foundations of his philanthropy, which reflected his evangelicalism and sense of civic duty, and it examines his personal “theology of love” that connects him to a fraternal community of reformers in London. The analysis then broadens to trace the Polytechnic's travel ethos in its institutional literature and travel brochures and in its classrooms and clubrooms. Further afield, the analysis continues with students’ long-term emigration and employment overseas that the Polytechnic's social and educational programs encouraged and that were fundamental to the formation of study abroad. The journey concludes, however, with conflict and contestation. Arriving once again at the crossroads illuminated by Cook and Hogg's dispute, the analysis examines class feuds and sex wars, in which students’ individual and collective experiences of travel and citizenship reveal how social boundaries were established, manipulated, or challenged within the Polytechnic community and, by extension, British society.
The Polytechnic: A “Door to Opportunity”
Bill Surrey, who carted freight to and from the London rails by day and attended the Polytechnic by night, wanted out. With “twenty pounds odd” saved and more to come, Surrey pictured himself owning a “bit of land” in the United States and “see[ing] the world.” How he traveled, however, mattered as much to Surrey as what he would see. “It's all nonsense,” he declared, “pretending to see things without money.” He would travel, therefore, with good clothes on his back and cash in his pocket—never as a “tramp.” The occasion for this disclosure was a chance encounter near Paddington Station in the late 1880s with Charles Finger, the son of a former employer. Inviting Finger to his small room that overlooked a canal off Harrow Road, Surrey shared a plain meal with his guest. They reminisced about the past and plotted out their futures.Footnote 16
The material circumstances of Finger's life stood in stark contrast to Surrey's own. In his autobiography, Finger explained that he first met Surrey in the Mayfair home of his parents, where he knew his old acquaintance as the kitchen “knife boy.”Footnote 17 Finger's middle-class parents, however, had since fallen on hard times and had immigrated to the United States. Although Finger had opted to stay behind and to make his way alone in the city, he, like Surrey, also imagined a future enriched by travel and eventually spent several years roughing it through the wilds and frontier towns of South and North America. The Polytechnic helped set him on this path.Footnote 18
Surrey introduced Finger to the Polytechnic that very night. Finger recalls that when he first entered through the Polytechnic's doors and into a hallway “crowded with young men and lads” from “varied walks of life,” he was instantly drawn into the “buoyant companionship” that the institute offered. Preferring friendship over isolation, Finger joined the Polytechnic and became particularly active in its social, literary, and political clubs. Yet, in 1890, Finger's club activities came to an end when he launched his travel adventures (and a literary career) with three other Poly boys, who were also bound for South America. Thus, for Surrey and Finger, one a member of the struggling but upwardly mobile working class and the other a member of the middle class threatened by downward mobility, the Polytechnic, as Finger writes, became a “door to opportunity,” one that inspired “ambitious young men” to envision “new horizons” in “trades and professions” that no longer seemed quite so out of reach to them.Footnote 19
Multiple interests with a stake in educational and social reform expanded these horizons by contributing to the Polytechnic's development. Education boards, chambers of commerce, trade unions, popular ministries, and public moralists supplied the Polytechnic with state and charitable funds, supervised course content, organized religious services, and publicized the Polytechnic's many social activities and philanthropic virtues. Hogg's friends and family also donated time and money to the institute, as did their wives and children. The cricketer and evangelical Kynaston Studd served as the Polytechnic's unpaid secretary for nineteen years before becoming its president after Hogg's death in 1903. Studd's son, R. G. Studd, followed in his father's footsteps, becoming the managing director of the P.T.A. in 1922.Footnote 20 Further down the social scale, students often became Polytechnic teachers and administrators, as well as the institute's most generous and consistent benefactors. Robert Mitchell, the son of a police detective and a skilled metal worker by trade, joined the institute at the age of sixteen. Mitchell eventually became the brilliant director of the Polytechnic's education department and with his wife “pioneered” the Polytechnic's “co-operative educational travel” program.Footnote 21 The example of Studd, Mitchell, and others at the Polytechnic encouraged young men like Surrey and Finger to forge new identities as they prepared for the future in the classrooms and social clubs of the Polytechnic. Even so, it was Hogg who, according to many accounts, held the “most influence” over the institute and its students.Footnote 22
Hogg adopted several identities and roles throughout his life that would have a direct impact on the Polytechnic, its students, and its travel programs. The seventh son of Sir James Weir Hogg, twice chairman of the East India Company, Hogg (1845–1903) attended Eton, where he developed a charismatic personality as a star footballer and campus evangelical, an asset he used to draw support for his later philanthropic endeavors. After Eton, Hogg carved out his own fortune in Demerara sugar, becoming a wealthy City merchant with colonial interests and financial investments across the globe. Hogg's wealth and stature thus gave him a commanding say in municipal politics. Serving as a liberal alderman to the London County Council (LCC) from 1889 to 1895, Hogg was especially active in progressive educational reform, which was strengthened by his commitment to “practical” Christianity, the basis of his social activism and philanthropy.Footnote 23
With little tolerance for zealotry or literal interpretations of the Bible, Hogg took religion itself to mean “brotherly love” and “fellowship.”Footnote 24 Hogg's daughter and biographer, Ethel Wood, explains that he first translated this belief into action at the age of eighteen when he started a “ragged school” for indigent children. Joining forces with other London philanthropists, and assisted by like-minded Eton alumni, Hogg was determined to turn “wretched little chaps” into “God-fearing, respectable citizens.” He taught them to read, steered them toward a trade, and helped many more emigrate.Footnote 25 Eventually, however, Hogg shifted his attention to creating a secondary school for “better-class boys” in the wage-earning sector.Footnote 26 Hogg envisioned, as he believed “Christ” would want, a free and compulsory secondary school system in Britain that would see as its duty the development of each student's “capacity as an individual and as a member of a community.”Footnote 27 For Hogg, this meant educating the “whole man,” his motto for nurturing students’ spiritual, intellectual, physical, and vocational “talents.” Just as crucially, Hogg joined other educational reformers in a “crusade” to modernize technical training in secondary schools, which was critically important in light of the increasingly educated and skilled industrial workforces of competitor nations, especially Germany.Footnote 28 Hogg, therefore, viewed state intervention in educational reform as a moral necessity and a national imperative. Hogg united both of these ambitions in founding the Young Men's Christian Institute (YMCI) for young apprentices at Long Acre in 1871. When demand exceeded available space in 1882, Hogg moved the institute to the Polytechnic on Regent Street. Previously a venue for popular entertainment and scientific demonstrations, the Polytechnic was ideally suited for the expansion of the institute's “experimental” educational programs and Hogg's vision of reform.Footnote 29
During the day, the Polytechnic offered secondary schooling and vocational training to students between the ages of eight and seventeen, while at night, artisans, mechanics, and clerks between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two (later extended to twenty-six) attended classes in technical, science, and commercial subjects. Students and nonstudents who paid a small “membership” fee also had access to the institute's vast sports grounds and recreational facilities, as well as to evening concerts and popular lectures, the largest (reportedly) mock parliament in Britain, social and language clubs, and a variety of travel programs. Regardless of one's status as a “student,” a “member,” or a “student-member,” Polytechnic administrators encouraged one and all to regard themselves as “Poly boys.” By 1894, the Polytechnic's numbers had grown to 14,000, and its educational facilities were augmented by local taxes and government grants that also subsidized the founding of thirteen new Polytechnics based on the Regent Street model. These funds lifted much of the financial burden off of Hogg's shoulders, but they also made the Polytechnic accountable to the state—which was the opening Cook had used to challenge the P.T.A's legitimacy as a commercial or public agency.Footnote 30
By this time, too, Hogg and his wife, Alice Grahm Hogg, had founded the Young Women's Christian Institute (YWCI) for “working girls” in trades ranging from domestic service to typing. In the 1890s, the Polytechnic opened some of its courses and facilities to the YWCI, training scores of young women to enter the workforce. The dominant gender discourse at the Polytechnic, however, defined ideal womanhood in terms of marriage and child rearing. This conventional view of British womanhood was, in part, defensive, reflecting conservative fears over women's growing emancipation from the domestic sphere, such as race degeneration and the feminization of the work place; but, it also reflected the Polytechnic's prevailing homosocial environment, which was par for the course in youth rescue work.Footnote 31
Although students occupied social strata far above the indigent children of Hogg's early philanthropy, reformers expected the Polytechnic to transform potential “delinquents” into “men of the future,” who would thus form a positive identification with the authority of the institute, the city, and the state.Footnote 32 The Polytechnic, in other words, was expected to produce not only “good workers” but also civic-minded individuals committed to the “common good” rather than to narrow class interests.Footnote 33 The prescription for this intervention was the same at the Polytechnic as it was at boys’ clubs. Based on the public school model, it delivered moral guidance through group activities that shaped corporate and civic identities and that tested manly vigor and character with a strong dose of muscular Christianity.Footnote 34 Central to this guidance and key to the Polytechnic's success, Hogg averred, was the “personal touch.”
Hogg, faculty, and associates made themselves exceedingly accessible to students in seeking to create a nurturing environment at the institute. In making the Polytechnic a “home” and the source of “true friendship,” they exercised what Lauren M. E. Goodlad terms “pastoral charity.” Reformers and philanthropists, Goodlad shows, imagined civic life as a symbolic extension of home, as a personal realm in which to foster “intersubjective” relationships between the middle and working classes. In this realm, responsive working-class subjects assumed a moral, if not an economic or social, equality with their benefactors, much like the relationship between Hogg and the young metal worker, Robert Mitchell, who began his Polytechnic career as the institute's first (elected) secretary. The “personal touch” was therefore a basis both for pastoral guidance in educating the “whole man” and for cross-class cohesion. According to his daughter, Hogg willingly “sacrificed” his own “identity” to achieve this end.Footnote 35
In the many interviews Hogg granted reporters, he conveyed his dedication to the institute and his intense connection to “my boys”—a term of endearment he used for young students as well as aging alumni. Hogg awed reporters, for instance, by knowing the names and personal stories of each of the Day School boys. And in another familiar anecdote, reporters noted that Hogg's family residence adjoined the Polytechnic. More than a metaphor for pastoral care, home life and civic duty literally merged when Hogg connected the two buildings with a passage that led from his study into the Polytechnic.Footnote 36 Hogg's identification with students and, as Lunn recalls, his “detachment” from his “own people” and his “own class,” thus links him to a coterie of reformers who, as Seth Koven has sensitively described, found their flights across the class divide sources of “personal liberation and self-realization—social, spiritual, and sexual.”Footnote 37
The crucible of Hogg's self-realization was the Polytechnic. His daughter writes that “the Polytechnic had indeed become his sole purpose in life, his very reason for existence.”Footnote 38 At the Polytechnic, Hogg made common cause with students’ aspirations and, in exchange, earned their devotion in life-long relationships that seem to have been based on mutual trust and respect. “Nothing,” Hogg wrote in a letter to a former student in Colorado, “has sustained and helped me so much, as far as earthly things go, as the love and sympathy of my boys.”Footnote 39 Reprinted in Hogg's biography, this letter and others expressed his “theology of love” and active pastoral guidance. It also, however, may suggest a form of sexual “liberation” that would have been impossible to express openly.
When Hogg died in his bath of carbon-monoxide poisoning in 1903, George Ives, an older Polytechnic student and early activist for “homogenic” rights, speculated in his diary that Hogg not only took his own life but “destroyed himself” in order to avoid imminent criminal prosecution for homosexuality.Footnote 40 If so, it was not only a tragic end to the life of a revered philanthropist but complicates the Polytechnic narrative by introducing a homoerotic, but by no means religiously irreconcilable, dimension to Hogg's commitment to “brotherly love.” Merely one among many “fraternal ideologies” circulating in what Koven identifies as a distinctive male reformist community, Hogg's “theology of love” shared in common with these ideologies a fervent belief in the “healing power of brotherhood” and similarly wove within its language homoerotic and evangelical overtones that charged fraternal friendships with a current of sexual energy.Footnote 41 The Polytechnic would thus have presented some students (and perhaps Hogg himself) a space in which to express same-sex love, even if it was couched, consciously or unconsciously, in the language of Christian brotherhood, a cross-class fraternity, or more perilously, as Ives also notes in his diary, in the coupling of “working class men” in the changing booths of the Polytechnic's “baths.”Footnote 42
The Polytechnic's homosexual subculture is a strong reminder of the complex motivations driving not only individuals within the reform community but students as well, who had their own uses for the institute. The aims of reformers, therefore, should not obscure the dynamic character of the Polytechnic's educational and social programs, which owed their development to an ongoing partnership, and at times a negotiation, between students, Hogg, faculty, and associates.Footnote 43 Unlike the children of the club movement, most students were old enough and independent enough to act as agents in their own lives and to contribute to the institute and its culture in meaningful ways. Student councils and club officers influenced administrative decisions from building plans to the P.T.A.'s travel itineraries. Student pressure groups lobbied for new programs, such as elocution classes, the Polytechnic parliament, and the founding of the YWCI for their “sisters.”Footnote 44 And student journalists cut their teeth in the profession with contributions to weekly editions of the Polytechnic Magazine, which both chronicled and critiqued the life of the institute.Footnote 45 Thus, in this liberal, liminal environment that respected public opinion and courted popular consent, students felt encouraged to identify as citizens within a Polytechnic polity.
Experimental and progressive, metropolitan and imperial, the Polytechnic provided students with not only a homosocial and cross-class (and to a certain extent, mixed-sex) contact zone but also a fluid and transient space of identity formation and exchange that brought the metropolis into the Polytechnic and the Polytechnic into the world. The Polytechnic's evolving travel culture embodied these traits. In providing an institutional structure for nurturing the “whole man,” the Polytechnic offered students, as Henry Lunn, its Sunday evening preacher declared, a sphere for social learning in the rights and duties of individuals within a collectivity that “encircles the globe.”Footnote 46
“The Spirit of Travel”
The essence of mobility and modernity at the Polytechnic was the “spirit of travel,” the theme of an 1894 “occasional paper” published in the Polytechnic Magazine. In the paper, the author, a “Good Englishman,” “claimed that his countrymen held “a first position as the most traveled people of modern times.” To the “Good Englishman,” the English penchant for travel constituted a national trait and its actuation a fundamentally patriotic act. “Nothing,” he argued, “is as certain to make us love our own country.”Footnote 47 What it meant to “love one's country,” was, of course, open to debate at the institute, and the Polytechnic Magazine duly records multiple political perspectives on the subject.Footnote 48 For his part the “Good Englishman” defined patriotism in somewhat cosmopolitan terms. The author did not advocate dismantling the nation state or salute the universal brotherhood of man, but he did argue that the path to progress required adopting, rather than rejecting as alien or unnatural, the best qualities of other nations. The primary “advantage” of travel, he explained, is that one is able to appreciate the merits of one's own country in contrast with other countries and, at the same time, learn “some new good” from “every town that can be utilized at home.” In fact, many of Britain's virtues, he argued, are owed to encounters with foreign others. Thus, “just as our language is a collection of the good points of many languages, and our people the result of the intermingling of many races, so is our commercial position throughout the world the result of the spirit of travel that has impelled England's sons to trot over the globe whenever opportunities arise.”Footnote 49 Few students, however, seem to have put the “Good Englishman’s” views to useful effect. Comparisons in the Polytechnic Magazine that faulted Britain's education system, for example, usually examined German and French pedagogical advances with a jaundiced eye, always mindful of economic competition and imperial tensions.Footnote 50 Even members of the French club denigrated France when opportunities arose to compare it with Britain—a show of bad manners that earned them a “dressing down” by the club's secretary.Footnote 51 Nevertheless, few students would have denied the importance of travel in the “Good Englishman’s” rhetoric. The “spirit of travel” strengthened their collective identity as “Poly boys,” and they often linked their affection for the Polytechnic with the pride they shared as active participants in the nation's prosperity and imperial destiny.
The “spirit of travel” permeated almost every aspect of the Polytechnic's work. In the Polytechnic's reading room, students had access to hundreds of travel-themed memoirs, journals, and novels, as well as maps that administrators periodically refreshed to reflect new territory brought under the British flag.Footnote 52 To help students understand the practical implications of their studies, the Polytechnic also invited speakers to discuss global commercial conditions, such as the assistant secretary of the London Chamber of Commerce, who lectured on the “Markets of the World.”Footnote 53 Thrilling wider audiences, celebrity explorers, war correspondents, and missionaries entertained and informed students with inspirational and hair-raising stories of imperial battles, scientific discovery, and conversion.Footnote 54 This trade in sensational tales complemented what the Polytechnic described as its “cosmopolitan character.” From time to time, the Polytechnic Magazine boasted that students from China, Russia, Poland, Greece, Germany, Spain, and France had made the Polytechnic their “home away from home,” including two “Coreans,” a Mr. Yee and a Mr. Yer.Footnote 55 Further helping students to become accustomed to the movement of people, ideas, and British power globally, indigenous representatives from the colonies visited the Polytechnic, some of whom participated in its parliament, such as John Ojijatekha Brant-Sero, the Mohawk civil-rights activist. The Polytechnic Magazine reported that Brant-Sero's motion for “‘removing all disabilities which at present prevent the greater proportion of the Empire's population from following a civil or military career,’” would likely be seconded by a “Hindoo friend,” also present at the debate.Footnote 56
Not least, the Polytechnic's commitment to teaching foreign languages, such as German and Hindustani, gave added impetus to the “spirit of travel,” preparing students to compete with Britain's imperial and industrial rivals abroad.Footnote 57 The Polytechnic Magazine continually plugged these courses as well as the Polytechnic's language clubs, citing the urgent threat of international competition. Guest speakers reinforced this discourse. In a speech to the carriage-building class on becoming “smart voters and intelligent workmen,” Charles Hooper, a London manufacturer, emphasized the value of language and travel specifically for British artisans. “Up to very recent times” Hooper explained, “every young German artisan must of necessity work for three years in foreign countries, to improve his skill, gain experience, and acquire knowledge of foreign languages.” This form of educational travel, Hooper argued, had made Germany “a nation.” The lesson could not be plainer. The opportunities for advancement that the Polytechnic offered, Hooper insisted, “should be made use of for your own personal advantage, as well as for being individuals forming parts of a great nation.”Footnote 58
Encouraging stories in the Polytechnic Magazine about students living and working abroad advertised the success of the institute's language campaigns. One member of the French club, for example, was chosen to represent his firm during the Brussels Exhibition of 1897. There he put his Polytechnic patois to good use in attracting new business for the firm. The rewards of this success, he gloated, included a continental trip three to four times a year and the “patriotic satisfaction of the knowing that every penny he earns comes out of the continent to England.” “Such instances as these,” the Polytechnic Magazine declared, “are encouraging and useful examples to others,” especially given the “pertinacity of the German clerk.” Nationalistic and imperialistic, the Polytechnic clearly defined the duty of citizenship in terms of language, labor, and travel abroad.Footnote 59
Hogg himself modeled the Polytechnic's travel ethos for his “boys.” In long letters posted during holiday and business trips abroad, Hogg regaled students with stories of indolent “natives” and Britain's civilizing mission. Just as important, Hogg encouraged students to engage for themselves “Greater Britain beyond the seas.”Footnote 60 Many obliged. After students struck out on their own, they often returned the favor of Hogg's letters with their own correspondence. Writing from all corners of the globe, they reported joining “Poly colonies” headed by “Poly consuls” who populated the world as emigrants, entrepreneurs, missionaries, soldiers, engineers, and clerks.Footnote 61 Some “colonies” originated as deliberate collectivities when students tied their fortunes together, such as thirty tailors by trade, who worked a homestead in Colorado, initially subsidized by Hogg.Footnote 62 Other “colonies” emerged as organic clusters when former students met up at sites with high emigration rates of British nationals. Either way, informal “colonies” gave rise to a network of Polytechnic alumni with ties to each other, to Britain, and to the empire. Reflecting Britain's “spirit of travel” the Polytechnic's student networks facilitated the identity of a global collectivity. As the Polytechnic Magazine enthused, the institute “has done a truly national, nay, an international work, for the lusty growth of the Regent Street Polytechnic is sending forth its branches like a mighty oak.”Footnote 63 Finger, whose “roving spirit” had landed him for a time in Argentina as a horse trader, knew this firsthand. Stumbling on an “old Polyite” in the shanty town of Lacuna Grande, he declared, “it is a fine brotherhood, after all—the Poly.”Footnote 64
“The Death of the Grand Tour”
The Polytechnic gave the “spirit of travel” more concrete form when it began organizing specific “holiday” tours for its students. Prior to the formal organization of the Polytechnic's travel programs, students took short holidays with Hogg or on their own. In the early 1870s, Hogg founded, for example, “special holiday homes,” in which up to seventy boys at a time lodged in the country or at the seaside with Hogg and his family. In 1877, Hogg ventured further afield, taking nearly one hundred students to the Paris Exhibition.Footnote 65 At the same time, students organized their own holidays, making their mark on the Polytechnic's evolving travel culture.Footnote 66 Some traveled solo and afterward posted reviews of their trips to assist fellow students plan their own holidays.Footnote 67 Other students traveled in groups, organizing short tours over Easter and bank holidays. Meeting up with former “Polyites” living and working abroad, especially in the “Poly colonies” of Paris, they described how their friends acted as “cicerones,” whisking them from one tourist site to another.Footnote 68
Tapping into students’ informal demand for holidays, the Polytechnic began arranging formal tours of its own in the 1880s that contained strong educational and collectivist components. The institute's first official “educational tour” in 1888 has been described as the “first school journey on record.”Footnote 69 Accompanied by three teachers and a doctor, fifty-one boys of the Day School enjoyed an “extended geography lesson” in Switzerland.Footnote 70 Committed to the idea that a trip abroad constituted an “essential development in practical education,” Hogg and Mitchell organized more excursions, such as cheap eight-day tours of the 1889 Paris exhibition intended to improve students’ vocational skills. Two thousand, one hundred young men and four hundred young women participated in the tours, which took place between mid-June and late September. To facilitate the travel arrangements and to encourage collective identities, the Polytechnic organized each tour group according to students’ membership in a particular club, occupation, or, in the case of the sister institute, a sex.Footnote 71 Thus, the plumbing school students occupied the same railway car on their way to the French capital and, after arriving, lodged and took in the sights together. Combining leisure and learning, their first lesson on the road was an ad hoc inspection of the toilets at the Rouen station, which they immediately pronounced “unsanitary.” When they reached their destination, however, they found more to praise. Guided by a former “Poly boy,” who had become a master plumber in Paris, students not only visited the exhibition but took an excursion through the city's famous sewers and visited a sewage farm at Gennvillies, where they sipped its crystal-clear water and sampled its produce. The tour, according to the guide, had successfully infused their holiday with “actual instruction.”Footnote 72 With this success, the Polytechnic continued to offer tours each year, developing a sophisticated program of study abroad opportunities by the turn of the century that encouraged educational and collective experiences, from language “holiday courses” for “commercial students” at Grenoble University to a tour of Vienna for the Polytechnic's architecture and building classes.Footnote 73 Becoming an essential feature of a modern education, the Polytechnic's tours, as one pamphlet stated, had bridged the gap from traditional artisanal training to the educational requirements of an emerging technological class. While apprentices “in the old days” had concluded their shop-floor training with travels through the “provinces” on the “journeyman's tramp,” Polytechnic students supplemented their training with the P.T.A.'s “holiday trips”—the “workmen's only means of getting the education that travel alone imparts.”Footnote 74
The Polytechnic's vocationally driven tours satisfied the educational needs of specific niches at the institute, but for the healthful recreation and cultural elevation of general holiday travelers, the Polytechnic also bought and developed a cluster of Swiss chalets to operate as a holiday camp and launched its “co-operative and educational tours,” both of which received considerable notice in the progressive press. In 1892, the Review of Reviews, William Stead's monthly journal, featured the Polytechnic in an article on cooperative travel organizations that conducted tours for the benefit of their members rather than profit alone. What was vitally important about this new leisure movement, Stead reported, was that it gave the “hard working many” the experience of “intelligent foreign travel” and, just as critically, destroyed the “barrier of reserve and isolation between individual members which militate so strongly against corporate life in great towns.” Stead's reference to “corporate life” signified an organic common culture and community that dissolved the fissures of modern mass society. The hardship of traveling long distances en masse, he emphasized, required “mutual respect and reliance,” which in turn produced “a public-spirited unselfishness.” As such, cooperative tours presented Victorians with a new social space and pedagogic field for relating to one another as members of a voluntary collectivity (the tour group) and as British citizens in developing a “deeper and wider comprehension of historical and human solidarity.” Praising the Polytechnic's cooperative and educational tours to Switzerland, Norway, and Chicago, Stead validated its ambition to achieve the progressive ideal of rational recreation and corporate integration.Footnote 75
With this encouragement, the Polytechnic expanded its operations still further by opening its cooperative tours to the public in 1894, when it inaugurated the Polytechnic Touring Association, a tourist agency with its own office next to the main entrance of the institute. Charging only a small increase over the cut-rate prices arranged for students, Hogg channeled the profits back into the Polytechnic and claimed that the tours constituted a part of its “educational work.”Footnote 76 The P.T.A.'s brochures soon boasted that it had assisted thousands of “limited means” to get “the best value for the money paid” for their holidays.Footnote 77
For progressive boosters like Stead, the P.T.A.'s success would have been celebrated as a considerable achievement. But for wealthy travelers at odds with mass culture, commercial appeals to “value” symbolized the degradation of a formerly elite cultural practice. Indeed, Studd writes that one magazine made Polytechnic tourists the butt of a joke in 1891, warning “swells” to avoid Norway on their holidays because it had been overrun by “dreadful Polytechnic people.” Mass tourism thus gave birth to what James Buzard defines as the “anti-tourist,” a “traveler” with the income and time to seek “authentic” travel experiences far off the beaten path. The anti-tourist, for example, traveled for an extended period of time so as to experience the world more intensely, not merely rush by it in a flurry of superficial, touristic activity. And, crucially, the anti-tourist traveled alone or with a small group of friends or family, cultivating an identity that prized romantic individualism over mass conformity.Footnote 78 P.T.A. tourists, however, read lofty sentiments into the term “value.” The P.T.A. stressed that its tours were not only more affordable than any of its competitors (namely, Thomas Cook & Son), but that the nation's leading “education experts” had endorsed their educational qualities. Customer testimonials backed these claims. Ignoring elite condemnation of “dreadful” Polytechnic tourists, they described how they found their brief time on the road profoundly meaningful.Footnote 79
Looking back on the foundation of the P.T.A. and its significance to participants, Studd explains that in the beginning one “didn’t go for a holiday to the continent. You went on an expedition. And you didn’t go alone but with a party, a mob, a carefully selected mob that you could trust, that trusted you, in which respectability was reciprocal.” Claiming the road as their own, Polytechnic tourists, therefore, reveled in their sociability and reportedly dismissed the individuated travel experiences of their social superiors, as their boisterous reunions at the Polytechnic, some drawing more than a thousand participants, attest. The Polytechnic's tours thus offered reformers a venue in which to imagine, create, and test their desires for an orderly, educated, and skilled electorate, and they offered tourists opportunities to participate in an experience that symbolized all that modernity and mobility promised Britons at the turn of the century. As Studd, with a populist's flourish, declared, the elite “Grand Tour” became a “corpse” when the first “apprentice mechanic” crossed the Swiss Alps on a “Polytechnic educational and co-operative tour.”Footnote 80
Travel Writing and the Poly-Boy Romance
Teeming with multiple possibilities for engaging the world, the Polytechnic produced a variety of travel texts that conveyed the “spirit of travel” and the institute's collective identity in reports, program itineraries, posters, and advertisements. Students living and working abroad, for instance, inundated the Polytechnic Magazine with their letters, warranting regular columns that headlined the Polytechnic's connection to empire in “From over the Water,” “Colonial and Imperial,” “Empire Building,” and “Our Foreign Legion.” Over time their letters shared discursive properties that helped extend the webs of the Polytechnic community in networks of mutual assistance around the globe. Students understood, for instance, that it was an “unwritten law,” as George Wiles teased in a letter scratched out in the gold fields of Western Australia, to list job prospects for others at “home” contemplating emigration.Footnote 81 Other correspondents offered to hold a hand out to new arrivals and gratefully publicized the help they had received from students who had preceded them. Perhaps less consciously, most refrained from being too down-in-the-mouth when frontier life got “jolly” tough, as Hogg sometimes put it, although reports of “bad luck” filtered through.Footnote 82 Early on, in fact, Hogg cautioned students to take glowing reports of emigrant life with a grain of salt, as “men do not print the records of their failures.”Footnote 83 Indeed, most letters, especially those of the younger Day School boys, produced a Polytechnic version of the public school spirit that was standard fare in juvenile periodicals, such as The Boys Own Paper, or replicated the homosocial environments and homoerotic imagery found in the adventure romances of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rider Haggard. Expressing all the same manly courage and dedication to empire as their public school rivals, they depicted a playfully masculine rough and tumble world largely bereft of women.Footnote 84 Collectively, they underscored a belief in Britain's civilizing mission and the continuing importance of civic duty and corporate life as “Poly boys” and as British subjects at home and in the world.Footnote 85
Characteristic of this genre are the letters of Don Homfray, a “Day School boy.” Addressed to Hogg and printed in the Polytechnic Magazine, Homfray's letters chart his ocean journey from England to South Africa in 1899, where he was to join the Natal Mounted Police. In a voice redolent of Stevenson's Jim Hawkins, the youthful hero of Treasure Island, Homfray conveyed the thrill of ocean travel, marveling at sharks and “monster” jellyfish spied from the ship's bow. But he also hinted at dangers lurking below deck. Asserting his identity as a respectable youth, Homfray reported that he could not “bear to mix with some of the rough people” on the ship and more ominously still “dread[ed] when the time comes to turn in at night.” Sensing, perhaps, sexual danger, Homfray resourcefully found a secret berth above deck in which to lay his head. There, in his solitude, he thought about his “old Poly friends” and pondered “the land” that would become his new “home.” Still musing from his hiding place, Homfray concluded his letter with a melancholy sigh, writing that “Every now and then the cool evening breeze carries the sound of voices and merry laughter to me,” while “far below the engine gently throbs, and I feel the soft, light rolling of the ship as it rides the Atlantic swell, leaving behind it a long white foaming train. We are now 5,000 miles from you.”Footnote 86 Predictably, Homfray's subsequent letters lost their thoughtful sensitivity to the new experience of travel. Expressing crude confidence in the imperial mission, Homfray narrated his successful integration into the police force, which allowed him to live like a “gentleman.” True to form, Homfray also encouraged students to try their fortunes in South Africa as opportunities awaited those who could speak “Dutch, Kaffir, [or] Hindustani,” as well as for volunteers to fight a war that promised to be “glorious.”Footnote 87 Homfray's letters, in essence, narrated the Poly-boy romance, a story that countless others articulated with equal attention to form and content. It was a powerful narrative, after all. Even in its darker moments, when reports came through of students who had met their deaths far from home, the Polytechnic Magazine highlighted those who had drawn their last breath while nursed by the “loving hands” of a “Poly boy.”Footnote 88 Such gripping, as well as more mundane, tales of students in the world made the Polytechnic Magazine an anchor of identity that alumni prized. As many former students who subscribed to the Polytechnic Magazine testified, it had become their “favorite magazine” because it kept them connected “to the dear old place” and to each other.Footnote 89 Contributing to the immediacy of the Polytechnic over space and time, their letters rejected the valorization of the heroic individual typical of adventure romances, affirming instead a heroic collectivity comprised of peripatetic “Poly boys.”
Students who vacationed together replicated the collective ethos of the Poly-boy romance in their holiday narratives. “Under the aegis of the Poly flag,” students wrote of forming “troops” that “stormed,” “marched,” “bivouacked,” “invaded,” and “occupied” the continent, peppering their travel narratives with patriotic cheers for the Union Jack, roast beef, and English tea.Footnote 90 Although the Polytechnic Magazine records occasional objections to students’ exuberant nationalism or jingoistic outbursts, their identification with British imperial power and sense of national superiority was difficult to contain.Footnote 91 With a growing sense of entitlement to occupy foreign spaces and consume tourist sights, students tended to express a cheeky confidence in Britain's imperial power and prestige. They expressed this confidence from a position of strength derived in part from their identity with and incorporation into the Polytechnic community.
Crafted by pseudonymous authors and unidentified collaborators, anonymous travel narratives in the Polytechnic Magazine underscored the Polytechnic's collective identity.Footnote 92 In some representations of group experiences, the collectivity assumed the mantle of narrating hero.Footnote 93 In other representations, one actor narrated the experience for the heroic whole. Thus, “Falcon” spoke for a “small party” of Poly boys who took their three-day bank holiday to visit Boulogne-sur-Mer. In a narrative that began with an excited salute to other Poly boys who, serendipitously, had taken the same vessel, Falcon described a punishing itinerary that led his tour group from one site to another on their one full day in the historic city. By the end of the day, one member had added his name to the graffiti prone pillars of La Barbière, while others had shopped for souvenirs before returning to the boat where they encountered still more Poly boys, an event that led to three enthusiastic “cheers for the Poly.”Footnote 94
The P.T.A.'s promotional literature also conveyed the message of corporate cohesion and welcomed tourists to share in the Polytechnic's collective identity. Ordinarily guide books and travel brochures presented readers with what David Chirico identifies as a “template for an unlimited number of single acts of travel,” one that allowed potential travelers to project themselves onto a landscape unencumbered by the author's subjective experiences, as in a travel narrative.Footnote 95 But, rather than “single acts of travel,” the P.T.A.'s holiday programs encouraged readers to imagine themselves in group contexts, where, enveloped in the Polytechnic's identity and unfettered by the “barrier of class,” they, too, could experience “good fellowship” with “our party” and “our fellows.”Footnote 96 The centrality of travel and tourism at the Polytechnic, therefore, not only produced institutional, civic, national, and imperial identities but appeared to realize the progressive ideal of an organic common culture and community. For some students, however, the Polytechnic's travel programs represented an exclusion that put these identities into question.
The “Upward Pressure”: Excursions, Exclusions, and Citizenship
Like directors of study abroad offices today, Hogg reminded students time and again that it was never too early to start planning for the summer holidays. “As each year comes round,” Hogg advised in a spring issue of the Polytechnic Magazine, “I keep on impressing upon all who can get away the great desirability of their endeavoring to take a trip abroad.” Not only was travel “very important as a means of education,” it was especially important for “anyone engaged in the commercial world.” For these reasons, Hogg continued, the Polytechnic was doing everything in its power to arrange tours to “suit the financial convenience of everyone who can take a holiday at all.”Footnote 97 Regular readers of the Polytechnic Magazine were accustomed to these exhortations, and most would have granted travel's importance as an educational experience. But, there were others who had come to loathe the privileging of “commercial” students in Hogg's rhetoric and who scoffed at the presumption that the Polytechnic's tours met the “financial convenience” of most students.
Belying the liberal progressive ideal, travel practices at the Polytechnic could be a source of conflict as well as cohesion. The roots of this conflict can be found in structural inequalities at the institute, the origins of which paralleled inequalities and exclusions in wider British society. Class divisions, for example, threatened the social harmony of the institute as far back as 1881. At a council meeting held in the institute's first location at Long Acre, council members debated qualifications for membership of the institute, basing their criteria on occupational identities and status. In their deliberations, the artisans and mechanics on the council voted to limit the number of clerks, defined as “those engaged in office work,” to the institute's membership rolls. As it was, they argued, clerks enjoyed exclusive access to the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), which routinely turned away ordinary workingmen, like themselves, from its doors. Why should clerks, then, monopolize the few spaces available to new candidates at the institute? Moreover, if the Polytechnic allowed clerks to increase their numbers, they would inevitably hold “undue influence” over the character of the institute. Hogg, sitting as chairman, attempted to steer the debate toward a different resolution. Hogg reminded the council that the institute was founded on “brotherly love” and existed to promote the “improvement of the neighborhood generally, and not of any one class in particular.” To exclude anyone—an artisan, mechanic, or clerk—would “cause disunion and disloyalty.” Some council members concurred, acknowledging that social qualifications could very well compromise the integrity of the “community” and their goal of working toward a “common good.”Footnote 98 But the dissenters had it right. A decade later the institute had changed. By 1891, the lower-middle class, designated as “clerks and others” in the Polytechnic's record books, comprised the institute's dominant occupational group.Footnote 99
The seeds of this transformation may have had as much to do with the institute's relocation to the West End as it did to the initial invasion of young, black-coated workers at Long Acre. When Hogg moved the YMCI to Regent Street, he planted the institute squarely in the “centre of fashion,” a residential, leisure, and commercial district characterized by architecturally distinctive homes, fine shops, and milling crowds of upper-class consumers.Footnote 100 This was a brash incursion into an elite sanctuary—a form of reverse slumming unlike other types of charitable uplift in the East End, where settlement reformers imagined themselves working in colonial outposts, surrounded by the barbarism of the urban jungle. In contrast, the Polytechnic encouraged rough, young men, such as the former “knife boy” Bill Surry, to inhabit the environs of Regent Street and to interact with the institute's more well-to-do students. To a certain degree, this achieved Hogg's goal of class mixing. But, the Polytechnic's High Street address did not guarantee class amelioration. The Polytechnic's Day School, for instance, catered especially to the sons (and eventually daughters) of the petite bourgeoisie, primarily West End shop owners, which further strained social relations at the institute.Footnote 101
By no means middle class, Day School children attended the Polytechnic only as long as their parents could pay the fee or until they acquired apprenticeships or jobs in low-level clerical and technical work; or, far less frequently, until they passed examinations for low-grade civil service positions or university courses. Although most of the Day School boys left the institute by the age of twelve, the extension of their education beyond elementary school was an advantage for which night school students longed for themselves. Furthermore, even though Hogg wanted to eliminate status differentials between clerical and technical work, the culture of the Day School created new distinctions that the evening students found difficult to accept.Footnote 102 Animosity bubbled to the surface, for example, when Hogg formed the Old Quintinian Club for the Day School alumni in 1891. With its own club room and special privileges afforded to the “Old Day Boys,” the Old Quintinian Club provoked some “envy” among the “orthodox” Poly boys, who, as one Old Day Boy later remarked, “resented” this “rival claim to the Polytechnic's resources.”Footnote 103 Other encroachments increased the tension. Some students felt that the growing popularity of the Polytechnic as a social club had contributed to the degradation of the “orthodox” Poly boy community, so much so that they had become “strangers” in their own institute.Footnote 104 As the “Inquisitor,” a frequent correspondent, complained in 1902, the institute had become a “West-end lounge for millionaires—a trifle passé in regard to decoration and the buffet arrangements, but convenient for the theaters and the whirl of society outside the Poly.” Obviously, he continued, “the poor boy earning his ten or twelve shillings a week is an outsider—he would blush to do what I did in the years gone by; bring my own bread and butter, and spend a penny on a cup of tea to wash it down.Footnote 105
The Polytechnic's travel business fanned the flames of alienation, intensifying some students’ sense of “outsider” status. While the Polytechnic harped on the importance of a trip abroad as a “means of education,” not every student possessed the means to participate in what had become a core feature of its institutional culture.Footnote 106 Complaints about the Polytechnic's tours, like the early misgivings over clerks or the Day School, punctuated the usually good-natured “Letters to the Editor” section of the Polytechnic Magazine. The “Inquisitor,” once again championing economically marginal “Poly boys,” claimed that the Polytechnic's original holiday homes, founded as charitable vacation destinations for students, had been mostly abandoned by the institute. In lieu of having students take their vacations at one of these homes, the Polytechnic steered students toward a “week's holiday among strangers” on one of the P.T.A.'s many tours. Such “trips,” the Inquisitor wrote, “are very good in their way, and I would not wish it to be inferred that I grumble at them—they enable some of us to see places which would otherwise be as sealed books, but my point is that it is more than a pity—it is a blunder—that the distinctive ‘Poly Home’ has been abandoned, and our younger and least wealthy members are left to shift for themselves.”Footnote 107 Others protested that the Polytechnic's tours did not fall at the time of year when employers permitted workers and clerks to take their holidays, leaving them “out in the cold.”Footnote 108 And still others resented that the Polytechnic's tours excluded many more through prohibitive costs. “Every year,” one student complained, “a great number of our members are thrown upon their own resources, instead of being catered for by the Institute, whereas to the outsider who can spend more heavily, every facility is given in many trips from June to October.”Footnote 109 Another unhappy student dismissed the value of the Polytechnic tours altogether, declaring that the Polytechnic's travel business, as well as its growing focus on educational programs, had robbed the Polytechnic of its “sociability,” that is, its “value as a social club and institute for mechanics, artisans, clerks, etc.”Footnote 110
Hogg tackled many of these complaints in the Polytechnic Magazine himself, sometimes with the good humor of an indulgent patriarch and at other times with acerbic dispatch. In one 1896 exchange that addressed the entire gambit of students’ concerns, Hogg baited the “Inquisitor” and his fellow malcontents with a slur to their masculinity. Poor “Cinderella,” he mocked, is left behind “while her more fortunate sisters are petted at her expense.” Warmed to the fight, Hogg defended the institute's travel agency. “More members attend our trips than used to be the case,” he argued, “and the facilities offered are greater.” Moreover, the tours brought in “revenue” and served as an “effective advertisement” for the Polytechnic, which had allowed it to expand its educational facilities. This was significant, Hogg insisted, because the institute was much more than a social club. It had a “duty” to “equip” students “for life's struggle.” To Hogg's mind, benefits included the cross-class relationships to be had at the Polytechnic. “I can honestly say that I have never seen a place—the world over—” he stated, “where all classes mix so freely and readily as they do with us.”Footnote 111 Thus, what the alienated few required was “unselfish thought for the comfort and feelings of others, or, in other words, a truer Christian brotherhood.”Footnote 112 The Polytechnic Magazine neglects to record whether the “Inquisitor” or his cohorts accepted Hogg's defense of the institute and its travel programs. But what is clear is that fissures in the Polytechnic community reflected inequalities that precluded full access to the Polytechnic's common culture and its corollary, citizenship. No group understood this better, perhaps, than the students of the “sister institute.” Some “sisters” in fact began had expressed resentment over their marginal status soon after the institute's founding in 1888. Turning underlying gender tensions into a war between the sexes, they challenged the sanctity of the Polytechnic “brotherhood.”
Although the Polytechnic Magazine praised the institute's female students who had achieved scholarly or professional distinction, the validation of their accomplishments conflicted with the Polytechnic's separate spheres ideology, which one reporter approvingly noted sought to transform London's “working girls” into “worthy English wives and mothers.”Footnote 113 Such remarks failed to take into account “Poly sisters,” who defined themselves as “New Women” and who, inspired by the election of women to the county councils and school boards, campaigned for equal access to the Polytechnic's courses, clubs, and facilities. The Polytechnic parliament, for example, became a special target for their activism in 1892; but, in a frustrating parallel to the suffragist movement outside the institute, the majority of Poly-boy-parliamentarians trounced their sisters’ petitions for entry into the “full duties of citizenship” as MPs.Footnote 114 These exclusions stung. As one “Sister” queried “is no girl a member of the Poly, but only a cipher?”Footnote 115 The marginalization of “Poly sisters” in the Polytechnic polity migrated to the realm of travel. As the Review of Reviews pointedly remarked, the Polytechnic's excursions “afford considerably greater facilities to men than to women; the latter in some cases not being admitted to an excursion at all.”Footnote 116 Occasionally, “Poly sisters” contributed short travel reports in the limited space afforded to the YWCI in the Polytechnic Magazine. In them, one representative usually spoke for the group, but few conveyed the collective romance typical of Poly-boy travel texts. Similarly, occasional references to Poly sisters’ travel and work in the empire filtered through. A “Miss Milligan,” for example, had accepted a secretarial position at the Cape. Yet, nothing more is heard from Milligan either aboard ship or within a Poly colony, unlike Homfray and the many other Poly boys featured in the Polytechnic Magazine. Thus, even as the Polytechnic sought to produce collectivities through travel, and through collectivities achieve the goals of good citizenship, the Polytechnic's travel ethos produced its own exclusions.Footnote 117
Perhaps such exclusions were to be expected at an institution as large and as socially diverse as the Polytechnic became, even as it strived to be, for the most part, inclusive. In terms of social hierarchies alone, the Polytechnic produced an inescapable consciousness of class by virtue of its very function as an institute of upward mobility, one that nagged at students to study hard and to forge ahead in order to attain secure futures and more satisfying identities.Footnote 118 And yet students and reformers alike still maintained that they were witness to a momentous era of social change and that they and the Polytechnic led the vanguard.
The Polytechnic's role as an agent of change was an important theme in its institutional narrative. It expressed reformers’ and student-members’ ambitions for the future and emphasized their contributions to modernity, be they innovations in motor car engineering or, as one forward-thinking Poly boy wrote in defense of women clerks, in changes to “the old order of things.” The Polytechnic, he remarked with pride, had enabled women to “raise themselves in the world” like their brothers.Footnote 119 In an 1896 address delivered at the Society of Arts, Hogg placed this narrative in a civic context, congratulating the city's elite for its growing commitment to technical education. But he also reminded his audience that what had been achieved thus far was “merely a promise of better things to come.” The Polytechnic, he announced, was leading the way toward that promise by becoming “a home, a smaller university and public school, to help our poorer fellow citizens to privileges [sic] which they have not had in the past.”Footnote 120 Although Hogg's rhetoric fell short of asserting such “privileges” as rights, students felt empowered to make these claims themselves. Encouraged by the Polytechnic's environment of educational experimentation, some students had come to feel that social change was not only possible but imminent. Thus, in 1893, the “Radical Ministry” of the Polytechnic parliament vowed to use its platform to “wage war against all privilege and class distinction,” a vow that the institute's suffragists echoed in their own demands for equality.Footnote 121 In critiquing the state of social relations at the Polytechnic, students thus made positive claims upon Britain's future. C. J. Peer, a vocal socialist in the Polytechnic parliament, anointed the institute as a “pioneer to the possibilities of the new era.” “Alone among the Institutions of modern England,” he asserted, the Polytechnic had produced a formidable “army” of students capable, by virtue of its numbers and training, to lead Britain to social “justice.”Footnote 122 The liberal reformist and Polytechnic enthusiast, Walter Besant, agreed. Bringing the Polytechnic narrative to an even wider public, he turned “Poly boys” into the heroes of a futuristic tale, projecting their collective optimism into the twentieth century.
Although Besant had witnessed the dismal failure of his own pet project, the People's Palace in Whitechapel, a site of rational recreation that seemed to repel rather than attract working people, he fully expected the Polytechnic and similar educational centers for “the People” to spur a “social revolution.”Footnote 123 How it would unfold is explained in “The Upward Pressure.” First published in 1893, the work proposed to look back on the Polytechnic from the 1930s, illustrating the far-reaching and positive implications of democratizing education. Prior to the twentieth century, Besant writes, money, connections, and time conspired against even the most talented students from entering the upper levels of the professions, the church, and the military, and thus from any position of significant authority. But, armed with new knowledge attained at the Polytechnic, students no longer accepted the social hierarchy as “natural.” Instead they began to apply enough public pressure, utilizing their skills in the new journalism (the only profession, Besant points out, that was open to their class) to effect change. Consequently, by the early decades of the twentieth century, not only were the professions open to all based on merit alone—by an Act of Parliament, no less—but the House of Lords had been rendered obsolete, completely overturning traditional rule.Footnote 124
Besant's vision, it hardly bears telling, lacked prescience. Instead of spearheading a social revolution, the Polytechnic became the neglected stepchild of Britain's education system. Besant himself observes that government administrators “reproached” the polytechnics (prior to their imagined twentieth-century transformation) for exposing students to higher learning, when their purpose was to “bring boys together for common discipline and orderly recreation, and to train them in their crafts.”Footnote 125 That the Technical Education Board debated the minutest dispensation of funds to ensure that expenditures did not become “too extravagant for a rough and ready school” bore this out.Footnote 126 The future, it seems, did not bode well for the democratization of education nor for the Polytechnic's travel programs.
By the late Victorian era, travel had become a compelling symbol of national identity, so much so that elementary school primers, such as the ubiquitous and long-lived Citizen Reader, taught working-class children that the “duties of the English citizen” extend beyond the British Isles and lauded the “boy” who “crosses the sea” and “travels abroad.”Footnote 127 In higher education, Whitehall turned this rhetoric into a reality for some students by instituting British teaching assistantships in French and German classrooms across the channel. Furthermore, study abroad steadily became a requirement for students in the emerging technological class, some of whom would have had their start at a Polytechnic. And yet this requirement still amounted to a “privilege” that the affluent classes shared with only a limited number of scholarship students, much like today.Footnote 128 Such provisions for educational travel, needless to say, failed as a democratic solution to educational inequalities and were inadequate to carry forward Hogg's ambition to educate “the whole man.”Footnote 129 Students, consequently, inhabited a number of paradoxes at the Polytechnic that put into question the inclusivity of its corporate identity and the equality implied, but not met, by its travel practices. Indeed, these paradoxes were the outcome of new liberalism's own internal contradictions that could not deliver on the democratic promise of equality and communal belonging within a predominantly capitalist system. In light of students’ social and economic disabilities and, in the case of the Y.W.C.I., gender discrimination, it can be seen that the Polytechnic's travel culture precluded full citizenship. Instead, the Polytechnic's travel ideologies and practices highlighted differences rather than commonalities, and contestation over social cohesion.Footnote 130
This then is the story behind Cook and Hogg's dispute. Standing at a crossroads between state and voluntary funding, and between stasis and change, the Polytechnic demonstrates how new conceptions of liberalism in an age characterized not only by anxiety over mass democracy and international economic competition but also by optimism over technological and social innovation had made it possible for reformers to imagine, and in Cook's case to presume, a national curriculum that included travel opportunities for working- and lower-middle-class students and that would serve, ideally, as both an education in and an obligation of citizenship.
Unsurprisingly, the impetus for this ideal was difficult to sustain after Hogg's death. Although the LCC continued to finance the Polytechnic, Studd explains that it was “unwilling” to fund the P.T.A.Footnote 131 As a consequence, the P.T.A. became a private limited company in 1911. Continuing as a commercial enterprise, it developed an extensive organizational structure, one in which the “pleasures of the tourist gaze,” as John Urry writes of modern leisure travel, came to be experienced as a “right” rather than a “privilege,” an interpretation of “rights” that workers had come to associate, across-the-board, with commercial leisure and entertainment by the 1900s.Footnote 132 Enlarging ordinary people's sphere of citizenship, the P.T.A. thus contributed to the emergence of the modern consumerist mode of travel and tourism.
What the history of the Polytechnic also reveals, however, is that the significance of travel in modern life was, and continues to be, more than the fulfillment of consumer desires as an individual right. In mobilizing ordinary youth, the Polytechnic responded to students own demands for opportunities to enhance their skills and to contribute to the “common good.”Footnote 133 Out of these expectations, the “spirit of travel” articulated the institute's collective identity that students used to improve their economic and social circumstances at home and around the world and to assert their own claims for citizenship. Yet, with limited resources afforded to the Polytechnic, the promise of the future that was inscribed in educational travel led students down a path that terminated in a relatively static social order. Indeed, what this article has sought to expose as a fundamental conceit is the idea that travel constitutes a democratic vehicle for either social mobility or active citizenship. Thus, as one education official could blithely remark in a Parliamentary report nearly two decades after Besant's Poly-boy-heroes stormed the barricades of class privilege, “the Polytechnics were intended to be institutions to make the rank and file the most capable rank and file in the world,” while the universities were intended to “train those who would lead them.Footnote 134 Cook, whose agency proudly catered to wealthy, university-educated, and titled “travelers,” perhaps won his case after all.
