Advocating for the Ignorant
Tracing a path from the Macmillan Brothers to the Beveridge Report
Extract from notes from the Advisory Panel on Home Affairs on Reconstruction Problems: The Five Giants on the Road, 25 June 1942
In 1942, William Beveridge, an academic and a Civil Servant, published a report which would lay the foundation for the Post-War construction of the British Welfare State. In it, he famously identified what he called the ‘Five Giant Evils on the road to reconstruction’ - squalor, want, disease, idleness, and ignorance.
Some eighty years earlier, Alexander Macmillan had written to his old friend and fellow Christian Socialist, Brooke Foss Westcott, at that stage a Classics master at Harrow (later Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University, and then Bishop of Durham). Westcott had sent Macmillan the manuscript of a theological treatise, The Gospel of the Resurrection, and Alexander was, as ever, keen to improve the work and make it more accessible.
There are certain places where you make allusions to theories instead of telling clearly what they are. For instance, I do not know what Aristotle’s view of immortality was, and I suppose a considerable number of those whom you would wish to have as readers would be in the same condition…You remember I am the advocate for the ignorant.
Somewhere along the line, we have changed our understanding, our use, of the word ‘ignorance’, turning it from a social problem, as seen by Macmillan and in the Beveridge Report, to an insult. We don’t bandy terms like ‘hungry pig’, or ‘ill pig’. But ‘ignorant pig’ is only too common. It is not a phrase that the Macmillan brothers would have understood or used: for them, for people to be ‘ignorant’ was evidence that society had failed them. It was a failure that they believed they could remedy.
Alexander Macmillan, born in Irvine, Scotland in 1818, had not had the advantages of a University degree, unlike Westcott, or any of the other male authors he published. The son of a poor crofter who had died when Alexander was a little boy, there had been very little money for education. His older brother Daniel had left school at the age of ten and been apprenticed to a bookseller. Alexander left school at fifteen. The pair became exemplary autodidacts, devouring every book, every periodical that came their way. It was this exposure to the world of literature which had enabled them to pull themselves out of Scottish poverty, so that by the 1850s they were the proprietors of an up-and-coming publishing house.
Daniel died in 1857, but by then he and his brother were established in the prime retail site in Cambridge, at 1 Trinity Street, and were the publishers of choice of the leaders of the Christian Socialist movement, with FD Maurice, Charles Kingsley, Thomas Hughes and other clerics and academics in their catalogue.
These earnest, religious men had enormous sympathy for the plight of the poor and disenfranchised, but they also feared bloody revolution. They believed that some level of democracy would soon prevail, but that it would be more peacefully achieved if those to be enfranchised were capable of exercising the vote responsibly. This led them to establish the Christian Socialist movement in 1848, on the back of the failure of the Chartist Movement to catch fire. Charles Kingsley’s cry was ‘Workers of England, be wise, and then you must be free, for you will be fit to be free.’
Six years later, the Christian Socialist movement achieved one of its key goals, with the establishment in London of the Working Men’s College. FD Maurice had been forced to resign his Chair at King’s College, London in 1853, over theological differences, and now turned to the education of the working man as a way to counter the tempting atheism of the socialist movement. There had previously been many attempts to spread learning among the adult working classes, Mechanics’ Institutes being a prime example. But these were focused on improving the working man’s technical and scientific skills, and discussions of religion or politics were generally banned. Although popular, spreading rapidly throughout England and Scotland in the first half of the nineteenth century, these Institutes were failing their audience – many working men wanted more than just technical skills, they craved answers to the questions that most influenced their lives, and better education would give them the tools they needed to develop political and spiritual understanding. Maurice wrote ‘We must aim in all our teaching of the working classes, at making them free.’
The first Working Men’s College was founded in Red Lion Square, London by Maurice, Hughes and other leaders of the Christian Socialist movement, and opened its doors in October 1854, with around 130 adult students enrolled to study humanities (including theology, history and politics), mathematics and natural sciences - all to be taught by volunteers drawn from Maurice’s circle. Kingsley would lecture there, as would Thomas Huxley and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and in a tremendous publicity coup, even John Ruskin. Alexander Macmillan established a second College in Cambridge, where there were plenty of sympathetic scholars happy to lecture. For Alexander and Daniel, this was a perfect fit with what they saw as their calling: that they would publish high quality educational material which would appeal to the working man and woman: ‘Literature for the People’.
To the philanthropic Victorians, to Daniel and Alexander, to the Christian Socialists, ignorance was a want to be remedied, akin to hunger, thirst or ill-health. To be ignorant would be to be ignored. This was the cause that the Macmillans took to be their mission on earth – to be a conduit for cascading knowledge down to those who hungered for it, or whose salvation required it. They fervently believed that access to good and affordable literature would bring young people to God, would give them a moral code to live by, and might ameliorate the misunderstanding between the classes that led to political strife and unrest. Above all they thought everyone deserved the sheer pleasure and intellectual stimulation that books had given them. When they were young apprentices in London they had made friends with men training to be missionaries, including David Livingstone. Daniel may have been tempted by the missionary life, but he did not have the constitution for it. So he concentrated on his trade.
He wrote to an old friend:
 We booksellers, if we are faithful to our task, are trying to destroy and are helping to destroy, all kinds of confusion, and are aiding our great Taskmaster to reduce the world into order and beauty and harmony. Bread we must have, and gain it by the sweat of our brow, or of our brain, and that is noble because God-appointed. Yet that is not all. As truly as God is, we are His ministers, and help to minister to the wellbeing of the spirits of men.
The early years of the Macmillan publishing house saw the brothers focusing on the pamphlets and sermons pouring out of Cambridge colleges: but they rapidly realised that schoolbooks might be the way to make a fortune, as more, and better, schools for boys and girls were opening across the United Kingdom and the ever-increasing British Empire. The profits made from best-selling literature such as Westward Ho!, Tom Brown’s School Days, The Water Babies and Alice in Wonderland were exciting: but churning out maths books by Barnard Smith and Todhunter reliably paid the bills. After Daniel’s death, Alexander embarked on even more ambitious projects, funding classic texts in smart editions at affordable prices: Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Verse, Patmore’s The Children’s Garland, the Globe Shakespeare and other Globe editions of classic texts brought quality literature into the hands of the masses.
While Macmillan concentrated on producing the raw materials of education, the broad thrust of the Christian Socialist movement contributed to the improvement of State provision. The 1870 Elementary Education Act was sponsored by William Edward Forster, well-known to Macmillan and the Christian Socialist set. Forster’s views on education had been shaped by his father-in-law, Dr Arnold, and by his brother-in-law Matthew Arnold’s experiences as a school inspector. Demand that something be done to improve education in England had been growing for the past decade. The 1861 census had shown that of the four million children of primary school age, some were in state-aided voluntary schools, some were in church schools, but nearly half were receiving no education at all. The 1867 Reform Act which had widened the franchise had brought calls for better schooling, so that the newly-enfranchised voters might be educated men. ‘We must not delay…now that we have given them political power we must not wait any longer to give them education.’
The Act provided for the establishment of School Boards, to be elected by the ratepayers. Where there was agreed to be inadequate provision in a particular location, the Boards were instructed to establish schools for the education of children between the ages of five and thirteen. Parents had to pay school fees, although School Boards were able to assist the poorest children. In most places in England, nothing changed overnight, but this was a significant milestone and indicated a direction of travel. The Mundella Act of 1881 made attendance compulsory between the ages of five to ten. Over the next decade, several thousand new schools were built, millions more children entered education and many thousand teachers were trained and recruited, mostly women. By 1891, primary schooling in England would be free. Textbooks would roll off the presses and Macmillan’s ethically-driven strategy would pay significant dividends.
There is a small but direct personal link between the philosophy of the Christian Socialists and the Beveridge Report of 1942: William Beveridge’s mother was Annette Ackroyd who, with Elizabeth Malleson, founded the Working Women’s College, an offshoot of Maurice’s Working Men’s College, in Queen Square, London.
The eye-catching elements of the Report, or to give it its full title ‘Social Insurance and Allied Services’ were the elements relating to National Insurance, Social Security and the National Health Service, which the Labour Party would start to enact when they won the election in 1945. But Daniel and Alexander Macmillan would have been delighted to learn that one hundred years after the founding of the Christian Socialist movement, Beveridge would honour their belief in the importance of education in the creation of a fairer, more equal society.
My paperback copy of Literature for the People arrived today. Looking forward to reading it.
Fascinating, thank you. I also see a link through to Alfred Marshall and John Maynard Keynes, who also had a burning desire to improve economic conditions in part as a way of avoiding possible revolution. Macmillan published Keynes' groundbreaking book Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919!