High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  A group of ladies met in the spring of 1849 to resolve to found the college – Mrs Sophia de Morgan, Mrs Scott, Miss Julia Smith, Mrs Rich, Mrs Hensleigh Wedgewood. In an undated letter from that time, Mrs Reid told Mrs de Morgan: ‘let our guiding principle be Love and not Fear. Let us make it our object to see our Coll as perfect as we can make it without troubling ourselves about other folk’s prejudices.’97 Already a stalwart of the anti-slavery movement and other Exeter Hall activities, she told Mrs de Morgan how much she liked Maurice’s lectures – ‘there is a charm in the man’s earnest devout spirit’. God was in everything for Mrs Reid: ‘I am sure lectures on the Old Testament might be made most delightful and instructive and we don’t want a weekday sermon instead: nine churchgoers out of ten have no idea of the connection of what they have been pleased to distinguish as Sacred and Profane History – that they are actually and in reality the same persons in each.’ Religious opinions were to be of no account, and no pupil would be required to attend religious instruction. Bedford Square was chosen as a location because it was an affluent neighbourhood housing precisely the clientele the founders sought. Although religion was no object, the ‘respectability’ of the pupils was, and references would be sought.98

  Mrs de Morgan warned her of the difficulties of getting such an enterprise started, and of the financial risk to Mrs Reid as the backer. Mrs Reid was resolute. ‘I am perfectly happy to take the risk as you term it and feel far too confident of its success to admit of any generosity in the affair.’99 She was going to lend them the money, and said that if they paid her interest on it she would spend it on the pupils; and if they were at some point able to repay her, the money would be put to a similar philanthropic use.

  She found it easy, at first, to get potential pupils and teachers, and settled on 46 Bedford Square for premises. The hunt then began for ‘patrons and patronesses’, with an emphasis on the latter, with various peeresses of the committee’s acquaintance being approached, but also women of distinction in various learned fields, notably Maria Edgeworth, the novelist and children’s writer. Emily Taylor, who ran Queen’s College, advised Ann Scott of the committee that, when it came to teaching music, she could not do better than to choose ‘a capital female Teacher for the Piano-Forte, leaving the lessons on Harmony to be an after, tho’ very important business. If you fix first on a celebrated Professor of Harmony, you must allow him to make all the necessary musical arrangements, and, depend upon it, a woman will then never be chosen; but if a Professor recommends, as is very likely, young men for teachers you will have the trouble of providing someone always to be present.’100 She recommended a Miss Speyer, who had been a pupil of Mendelssohn.

  By January 1850 Mrs Reid told Robinson that she ‘will give an education to any girl of suitable character and position who wants it.’101 It was far from easy, not least because many of the families to whom Reid spread the word about the benefits of educating their daughters were entirely uninterested in the notion. Harriet Martineau wrote in May 1851 to console her, saying ‘I am a good deal surprised, and very deeply grieved, at what you tell me of the doings and feelings of parents about the education of daughters’.102 Two years earlier, when Reid had sent her a prospectus, she had questioned the need for it, coming just a year after the foundation of Queen’s. ‘I don’t see why there should be a second college unless the first is overfull. Is it the teaching that is different or the plans? Or is it for the sake of a new neighbourhood?’103 She had praised her, however, for advancing feminist doctrine and aspirations. Yet by the autumn of 1851 Reid was touting for business, seeking to persuade her friends to spread the word and recruit any eligible young women to come to be educated. Martineau was not very helpful. ‘I wish I could help you about your college, but I know no young people, except impracticable ones.’104

  A problem with recruiting pupils inevitably led to one with recruiting teachers, partly because of a shortage of pupils to teach, and partly because of the resulting lack of funds to pay salaries. Robinson noted on 14 October 1851 that ‘Mrs Reid . . . is suffering seriously on account of the difficulty they find in filling the ladies’ college with professors, of which she is to a great degree the foundress.’105 He found learned men to introduce to Reid whom she could seek to persuade to take jobs at her college. The problem then became paying them. She had to spend much of the 1850s soliciting funds to keep it going. She told Robinson in 1858 that ‘it is often referred to among us – and with some disappointment and wonder that Mr Carter [a solicitor with a daughter at the College] and you should be the only gentlemen in England who have ever given £50 to promote the higher education of Women.’ She added: ‘If they could but see and feel, as I do, that we never shall have better Men till men have better Mothers, they would come flocking about us . . . An able, earnest, liberal minded Man or two, or three, is at this moment our great want, not to teach, but to be Members of the council and be ready to advise and assist in private; a man of education experience and leisure.’106 She had trouble with anti-feminism when seeking male teachers. She told Robinson on 17 June 1856 that ‘the difficulty is to find one who is deliberately of the opinion that female education, the improvement of the Moral and mental education of Women is of any importance to society; while all the time the good man may be teased with a very silly and tiresome wife himself, who is spoiling the minds of his children.’107 She hired a man called Beesly, a friend of Robinson and a professor of history at University College, to teach Latin to her girls: but in October 1861 she had ‘taken offence’ at him ‘for stating as a fact that Woman as such was a subordinate to man’ during a class when he was trying to demonstrate, without much tact, the etymology of the adjective.108 He had already offended her, and caused her not to appoint him a professor, by mocking the slavery abolitionists: the American Civil War was under way. She tried to hire Maurice, knowing well his pro-feminist credentials, but he refused because of the presence of F. W. Newman on the staff.

  Reid routinely badgered her friends for help. On 10 May 1854 Martineau wrote to her in response to a letter describing the financial distress of the college, and asking for suggestions of rich potential benefactors. She named Erasmus Darwin, Lady Shuttleworth and one ‘Dr Davis (a niggardly Jew)’, whom she approached, one presumes out of desperation, despite her disobliging view of him.109 Martineau had already lent £500 and had no more. By 16 October 1857, however, Robinson recorded in his diary that he had visited Mrs Reid and the college in Bedford Square ‘which she represents to be flourishing’.110 That December, though, Reid was told by the Duke of Bedford to remove her pupils, as such an establishment was against the terms of her lease. Negotiations ensued, but for a while the relationship was precarious.

  Reid feared that her premises drove away the clientele. ‘I am sure that the meanness and shabbiness of our interior has cost us many pupils,’ she told Robinson in 1856, ‘but what can we do? My £1,500 has melted away; could I give another, I would gladly do it, but I can only live on my savings now. You would not advise me to cut up the goose that lays the egg. “It ought to be self supporting”, gentlemen say to me. Perhaps it ought, but it is not, and it cannot be for a long time to come. Who can shew me a College for men that has been self supporting while these are of old and ours are [sic] new and in advance of public opinion, more than we were aware of? Nor did we calculate enough on the opposition of the clergy when we began.’111

  She professed that ‘the care of young Girls and helping them on to growing goodness and usefulness, being my vocation [is] my one object in life.’112 She put this another way in a letter found in her papers after her death, written to her colleagues Jane Martineau and Eliza Ann Bostock: ‘the elevation of the moral and intellectual character of Women’.113 In the same letter she said: ‘The condition of women never was quite so good, or by a great deal so hopeful as at this moment – and that the enemy is wide awake and in full activity is corroboration of the truth – nevertheless by untiring efforts and extreme patience we may, with Go
d’s blessing, obtain a glorious result in a quiet, unobtrusive, resistless success.’

  Reid was greatly inspired by Angela Burdett-Coutts’s pamphlet Daughters of the Middle Classes in 1858. She felt her pupils could do great work in schools for the poor. She told Robinson in March 1858 that ‘I am convinced that a lady is no more unfitted to teach the lowest and meanest by our College, than a clergyman is by going to Oxford; the desire is everything with either. I must add that perhaps half of our Young Ladies rank as such more by good manners and ability than birth and that if you know anyone disposed to place another of this description under Miss Rankin’s care for three or four years at an expense of £50 per annum he would be a Patriot indeed!’114 She had hoped that a charitable foundation would support the college as a place for the education of the daughters of unitarian ministers. Thanks to her efforts, and those of her supporters, her enterprise flourished and, with the growth of the middle classes and the increased understanding of the value of education for young women brought about by such establishments as Queen’s College and Bedford College, its place was soon secure. By 1869 Bedford College was so successful that it was incorporated, and in 1874 it moved to larger premises off Baker Street.

  The lack of schooling for girls limited the supply of those equipped for a university education. Reid founded her own girls’ school in 1853 as a feeder to Bedford College, but the problem remained acute. In the 1860s the Taunton Commission heavily criticised the shortage of endowed schools for girls, and warned the government that more funds would need to be provided to educate them. After the 1860s, and in spite of the revised code, new opportunities for young women to enter teaching, and therefore a profession and a calling of reasonably high social standing, became more widespread. The great increase in pupil-teachers facilitated by the Forster Act in 1870 largely comprised young women. In 1870 there had been 6,384 males and 8,228 females in training in elementary schools. By 1880 the figures were 10,822 and 21,306 respectively.115

  VII

  The shortage of decent secondary schooling for girls was accentuated when in 1868 Cambridge agreed to admit them as candidates for local examinations. Although these were short of the standard of the university tripos – which women would start to sit within a few years, without being permitted to graduate – most girls were of insufficient standard to be serious candidates even for these. This prompted Arthur Hugh Clough’s sister Anne, a campaigner for women’s higher education, to suggest what was in effect the beginning of the university extension movement, which would provide lectures in major provincial towns and cities and, indeed, partly as a result of an initiative by Jowett and Oxford, led to a campaign in 1874 to found a university at Bristol, which opened in 1876. It had been difficult enough to launch new institutions to teach young women to degree standard. The next challenge, though, was to breach the walls of the two ancient English universities, and have them accept women. Emily Davies was a pioneer of this movement; and like many of those in the field of women’s education, brought with her an entire package of feminist views that followed the idea of education of women to a logical conclusion: women should also have the vote, and they should find none of the professions barred to them.

  Davies was born in 1830, the daughter of a clergyman, John Davies, whose intellectual reputation had been sufficient for him to be offered the chair of moral and political economy at London University. He sent his sons to Repton, but his ideas of educating children did not extend to his daughters. They were consigned to a life of assisting with the family needlework and, when old enough, doing good works in Gateshead, Mr Davies’s parish. Davies resented this; in her twenties, however, she met two women who inspired her to campaign for women’s education and suffrage. One was Elizabeth Garrett, six years her junior, who would become the first female doctor in Britain; the other was Barbara Bodichon, three years her senior.

  Bodichon was then known for her campaign to reform women’s property rights, but was also one of the most prominent members of the Langham Place circle of feminists, which from 1858 under Bodichon’s leadership published the radical English Woman’s Journal, for which Davies would become a main writer and editor. Bodichon’s grandfather had been one of the MPs who supported Wilberforce in the abolition of slavery; her father, Benjamin Smith, was a radical MP. She was a first cousin of Nightingale, whose mother was her father’s sister: but Barbara was illegitimate, and much of the family refused to know her. In keeping with his beliefs Smith had Barbara educated by private tutors and at various schools; and when she came of age in 1848 her father gave her shares and property to provide a private income, allowing her the independence to pursue her main career interest (which was to become an artist) and to engage in political campaigning. That activity would lead her into close associations with Mill, through his stepdaughter Helen Taylor, and George Eliot. She regarded her money as ‘a power to do good . . . a responsibility we must accept.’116 She was also what the twenty-first century would call a ferocious networker, and it was not least thanks to her network that she was able to advance her various feminist causes so well as she did.

  Davies also had a link to Maurice’s circle through her brother Llewellyn, a friend of Maurice and a member of the proto-feminist National Association for the Promotion of Social Science. Visiting London in 1859, she and Garrett attended lectures given by Elizabeth Blackwell, an Englishwoman who had become the first female doctor in the United States, and who inspired Garrett’s campaign to allow women into the medical profession in Britain. Blackwell had been urged to come to Britain by Bodichon, to help Garrett’s campaign. Davies also joined the Society for the Promotion of the Employment of Women, and on her return to Gateshead founded a branch. This further motivated her to campaign for women’s education, and she joined Garrett’s drive to have London University award degrees to women. One of her campaigns was to allow girls to take the Cambridge local examinations, in which she had the support of Matthew Arnold, who wanted women teachers to have a recognised qualification.117 When it succeeded, Davies found eighty-three girls in just six weeks to take the exams, twenty-five from Frances Buss’s North London Collegiate School. It was also thanks to one of Davies’s campaigns that the Taunton Commission considered the education of middle-class girls as well as of middle-class boys. When she gave evidence to it in 1865 it was the first time a Royal Commission had ever examined a woman.

  Her next campaign was to draw up the petition for women’s suffrage that Mill presented to the Commons in 1866. For a time she was secretary of a suffrage committee under the auspices of the Kensington Society, a group that also included Barbara Bodichon, Elizabeth Garrett, Miss Buss and Miss Beale. However, Davies feared that her role in this campaign was potentially damaging to her ideal of creating more educational opportunities for women, and so withdrew. In 1866 she set out her aims in her book The Higher Education of Women, arguing that university courses and the professions should be opened to females: and she disposed, with cool rationality, of the arguments that women were biologically inferior to men, and therefore could not cope either with the pressure of examination, because of a tendency to hysteria, or with the demands of a serious career.

  From her next organisation, the London Schoolmistresses’ Association, the idea emerged of founding a women’s college that would award degrees. The initial idea was to persuade Queen’s College to ask London University to allow its women to take their degrees: but that proved impracticable, and the ambition was conceived to raise funds for a women’s college at Cambridge: Oxford was deemed too hostile, whereas several prominent Cambridge dons had indicated their support. A committee met in December 1867, under Davies’s direction, to set about raising the £30,000 that would be needed. The committee included some of the academics who had earlier indicated their support, such as J. R. Seeley, the historian; and pillars of society such as Lady Augusta Stanley, a confidante of the Queen and the wife of the biographer of Dr Arnold. Barbara Bodichon, who had financed a secular coeducational school in Lo
ndon from 1854 to 1863, gave much of her time, and some of her money. She had been an advocate of a women’s university education since visiting her brother at Cambridge in the late 1840s. However, Davies initially suppressed her name from the list of supporters because of the strong association Bodichon had with radical feminism.

  What Davies sought for her college was markedly different from what another group with similar ambitions hoped to achieve at Cambridge. Henry Sidgwick, whose article on Eton had been one of the causes of the Clarendon Commission and whose resignation as a fellow of Trinity would cause the University Tests to be abolished, had with Anne Clough obtained the university’s agreement to establish special examinations for female students: these would not lead to a Cambridge degree, thanks partly to Sidgwick and Clough’s belief that the inadequacies of girls’ education made such an aspiration unrealistic. Sidgwick and Clough had become friends not least because of his reverence for her brother’s poetry: he was also, like the poet, a Rugbeian. When resigning his fellowship in 1869 on the grounds of apostasy, he had identified with Clough’s experiences at Oriel twenty years earlier. Trinity promptly appointed him to a lectureship, so he could continue his college teaching without a fellowship, and threw its considerable weight behind the campaign for abolition of the test. The climate had changed radically since Clough’s enforced isolation.

  Sidgwick wrote that, like Clough before him, ‘I can neither adequately rationalise faith, nor reconcile faith with reason, nor suppress reason.’118 He added: ‘I do not feel called or able to preach religion except as far as it is involved in fidelity to one’s true self.’ Strongly influenced by Mill in his philosophical thought, Sidgwick committed himself to women’s education, becoming involved with university extension teaching for the new Higher Local Examination. He and others in Cambridge saw the advantages of founding a college for the purpose not just of lecturing for these examinations, but to bring women up to the level required for the tripos. This commitment, and his Clough-like behaviour at Trinity, caused him to be venerated by Anne Clough.