Curricular Innovation and the Politics of Culture at the Time of the Second Reform Act

Introduction

The terms paired in the expression ‘liberal democracy’ clearly did not always belong together: one need only dip into the debates around the Second Reform Act of 1867 to convince oneself of this.1 By then the habitual assertion of the freedom-loving nature of the common Englishman was well established, for example by Whiggish historians such as Thomas Babington Macaulay whose History of England (1848–61) told the story of the Glorious Revolution as the vindication of timeless English liberties. The overthrow of James II had, of course, been unconstitutional, but his replacement by the liberty-respecting William of Orange was presented as politically and morally justifiable; it was a conservative revolution that preserved the traditional liberties of the uncodified ‘ancient constitution’.2 Such was the language of the Whig victors and their descendants. They effectively treated the Glorious Revolution as having established a liberal polity, with ‘liberty’ as its core value. But by ‘liberty’ they meant only what political theorists now call negative liberty: the right of individuals not to suffer the abusive invasion of their persons or property by the agents of authority. English liberty theoretically protected all from the abuse of power, but this did not imply a shared status of citizenship in virtue of which ‘the people’ would have a proportional say in the running of the state. For the Whigs, and many early liberals, the disjuncture between negative liberty and equality was self-evident; for some, it was necessary and needed to be maintained. ‘Democracy’ – used essentially as synonymous with the principle of equality – was, especially before the Second Reform Act, widely seen as impracticable and dangerous. This was as true of liberals as it was of conservatives, as Robert Lowe and other liberal rebels made obvious when they brought down the Russell-Gladstone ministry in 1866 on just this issue. That defeat of William Ewart Gladstone’s attempted reform divided the Liberal Party and made an opening for Benjamin Disraeli to forge ‘one-nation Toryism’, setting in motion the process by which an emergent and increasingly democratic form of liberalism ceased to be a marker of party affiliation or ideological orientation, and became something more like a philosophy or an ideal; and one that was broadly consensual in Late Victorian Britain.

Naturally, radical and conservative outlooks continued to exist in parallel, but we might think of mainstream political debate after 1867 as characterised not so much by a struggle between distinctly demarcated ideologies, but rather an ideological continuum centred on the question of how broadly liberal English ideals were to face the distinctively modern challenges posed by democracy. Here, ‘democracy’ does not only mean a widened suffrage, or even just the abstract principle of equality; more significantly, it also entails the massification attendant upon industrialisation, urbanisation and professionalisation. In other words, the transition – as we might see it with the benefit of hindsight – from a primitive and limited liberalism to modern liberal democracy was by no means a narrowly political process but one that was influenced by and had an impact upon all walks of life. In this chapter we focus on the world of educational theory and practice, and especially on the debate around curricular reform in the 1860s. These debates are particularly relevant in the context of the emergence of modern liberal democracy, and particularly illuminating to us historically, since there are few other domains in which questions of knowledge were brought so explicitly into contact with questions of access to power.

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It was, of course, entirely natural that education was in the frontline of political debates around modernity. The working class would not be given the franchise without the state taking in hand the elementary education of new voters. But modernity raised educational issues for society as a whole; for the elites as well as the masses. In the early 1860s, the ancient universities and the public schools continued to run a classical curriculum that seemed increasingly inadequate to the demands of an industrialising, democratising, diversifying liberal state. The debate around curricular reform, particularly active as the different reform bills were offered in 1866 and 1867, can thus be seen as echoing, and giving substance to, preoccupations about liberal democracy – what it might be, how it might work, how it might be made to work without undermining fundamental values.

We might take Matthew Arnold’s work on education and culture as a useful window on these issues. Apart from his standing – unofficial but broadly recognised – as an authority on ‘culture’, Arnold also worked as an inspector of schools between 1851 and 1886 and in this capacity had reported to the Newcastle Commission (1859–61) on continental European schooling systems. Generally associated, then as now, with a rather conservative defensiveness of the intrinsic value of ‘high’ culture, Arnold was nevertheless emphatically not trying to resist change but to channel it. In his 1861 essay ‘Democracy’ (the introductory chapter to the published version of his report to the Newcastle Commission), he argued that, when in former times the aristocracy had constituted the natural ruling class, it was their values that had shaped a national character from which the masses were naturally excluded; but that in his own day ‘the charm of life and expansion’ had worked its way down into the populace with the result that ‘democracy is trying to affirm its own essence; to live, to enjoy, to possess the world, as aristocracy has tried, and successfully tried, before it’ (Arnold, 1993, p. 5, emphasis in original).

Arnold believed the France of the Second Empire to be the most influential European state because of the ‘completeness with which she has organised democratic institutions’. He reassured English readers that ‘the action of the French state is excessive’, but also alerted those same readers that ‘the French people has adopted this action for its own purposes’, which were essentially to lead Europe towards a democratic future (p. 8). In keeping with the basic tenets of Whig-flavoured English liberalism, Arnold believed that ‘the native independence and individualism of the English character’ ill-suited it to the Gallic model of centralisation of authority; yet the question remained, and indeed was posed with even more urgency, as to what sort of central authority would replace the now redundant aristocratic guardianship of culture, and therefore of national identity. The French had their academies; what would stand in their stead for independently minded Englishmen in a democratic age? The challenge, in Arnold’s terms, would be ‘how to find and keep high ideals’. And he explained:

Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man, taken by himself. Our society is probably destined to become much more democratic; who or what will give a high tone to the nation then? That is the grave question. [p. 14]

Progressive liberals were broadly in agreement: change towards democratisation was inevitable, but fraught with danger. In the protracted debates around the different versions of the second reform bill in 1866–67, there were considerable fears of a return to the insurrectionary mood of 1848. Mass meetings organised by the Reform League brought jittery reactions from the authorities, whose attempt to block a meeting in Hyde Park in July 1866 was ignored by the crowd who, in what was called a riot in some reports, pulled down the railings to gain access to the park and hold their meeting. The potential for a breakdown of civil order seemed real enough. At any rate, such scenes naturally bred anxiety among establishment elites, and fervent debate as to their best course of action.

It is no coincidence that the 1860s were also a period that saw much public discussion of educational policy, and of curricular reform. During this decade, three major commissions were organised to take stock and offer recommendations. The most significant was the first, the Newcastle Commission of 1859–61, whose report led to the establishment of free elementary schooling in 1870; thereafter, the Clarendon Commission (1864) recommended reforms to the public schools, while the Taunton Commission (1868) dealt with grammar schools. The reports were in general highly critical of existing institutions as ill-equipped to cater for the needs of an industrialising economy and a transforming polity. The alarm generated by these reports prompted the establishment of the Devonshire Commission (1870–75) to investigate the state of scientific instruction in both schools and universities. The ancient universities were only just beginning to modify their curricula. While some provision for instruction in the natural sciences had been introduced from the 1830s, examined courses leading to degrees only began to address modernity directly with the creation of Natural Science faculties in the 1850s and then the School of Modern History at Oxford in 1868 and the Modern History Tripos at Cambridge in 1873.3 These latter were the first signs of recognition in Oxbridge that the concept of ‘culture’ might have specifically modern orientations with specifically national implications.

The culture hitherto aspired to by liberal education was of quite a different sort, entailing the acquisition of a set of ethical, philosophical and aesthetic values held to be timeless and universal by their very nature. Modernisation, with its pressures towards individuation – in the form of disciplinary specialisation or differentiation of national identity – put these values under considerable strain. In the absence of state-sponsored academies to provide technocratic solutions, the specifically English debate tended to become a polemical matter debated internally among influential cultural elites. As such, it naturally became the site of a significant emergent debate about identity fundamentals, central to cultural and political senses of nationhood, in both domestic and imperial contexts.

The imperial context represented a further challenge for progressive liberal opinion. If the traditional Whiggish celebration of English liberties fell foul of democratisation on the domestic stage, the same issue was even more challenging around the empire. English liberties, though understood only in the negative sense, had been proclaimed to pertain for all Englishmen irrespective of social class, wealth or standing. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Gladstonian version of the liberal vision of empire travelled a similar path, with British ascendency around the world justified on these political grounds. The British imperium would bring not only stability, the rule of law and prosperity, but also the respect of the rights of the individual British subject. The message seemed to be that subject peoples around the world might legitimately aspire to the same standing in the eyes of the law as that enjoyed by Britons. In practice, however, the authority of the empire rested upon the long-standing assumption of innate European ascendency over subject peoples; on the assumption of fundamental societal and racial inequality. Liberal opinion thus found itself torn here too: was it more important to Britain as a nation to be able to justify imperial ascendency on the philanthropic grounds that it was bringing the condition of English-style liberty to peoples of all kinds around the world, or to secure the political and economic grounds for pragmatic domination, irrespective of liberal theory? The issue presented itself to mid-to-late Victorians in bluntly racial terms: did such groups as African tribesmen, former slave populations or Irish Fenians deserve to be treated on an equal footing with Englishmen? Did ‘English liberties’ apply to non-Englishmen?

By a curious coincidence, the imperial dimension of the debate was brought to public attention at just the same time, in the form of a major public controversy around the acts of Jamaican governor Edward Eyre in his bloody suppression of the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. As governor of the colony, Eyre had presided over the summary executions of the leaders of the uprising, as well as indiscriminate punishment killings among the population of former slaves. He was returned to England in 1866 where opinion was radically divided between those who saw him as a criminal deserving prosecution for murder, and those who feted him as a courageous hero who had shown commendable character in the defence of colonial Jamaica, and of the empire. Groups were organised by each camp, the Jamaica Committee which sought to prosecute Eyre and the Eyre Defence Committee. Interestingly, these groups did not divide along straightforward party lines; nor did their identities become specifically partisan in those terms. Instead, both groups were spearheaded by luminaries of liberal culture and opinion. The active members of the Jamaica Committee thus included John Stuart Mill, John Bright and Thomas Henry Huxley; while the Eyre Defence Committee was animated by such figures as John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley and John Tyndall.

The Eyre Affair can be seen as another dimension of the more specific domestic debates going on at the same time about liberal values and ‘the content of culture’. It is particularly useful as a sort of litmus test that brought underlying divergences to the surface, making them more plainly discernible. Where the domestic debates around culture could be conducted in cultivated terms that made the difference appear little more than a matter of shades of focus, the Eyre case forced a dichotomous differentiation. To participate was to pronounce for or against; it was really not possible to sit on the fence.

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In this essay, we consider two collections of essays published in 1867, both the works of liberal educational reformers addressing what was then the particularly hot topic of curricular modernisation. The obvious difference between the two works was one of disciplinary perspective. Thus, Essays on a Liberal Education, edited by Rev. Frederic William Farrar, offered a perspective firmly anchored in the humanities, while Edward Livingstone Youmans’s Modern Culture: Its True Aims and Requirements collected the views of working scientists on educational matters. The very fact of the virtually simultaneous publication of these works in these forms lends itself to an interpretation of the debate as little more than a turf war between ‘the humanities’ and ‘the sciences’ over control of the curriculum. But underlying this merely pragmatic version of the question was the more abstract and further-reaching political issue of what was even meant by ‘culture’ in a modern setting. In comparing the respective outlooks on offer in the two contrasted publications, therefore, it will be useful to seek for echoes in the other political affairs that happened to coincide chronologically: the debates about suffrage and democracy in connection with the Second Reform Act, and the debates around the rule of law in connection with the Eyre Affair. This essay attempts to draw together these three concurrent political strands into a broadly unified cultural debate about modernity and identity.

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Although our two collections of essays can be treated at some level as companion pieces representative of opposing positions on the same issue, in purely material terms they were actually rather different sorts of works. Where Youmans’s collection was really just an anthology of existing writings by prominent scientists about the general educational value of instruction in their specific disciplines, Farrar’s more deliberately constructed book was designed to offer a structured vision of a conception of liberal education in which ‘modern’ disciplines might take a significant part. Unlike Youmans’s scientists’ anthology, then, its goal was not to defend each new discipline independently, on its own terms, but to offer an overview of what a modern liberal education might look like. Farrar’s authors wanted to show how a general culture might be carried by, and acquired through instruction in a set of disciplines that preoccupied themselves with the modern rather than the classical world. That is, they believed that an appropriate treatment of the materiality of modernity was more pertinent to modern cultivation than the essentially abstract and aestheticising forms of universality offered by the study of classical cultures.

The emergent concept of ‘the nation’ was a key organising concept here, capable of nourishing ‘research’ in a variety of new or transformed domains, from history to literature and philology, and on to anthropology and sociology. The Farrar collection attempted to deal with educational modernisation in a systematic way, and its construction might be broken down as follows: Essays 1–3 dealt with the abstract issue of the ideals of liberal education and their solubility in modernity; Essays 4–5 offered criticisms of current teaching practices; Essays 6–8 looked at new curricular content associated with new or transformed disciplines and showed how they might be able to serve both the abstract ideal of general cultivation and the practical desire for material relevance. Finally, the concluding chapter, something of an outlier on the main sequence, offered a broader societal outlook for the proposed educational reform package.4

The contributors to Farrar’s volume formed a fairly homogenous group. Of the nine contributors, eight were actively involved in education,5 either in the ancient universities or at one of the major public schools, or both. They were predominantly Cambridge men, only one of them being associated with Oxford.6 Five were ‘Cambridge Apostles’,7 and two would go on to high-profile positions at the university: John Seeley would become regius professor of Modern History in 1869, and Henry Sidgwick professor of Moral Philosophy in 1883. But in 1867, when the Essays were published, the majority were young men, in their thirties, at the beginning of their careers. In contrast, the essays in Youmans’s collection were mainly the texts of addresses delivered by figures of such established reputation as Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Michael Faraday, Tyndall and William Whewell. Six of the eleven chapters had originally been delivered as part of a series on the theme of education and social class at the Royal Institution (hereafter RI) in 1854, and published by that body in 1855;8 two others had first been delivered as addresses elsewhere, in the early part of the 1860s.9 None of these authors was young; indeed, by the date of Youmans’s publication in 1867, three of them were dead.

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In some ways, Farrar seems an unlikely figure to have undertaken a project of the sort represented by the Essays. He had been ordained into the Anglican Church after graduating from Cambridge in 1854, and gained a teaching post at Harrow in 1855. He wrote two works of comparative philology in the early 1860s which were significant enough to earn him a Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS) on the recommendation of Charles Darwin, but the publication for which he had gained most general renown, and success, was his moralising tale for boys, Eric, or Little by Little (1858). The Essays did not figure prominently on his list of publications – they were not mentioned at all in the biography published by his son in 1905 two years after Farrar’s death – and thereafter he devoted his attention to writings on sacred subjects, and a few more improving tales for youthful readers.

In a very brief preface to the Essays, Farrar presented the English conception of a ‘liberal education’ as an organic principle flowing up from the life of the nation, as opposed to a rational principle imposed from above by administrators or ideologues: ‘Liberal Education in England is not controlled by the Government, nor is it entirely in the hands of tutors and schoolmasters; it is an institution of national growth, and it will expand and improve only with the expansion and improvement of our national ideas of what education ought to be’ (Farrar, 1867, p. v). Hence the debate, as Farrar saw it, was not a technical one centred on curriculum, but a philosophical one centred on educational values. The core issue was the content of modern (general) culture; if educationists could reach a shared understanding of this new organic national reality, the detail of curricular choices would flow from it unproblematically.

Youmans’s collection displayed a similar concern for the relationship between modern culture and reformed educational practice. However, being an anthology of existing essays on education by prominent men of science, the book could not really have a very clearly demarcated editorial identity. Youmans had brought these essays together in one place in order to mount a defence of a wide range of increasingly distinct scientific disciplines which he sought to present as offering, collectively and individually, a solid foundation for a characteristically modern educational programme. This construction necessarily implied a lesser capacity to develop an explicit educational philosophy of the sort attempted by Farrar’s group. Nevertheless, Youmans’s preface, almost as brief as Farrar’s, did offer a glimpse of an educational programme:

The importance of giving a larger space to scientific studies in our educational courses is being, year by year, more felt and acknowledged. Deeper than questions of coal-supply or political reform is the question – What kind of culture shall the growing mind of the nation have? A conviction of this truth has led many of our most eminent thinkers to criticise the prevailing educational system, and to urge the claims of the various sciences to increasing consideration. [Youmans, 1867, p. v]

The logic here is strikingly opposed to Farrar’s: where the humanist had seen the organic life of the nation feeding an equally organic culture, Youmans treated ‘culture’ as resulting from deliberate choices which would help determine the shape of the nation. His vision was more positive and more interventionist: he believed that a reform of education to foreground the sciences was not just a way of bringing education and culture into line with one another in a modern context, but actually a way of deliberately shaping culture and, therefore, the nation.

Youmans was an American writer and publisher of popular science who had no part in any academic establishment in the manner of Farrar’s circle. The ab initio logic of his programme was perhaps more likely to receive a friendly hearing in Reconstruction-period America than among the well-established cultural elites in England. No doubt for this very reason Youmans would produce an American edition of his book the following year (1868), featuring quite substantial additions in which his own personal programme was stated more explicitly. The title itself was modified to become The Culture Demanded by Modern Life, a formulation that underlined the sense that ‘culture’ was something that called for deliberate construction. It contained a lengthened preface and, more significantly, a long opening theoretical chapter on ‘Mental Discipline in Education’. Here, Youmans made a concerted effort to resituate ‘culture’, to wrest it away from the ‘metaphysical’ grasp of the humanists (Youmans, 1868, p. 3), recasting it in naturalistic terms that would no longer refer to merely human activities (i.e. literary culture) and move it towards implying something like a warranted knowledge of nature and nature’s processes. He accordingly castigated the existing curriculum as predicated upon ‘the principle of vicarious discipline’ (p. 20) which ‘fails to grasp the controlling ends of culture’ (p. 21). It is ‘vicarious’ because it seeks to discipline the mind indirectly, via human cultures, and fails to consult the true font of knowledge which is nature and nature’s processes. Modern cultivation, for Youmans, required an education that reversed the current prioritisation of culture over nature, and put in its place a curriculum in which ‘science [is] made the basis of culture’ (p. 24). This sort of reform would offer practical benefits on all fronts – economic, political and social – but only a nation like the US disposed to embrace modernity both politically and epistemologically was likely to achieve it. In Europe, Youmans suggests at the end of his chapter, political elites were too scared of liberty, and intellectual elites too scared of science for such fundamental reform to be envisaged (pp. 55–56). It would be up to Americans, Youmans hoped, to show how curriculum reform was the lynchpin upon which all else turned: by resituating ‘culture’ as an emanation of nature, modernity might make itself capable of mastering knowledge and power together as a single united issue.

This was obviously a very different sort of attitude towards ‘culture’ from the general outlook that tended to be espoused by contributors to the Farrar collection. However, though there were necessarily variations in the detail, it is striking that none of Farrar’s authors was actively hostile to the claim of the sciences, or other emergent empiricising disciplines, to a place within a reformed liberal education curriculum. The second essay in the collection, ‘The Theory of Classical Education’, is the piece which does most work on formulating a general theoretical position on the status of ‘modern culture’ in a form that the book as a whole might be seen as championing. It was written by Henry Sidgwick, future professor of Moral Philosophy, who in 1867 was a mere twenty-nine years of age. For Sidgwick, science was not the same thing as culture, but the scientific disciplines, along with modern history and modern literature, were all important pathways to meaningful cultivation. The culture promoted by a reformed liberal education is that which is capable of drawing from all the modern disciplines, and of relating them to one another in an organic whole:

Physics and Chemistry are the most natural and efficacious way of teaching boys from some part of any of the invariable series of nature to infer and supply the rest; their place could not be adequately occupied by History and Literature, if ever so philosophically taught; as History and Literature are taught at present, the training is simply absent from the classical curriculum. […] We may admit that a knowledge of the processes and results of physical science does not by itself constitute culture: we may admit that an appreciative acquaintance with literature, a grasp of the method as well as the facts of history, is a more important element, and should be more prominent in thoughts of educators; and yet feel that culture, without the former element, is now shallow and incomplete. Physical science is now so bound up with all the interests of mankind, from the lowest and most material to the loftiest and most profound; it is so engrossing in its infinite detail, so exciting in its progress and promise, so fascinating in the varied beauty of its revelations, that it draws to itself an ever increasing amount of intellectual energy; so that the intellectual man who has been trained without it must feel at every turn his inability to comprehend thoroughly the present phase of the progress of humanity, and his limited sympathy with the thoughts and feelings, labours and aspirations, of his fellow-men. [Sidgwick, in Farrar, 1867, pp. 135–36, 139–40]

In this strikingly poetic paean to scientific culture, the sciences were not merely treated as adjuncts to culture deserving admission to the fold, but as having transformed the very meaning of ‘culture’ at its heart. The need for curricular reform thus arose organically, from the shift in the positioning of ‘culture’ in the conceptual landscape.

Like Youmans, then, Farrar’s authors wanted ‘modern culture’ to have an organically unified identity. What separated them from Youmans was only one consideration, though an important one: the directional dynamics of the organic processes involved in the constitution of ‘modern culture’. For Youmans, ‘nature’ was a prior or ideal entity, and ‘culture’ a human construct to be shaped around it; ‘culture’ was valid and useful to the extent that it resembled nature and rendered its workings readable to the humans that inhabited that culture. For Sidgwick, and the Farrar team generally, ‘culture’ retained its own priority; it did not and must not resemble anything else but was always its own value. Its contents must evolve to reflect renewed human knowledge and experience, but the inherently independent status of the abstraction, ‘culture’, as an immaterial value, must be defended at all costs. To put it more synthetically, Youmans put ‘nature’ at the heart of everything and mechanistically derived the shape of ‘culture’ from the alleged shape of nature as understood by science; Farrar’s authors put ‘culture’ at the heart of everything and sought to absorb the sciences, and other modern disciplines, into its orbit. The former attempted to systematise culture; the latter to moralise the sciences. The debate at the heart of modernity was not a mere turf war between ‘the sciences’ and ‘the humanities’; it was a philosophically significant debate about how a unified sense of knowledge, and therefore of identity, might be maintained in the face of accelerating disciplinary diversification and fragmentation.

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Both essay collections contained some interesting ‘outliers’ that might seem to cloud, or at least complicate, their core messages as outlined above. Among the essays selected by Youmans, for example, few were as radical as he on the desire to derive ‘culture’ wholly from ‘science’. Spencer was perhaps the only figure among them who would have shared a similar line. Others were ready to adopt a more conciliatory attitude which conveniently separated out the material matters of ‘the sciences’ from cultural and spiritual affairs, and leaving these latter domains to their respective orders of specialists so long as they in turn left the material order of things to the scientists. We might take as an example of this sort of attitude the essay contributed by John Tyndall, ‘On the Importance of the Study of Physics’, the first essay in the book (though after Youmans’s introductory essay in the US edition), relating to the most fundamental of the sciences, physics.

Tyndall was an emergent figure in 1854 when this text was delivered as a lecture at the RI, but already well established as a physicist by the time it was reprinted by Youmans; and even better established as a teacher and populariser. He had been a school teacher at the beginning of his career, and would become a regular lecturer at the RI and elsewhere. He was named president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1874 and notoriously used his address at the group’s annual meeting that year to make a strong claim for the rights of ‘science’ to exercise exclusive and unhindered authority over the domains of material phenomena; in other words, asserting a radical differentiation between material matters and spiritual affairs, and the need for distinct institutions and forms of expertise to deal with each.

It may therefore come as a surprise to find that in his 1854 RI lecture, reprised by Youmans in 1867, Tyndall had taken an attitude towards the teaching of science that seemed to place it at the heart of ‘culture’, and not at all as the sort of knowledge that that could or should be separated from it. The very title of his lecture, the subject of a misunderstanding with the RI, was symptomatic. The RI had a default title format for the whole series of lectures, which was: ‘On the Importance of [x discipline] as a Branch of Education for All Classes’; but for his own lecture Tyndall had changed ‘a branch of education’ to ‘a means of education’, and was annoyed that the RI had ignored the modification and persisted in using their own formulation. He explained at the outset – under the RI title! – that his formulation was preferable because it maintained the idea of a unitary educational ideal, with physics being just one of many possible pathways towards educated cultivation. He did not want that sense of culture to be fragmented into different varieties, associated with different disciplinary specialisations. He recognised that some might object that by taking this stance, ‘I degrade physics into an instrument of culture’, but unconcernedly continued: ‘… and I mean to do so, to a large extent’ (Tyndall, in Youmans, 1867, p. 4).

Much of Tyndall’s lecture was devoted to practical pedagogy, based on his personal experience as a school teacher. For example, he listed ‘naïve questions’ asked by his pupils, then showed how those questions gave the enlightened pedagogue a natural pathway into an almost infinite variety of subjects and themes. Carried out this way, scientific instruction should renew the whole being; giving modern life new sense without cutting it off from the idea of a spiritual whole underlying the appearances of things. The recommended attitude might be described as a sort of secular spirituality, which Tyndall was entirely willing to describe in quasi-religious terms:

Thus the boy finds the simple and homely fact which addressed his senses to be the outcome and flower of the deepest laws. The fact becomes, in a measure, sanctified as an object of thought, and invested for him with a beauty evermore. He thus learns that things which, at first sight, seem to stand isolated and without apparent brotherhood in Nature are united by their causes, and finds the detection of these analogies a source of perpetual delight. [p. 15]

Sidgwick, and most of the contributors to Farrar’s volume, would surely have agreed. If science were taught this way, it would pose no serious threat to their conception of ‘liberal education’. This sort of science kept ‘culture’ in a superior position, as the unitary goal of all education; with no single discipline or groups of disciplines allowed to claim exclusive property of the sort of knowledge that counted.

Naturally, some of the other authors featured in the Youmans’s collection might have demurred from this rather pious liberal vision of gloriously progressive knowledge prospering under the benign supervision of a repurposed providence, now acting as general guardian for capital-C Culture. Herbert Spencer, for example, had little time for such sentimentality: for him, modern culture was to be defined ‘scientifically’, and only disciplines demonstrably capable of producing materially reliable knowledge had a legitimate place in a modern curriculum. Youmans, whose attitude we outlined above, had clearly been influenced by the Spencerian outlook.

If Tyndall was something of an outlier in Youmans’s collection for his willingness to envisage an overarching liberal ideal that might continue to hold a reformed modern curriculum together, an analogous outlying position pointing the opposite direction can also be found among the authors in the Farrar collection. For example, John Seeley, whose contribution, entitled ‘Liberal Education in Universities’, was the work of a young man (aged thirty-three) whose main preoccupation at an early stage in his career was the establishment of his own subject – modern history – as a degree subject in the ancient universities. In other words, his pragmatic position was more like that of the scientists collected in Youmans’s volume, for whom the main concern was to seek institutional recognition for their disciplines by absorption into the curriculum. Seeley would indeed be a significant actor in this process since he would be appointed regius professor of Modern History in 1869 (shortly after the publication of Farrar’s Essays), in which position he was instrumental in extricating the teaching of history from the teaching of moral philosophy at Cambridge, and in establishing the Modern History Tripos shortly thereafter.10

So Seeley’s main preoccupation was not in fact with defending the liberal ideal of education as such, as had been the case for the majority of his colleagues in the Farrar collection, and indeed for some of those featured in the Youmans’s volume. On the contrary, Seeley’s cause was disciplinary specialisation, a theme which naturally pulled in the opposite direction. It was by defending the specificity of disciplines – which called for particular technical trainings – that Seeley and others like him could best hope to assert the independence of ‘modern history’ as a discipline, and to differentiate it from established disciplines such as classics or moral philosophy, within whose orbits it had hitherto moved in a limited way. In his presentation, therefore, the goal of ‘liberal education’ was couched not in the terms of an essentially moral defence of a vision of culture, as we saw in Sidgwick’s essay as well as Tyndall’s, but in more political and indeed militaristic terms, channelling cultural considerations through the politics of nationhood and imperial domination:

If in the present century we have fallen somewhat behind, and instead of overrunning the continent with our ideas, as in the days of Locke, Newton, and Bentley, have suffered in our own island the invasion of French and German philosophies, it is assuredly from no inherent weakness. We must seek for other causes, and among them we shall find this, that in the warfare of thought we have hoped to resist regular troops with volunteers. [Seeley, in Farrar, 1867, p. 178]

In this reading, the ‘culture’ defended by liberal education was less a common moral heritage to be preserved and more a war of epistemological conquest to be waged. Britain’s standing as cultural imperator on the global stage would depend largely upon the technical training of its storm troopers.

*

As we remarked at the outset, this somewhat confidential discussion of curricular reform was occurring against the backdrop of other higher-profile, more urgent and more divisive political debates: notably those prompted by the agitations of mass public meetings organised by the Reform League in central London in the summer of 1866, and the beginning of the proceedings against former governor Eyre of Jamaica at just the same time. Edward Eyre had left Kingston the hero of the Jamaican plantocracy and arrived in England in August 1866 to find himself at the heart of a vast public polemic that polarised opinion to an extent not dissimilar to the later Dreyfus Affair in France. Interestingly, opinion did not divide along straightforwardly partisan lines, but primarily concerned specifically liberal opinion. The Eyre Affair put out on public display the divisions that could no longer be kept hidden away under the veil of abstract Whiggish progressivism. Here was a case that forced liberal opinion to decide on the practical applicability of the theory. The case was simply stated: as subjects of British authority, did the freed slaves of Jamaica enjoy the same liberties as Englishmen? If so, Eyre was clearly guilty of abuse of authority. If not, then why not? What sort of relationship existed between the Crown and these subjects if not that which existed with its British subjects? Here the defenders of Eyre had to fall back on values as opposed to principles. What needed defending, it turned out, was the standing of the nation, and the empire, in the world. For sure, that empire was meant in liberal opinion to stand for the rule of law, but when push came to shove, it was ‘rule’ that mattered more than ‘law’. Such voices focused not on the principles of the empire but on the character of its defenders.

First to organise themselves were Eyre’s accusers, who formed the Jamaica Committee (hereafter JC) in December 1865. Its leading figures were prominent liberal intellectuals such as John Stuart Mill, Thomas Henry Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Thomas Hill Green; but also the radical liberal politicians John Bright and Edmond Beales, both of whom were equally involved with the activities of the Reform League, providing that mass movement with its respectable public face. The JC argued that the leaders of the rebellion had been executed without fair trial, which opened Eyre to charges of murder. After protracted negotiations these charges failed, but a civil case was heard against Eyre in 1870 for false imprisonment. He was acquitted, had his costs paid by the Crown, and retired in 1874 on a full pension. Meanwhile the Eyre Defence Committee (hereafter EDC) had been set up in September 1866 in response to the JC’s attempts to prosecute. This group was initially spearheaded by Thomas Carlyle though he increasingly withdrew from this role. Other prominent figures included one noted aristocrat, the former Tory MP and commander of the Light Brigade in the Crimean, Lord Cardigan, but their main body was constituted of an impressive array of liberal-tending men of letters including John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, Charles Dickens and Alfred Tennyson. Only one man of science joined them, but the solidity of his reputation made up for his isolation. This was John Tyndall, who played an increasingly prominent role after Carlyle’s withdrawal, and who found himself somewhat alienated from his scientific friends and colleagues, notably Huxley, as a result. The EDC concentrated on raising money to help Eyre fight the cases the JC was trying to bring against him, and was successful in this. They were scandalised to see Eyre vilified by the JC, arguing that he and his men had simply done their duty in defending the integrity of the Jamaican colony, and believed he should be held up as a model of courage and honour, not treated as a common criminal.

So where the JC concentrated on legalistic arguments foregrounding the principle that the rule of law should apply to the former slave population of Jamaica just as much as to any other of the Crown’s subjects, the EDC preferred to appeal to vaguer moral precepts of honour and Englishness. Strikingly, this version of Englishness was a restrictive or limited one, designed to limit access to privilege. English liberties were of universal value for as long as the narrative suited English national interests in breaking into new territories; but should the colonised dare invoke those principles in the name of a divergent interest, they would quickly find themselves excluded from the charmed circle. When JC advocates pressed the pragmatic political point that to tolerate Eyre’s actions in Jamaica would open the gates to similar abuses in England, the EDC was obliged to be more specific about the principles that underpinned their instinctive defence of English honour. Faced with this challenge, they willingly spelled out their view that Eyre’s actions were honourable in Jamaica, but would have been criminal in England. This anomaly, intolerable to the JC group, seemed no more than a banal statement of commonsense reality to the stalwarts of the EDC: obviously no one really thought that these fine principles applied to everyone indiscriminately! That would be an unmanageable absurdity. As Tyndall himself put it in one of his submissions to a hearing: ‘Who dreams of making Jamaica a precedent for England? Certainly not the defenders of Mr Eyre. […] We do not hold an Englishman and a Jamaica Negro to be convertible terms, nor do we think that the cause of human liberty will be promoted by any attempt to make them so’ (quoted in Semmel, 1969, p. 132).

The point could hardly be more clearly made: ‘liberty’ as an abstract ideal simply does not apply to black former slaves under British authority. And this from a man who, as an educator, passionately defended the value of an education in the sciences as a force for the liberation of potential and the equalisation of opportunity, for all social classes. An education in the sciences would naturalise culture, and therefore level the playing field; but some people, it seems, were not to be allowed anywhere near the playing field.

To make sense of this apparent anomaly, it is helpful to turn to the works of Charles Kingsley, one of Tyndall’s more prominent colleagues in the EDC. Unlike Tyndall, Kingsley was a man of letters rather than a scientist, though he had taken an active interest in contemporary scientific debates, notably backing Darwin on the theme of evolutionary change, and had produced a variety of stories and lectures designed to encourage children and the working classes to observe nature in a scientific spirit. The discipline required of an inquiring frame of mind was, to him and many other similarly progressive liberals, more constitutive of genuine liberty than the winning of unearned political rights such as the electoral franchise.

For example, in the introductory lecture of Town Geology (1872) – a series delivered to working men in Chester seeking to demonstrate the compatibility of a working urban lifestyle and the habit of scientific observation – Kingsley had explicitly connected scientific education with the promotion of the political ideals of liberty, equality and brotherhood (Kingsley, 1872, pp. xxvi–xxxviii), and extolled the scientifically literate working man as ‘the aristocracy of the future’ (p. xlii). Where all former civilisations had been subject to decay because based upon cultures of superstitious belief, the coming civilisation might endure if its common citizens were well endowed with the scientific attitude. The familiar cycle of ‘anarchy, decay and social death’ would be a permanent fixture if power remained in the hands of ‘aristocracies of mere birth’ or of ‘aristocracies of genius, which are really aristocracies of the noisiest’ and therefore ‘but too likely to give place to the worst of all aristocracies, the aristocracy of mere “order”, which means organised force and military despotism’ (p. xliii). In the place of any of these fake aristocracies, Kingsley set his hope for the future on the presence of ‘a sufficient number of wise men to form a true working aristocracy, an aristocracy of sound and rational science’, to act ‘in the nation, in the society, as the salt of the land, to keep it all from rotting’ (pp. xliii–xliv). In other words, Kingsley’s vision was one that lionised the common man once he had been suitably moralised by the acquisition of natural knowledge. His heroic mastery of nature, and of himself, would finally make possible a life of liberty, equality and fraternity. Only when he briefly attempted to sketch out how this future was to take shape did it slip out that the vision did not apply to the whole of humanity, but was to be limited to ‘our’ nation, or to ‘our’ race:

I say it deliberately as a student of society and of history. Power will pass more and more, if all goes healthily and well, into the hands of scientific men; into the hands of those who have made due use of that great heirloom which the philosophers of the seventeenth century left for the use of future generations, and especially of the Teutonic race. [p. xlii]

This exclusion occurs in passing, almost an afterthought; it is clearly assumed to be self-evident. After all, any aristocracy – even the most enlightened – by definition needs a servile mass to lead, guide and reform.

In the context of the Eyre Affair, Kingsley’s Teutonism came out into full view, as did some related form of identitarian bias for all the other liberal worthies that constituted the bulk of the EDC. Their potentially dangerous political liberalism was thus safely hedged about with exclusionary moral guarantees: the liberty they claimed to promote was safe because it needed only apply implicitly to an amorphous ‘us’ whose boundaries could shift across national and racial categories to suit the needs of the moment. Aggressive Fenians or rebellious Jamaicans could be excluded at will; and the violently repressive acts of an Eyre against such groups dressed up as part of the struggle for civilisation, and, indeed, for (English) liberty.

As we have noted, the Eyre controversy brought these undercurrents to the surface. As a backer of Darwin and an active actor in science education, Kingsley had a fairly close relationship with figures such as Huxley situated right at the heart of the emergent scientific establishment. At the time of the Eyre Affair, however, whatever complicity they shared seemed to evaporate. Suddenly finding themselves in opposite camps in this highly publicised controversy, it became clear that a deep division underlay the surface affinities:

In point of fact, men take sides on [the Eyre] question, not so much by looking at the mere facts of the case but rather as their deepest political convictions lead them. And the great use of the prosecution and one of my reasons for joining it, is that it will help a great many people find out what their profoundest political beliefs are. The hero-worshippers who believe that the world is governed by its great men, who are to lead the little ones, justly if they can; but if not, unjustly drive or kick them the right way, will sympathise with Mr. Eyre. The other set (to which I belong), who look upon hero-worship as no better than any other idolatry, and upon the attitudes of mind of the hero-worshippers as essentially immoral; who think it better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains; who look upon the observance of inflexible justice as between man and man as of far greater importance than even the preservation of social order, will believe that Mr. Eyre has committed one of the greatest crimes of which a person in authority can be guilty, and will strain every muscle to obtain a declaration that the belief is in accordance with the law of England. [Huxley to Kingsley, November 1866, quoted in Semmel, 1969, pp. 129–130]

So for Huxley at any rate, this was no anecdotal blip in their relations, but a concrete demonstration that the moral heroism which Kingsley placed at the heart of his reformist programme so as to spiritualise his version of science was actually an open door to new kinds of abuse of new kinds of authority: Kingsley’s morally heroic version of scientific modernity was effectively an abusive seizure of power. It was undertaken in the name of no identifiable principle, but only on the intimate conviction that he and people like him deserved that power.

Conclusion

All English liberals trumpeted the ideal of individual liberty; most of them proudly invoked it as the foundation of national identity; and some as the principle justifying that nation’s imperial outreach. But whether this claim was made in favour of the rights of subject peoples or merely in justification of English authority was an ambiguity that was often allowed to pass unnoticed. The Eyre controversy called out the hypocrisy, and brought to the surface the habitually veiled distinction between what we might call ‘principled liberals’ and ‘value-led liberals’. That is, on the one hand, those who took the theory of ‘English liberties’ seriously enough to treat it as a legal principle; and, on the other hand, those who were ready to fudge that principle in the name of some higher moral value intended to peg national identity to a transcendent civilisational ideal – and so to make it the instrument of class domination and/or imperial expansionism.

Although the themes we have examined here – curricular reform, electoral reform, colonial administration – seem to belong in radically different domains likely to respond to different sorts of factors or constraints, yet these formal differences recede in significance when we apply the filters that permit us to perceive the hidden patterns and tensions underpinning the mainstream liberal values of the period.

For example, it might initially seem surprising to find that men such as Kingsley or Ruskin who habitually invoked humanity against systematicity in defence of the marginalised were Eyre’s most vocal defenders, or conversely that the systemisers such as Mill or Huxley were those most apt to insist upon the rights of the Jamaicans Eyre had summarily executed.

Similarly, we may be initially surprised to find that the debate around curricular reform does not break down as neatly as we might have anticipated, with the ‘scientists’ favouring increased disciplinary specialisation and the ‘humanists’ defending the ideals of general culture. Although these positions may form structuring poles, there are nevertheless a variety of combinations that inhabit the space between. Thus, we saw Tyndall the physicist go out of his way to argue that scientific education might serve the existing ideal of general liberal cultivation rather than break it down into pieces; while Seeley the historian took just the opposite tack as part of his campaign to institute ‘modern history’ as an independent academic discipline at Cambridge University. In addition, Tyndall’s status as the only renowned man of science willing to take on a public role in the EDC might look like a further eccentricity needing to be explained away.

But these apparent oddities diminish if we can distance ourselves from the habitual categorisations for the structuring of knowledge, belief, and ideology. If we try to categorise these thinkers along these bipolar axes, as either scientists or literary men, as either liberal or conservative, as either imperialists or egalitarians, we will inevitably be faced by numerous apparent anomalies and paradoxical cases. The differentiation we have offered instead in this chapter, between principled and value-led versions of liberalism, certainly cannot hope to cover all possible positions; but it does perhaps have the advantage of directing our attention towards the conceptual heart of the period, and of drawing out of it a more useful way of identifying genuinely constitutive issues. In particular it helps us see through the hypocrisy of much liberal discourse, often exceptionally skilled at presenting all sorts of value-laden personal preferences as a reliable moral lodestar which modern humanity must learn to rely upon if it is to make sense of societies destructured by democratisation, and if it is not to lose its way in the ever-growing labyrinths of increasingly specialised knowledge.