Maurice, Mansbridge and Jennie Lee

Three heroes of adult education - Part One

‘We must aim in all our teaching of the working classes, at making them free.’ FD Maurice, 1853

‘I am not here as a suppliant for my class. I decline to sit at the rich man’s gate praying for crumbs. I claim for my class all that Oxford has to give. I claim it as a right, wrongfully withheld.’ JM Mactavish, future General Secretary of the Workers’ Educational Association

‘The first, and most urgent task before us is to cater for the many thousands of people, fully capable of higher education, who for one reason or another, do not get it, or get as much of it as they can turn to advantage, or as they discover, sometimes too late, that they need.’ Lord Crowther, the first Chancellor of the Open University

Jennie Lee: courtesy of the Open University Archive

Over the next couple of weeks I am going to try to trace a thread from one of the earliest pioneers of education for the working man, FD Maurice, through the foundation of the Workers’ Educational Association (the WEA) by Albert Mansbridge in 1903, to the launch of the Open University in 1970. Along the way we will spend a little time with the Christian Socialists of Queen Victoria’s day, an inspiring amount of time with the pioneers of the WEA including the brilliant historian RH Tawney, and finally a frankly amusing time with Jennie Lee and Arnold Goodman as they bulldoze their way through a raft of opposition from the Civil Service, the Educational Establishment and the Labour Cabinet, to bring to fruition Harold Wilson’s ‘back of an envelope’ idea for a ‘University of the Air’. Every rule of Government policy says that the Open University should never have happened - the financial estimates were completely wrong, the timetable was ludicrously over-ambitious, and most of all, there was no evidence that anyone out there wanted it. Today it is the largest academic institution in the United Kingdom (and one of the largest in Europe) by student number. Since it was founded, more than two million students have achieved their learning goals by studying with the Open University. How on earth did it all begin?

It’s a big subject, which I am still working my way through. So I’m going to cheat slightly at the start, by re-purposing a very early Substack that most of you will never have seen, but which was based on the research I undertook for my biography of the Macmillan brothers, Literature for the People. Here we go:

It’s pretty simple to explore the impact that Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-72) had on the Macmillan brothers. Daniel called his first two sons Frederick and Maurice, respectively. Their publishing catalogue in the 1850s mostly consisted of the works of Maurice and his Christian Socialist disciples, although Alexander would later say ‘had we only such books as his we could not have lasted three years.’ Luckily, among Maurice’s disciples were two bestselling authors, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, and it was the manuscripts that they gave to Macmillan to publish which were the foundation of the success of the firm. Maurice is rarely spoken of today outside Anglican theological colleges, but his practical interest in education survives in two organisations that owe their establishment to him: the Working Men’s College, (https://www.wmcollege.ac.uk/), still flourishing in north London, and Queen’s College for Women (https://www.qcl.org.uk/), the first British educational establishment to give academic qualifications to women.

Maurice was born in Suffolk in 1805, the only son of a Unitarian minister, with numerous sisters, all of whom fell out with their father over his beliefs and then pursued their own varying degrees of non-conformist fanaticism, making for a very uncomfortable family life. ‘For much of his early life, FDM was surrounded by as many as nine females in various stages of religious hysteria and physical debility…it is surprising that he retained his own mental balance as well as he did.’ This childhood may explain one of the principal features of Maurice’s philosophy, which was to avoid conflict and seek to emphasise similarities rather than differences in all things. He was always open to debate, and his tendency to see all sides of every question made many frustrated with what could appear to be woolly thinking - hence Mathew Arnold’s comment that he ‘passed his life beating about the bush with deep emotion and never starting the hare’. JS Mill thought he wasted more intellectual capacity than any other thinker, Aubrey de Vere said his writings were like eating pea soup with a fork. Ruskin and Carlyle were equally dismissive.

But Frederick Denison Maurice has been hailed by many as one of the greatest thinkers of the Victorian age – Tennyson would call him ‘the greatest mind of them all’, Julius Hare called him ‘The greatest mind since Plato’. He was a Cambridge-educated theologian, an essayist and an educationalist, who developed most of the philosophy that underlay the Christian Socialist movement while working in practice to promote the higher education of women and of the working classes. He believed that ‘social regeneration would come not through social change, but through the spiritual influence of modern literature’. His principal work, The Kingdom of Christ (1838), made the case for tolerance and ecumenicism, arguing that most Christian sects had more in common than was supposed, the crucial commandment being the necessity of living in brotherhood with all men.

Bust of Maurice: Westminster Abbey

In 1823 Maurice was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became one of the principal members of the elite intellectual society, The Apostles. However, his religious difficulties prevented him from taking his degree, and it was not until 1834 that he was ordained into the Church of England. In 1840 he was elected Professor of History and English Literature at Kings College, London and in 1846, Chaplain of Lincolns Inn. Daniel and Alexander Macmillan fell under his spell in the early 1840s. In 1847 Maurice founded Queen’s College for Women, determined that there should be better educational opportunities available for girls living in London.

It was while living in Lincoln’s Inn after the death of his first wife that Maurice began to spend time with a group of young radical lawyers. John Ludlow, a young and idealistic barrister, had travelled to Paris in 1848 to witness revolution at first hand and the letters he subsequently wrote to Maurice were seen by both men to be key in the development of Christian Socialism. Both men believed that violence and bloodshed between the classes could only be averted if society began to put into practice the teachings of the New Testament, and started to love and protect the interests of all men, not just the wealthy capitalists and industrialists. Inspired, rather than led, by the reticent Maurice, this grouping of lawyers and clerics included Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes. From 1848 into the early 1850s, much of the Group’s effort was spent in trying to launch a system of workers’ cooperatives across the country. The failure of many of these groups led Maurice and Ludlow to realise that the workers needed to be better educated to make a success of this philosophy.

In June 1853, Macmillan published FD Maurice’s Theological Essays, and opened a whole can of worms. Smuggled into these apparently harmless but well-written sermons was Maurice’s stated belief that a God of Love could not be so harsh as to condemn a sinner to an eternity of punishment. This apparent dismissal of the established Christian conception of Hell caused such an uproar that he was sacked from his position at King’s College: an early example of ‘no platforming’.

Following his dismissal, Maurice turned to the education of the working man as the way to counter the atheism of the socialist movement and improve the chances of success for the Co-operative movement. There had previously been many attempts to spread learning among the adult working classes, Mechanics’ Institutes being a prime example. But these Institutes were failing their audience – the working man wanted more than just technical skills, he craved answers to the questions that most influenced his life, and better education should give him the tools he 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, Ludlow and other leaders of the Christian Socialist movement, and opened its doors in October 1854, with around 130 students enrolled to study humanities (including theology, history and politics), mathematics and natural sciences. Lecturers included Thomas Huxley, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Ruskin.

National Portrait Gallery

Charles Kingsley’s cry was ‘Workers of England, be wise, and then you must be free, for you will be fit to be free.’

We cannot know how Maurice sounded in the pulpit, and his writings are too dense for the modern reader, but he was certainly an attractive and commanding figure who inspired worship among his followers, although he never courted it. His lasting concrete achievements were in education for women and for working men, but by constant repetition of the principles of liberal, Christian-based concern for fellow men, he had a huge impact on 19th Century social and political thought. The Co-operative movement always gives credit to the spadework put in by Maurice, Ludlow and Tom Hughes. The Macmillan brothers would not be the only young, impressionable disciples who would fall under his spell, his influence was far-reaching. Charles Kingsley would say that reading The Kingdom of Christ had changed his life. Maurice’s Wikipedia entry, under ‘people influenced’ has 47 entries – and these are just the people with Wikipedia entries. The truth is that there were many, many Victorians who were influenced by the writings and teaching of FD Maurice. and the two principal institutions that he founded fulfil his purposes to this very day.

Later this week we will look at Albert and Frances Mansbridge, founders of the WEA, and RH Tawney, its first tutor.

Albert and Frances Mansbridge