A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster by Wendy Moffat Page A
Authors: Wendy Moffat
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College on Great Ormond Street. In this he joined George Trevelyan, HOM, and other idealistic young Cambridge men. He also applied for a position as a lecturer for a university extension service in regional towns near London. He proposed a syllabus on the history of the Italian city-states. It was a great relief to him to have something to do, and especially to be in the company of robust, attractive male students. Morgan wrote to Dent that he thought he wasn’t a very effective teacher. “I am afraid I enjoy it more than they do.”
The Working Men’s College was the fruit of Christian socialist idealism. It had been founded forty years before by a man called F. D. Maurice to provide a university-style education for men of the working classes. There were already mechanics’ institutes devoted to vocational training, but F. D. Maurice’s liberal imagination was not satisfied. Did workingmen not yearn for knowledge for its own sake? Did they not deserve the human fellowship of university life? So the course of the Working Men’s College was set to self-consciously mirror the most advanced curricula of the day: systematic study of controversial political subjects, great literature, and art. The founders’ ideals emphasized “rational enjoyment and hard work mingled with education” and encouraged “the formation of friendships” between faculty and students. The opportunities for friendship centered on manly pursuits—boxing and other sports. For the less hearty there was a library.
Though the intended clientele were laborers, most of the students who attended the college in fact came from a rung up the social ladder. These were clerks and lower-level professionals—men like Leonard Bast in
Howards End
, or indeed like Hugh Meredith’s father, men who stood on their feet for twelve hours a day, filing cards in the new modern systems of cross-ledgers and indexing, or scratching out copies of business documents with inky fingers. Manual laborers, the reformers discovered, “demanded more practical subjects.” No reading of Ruskin’s “Stones of Venice” for them. They wanted to
get on
in the world.
There is very little record of Morgan’s time teaching at the college. It was essentially a private pleasure. But he did succeed at making one lifelong close friend. One of his students was a brilliant young man who worked as aclerk in a Crosse and Blackwell pickle factory. E. K. Bennett, known as Francis, was quiet, gentle, and homosexual. Despite his tendency to denigrate himself, Bennett’s career was a remarkable success story: he rapidly progressed from student to teacher at the Working Men’s College, and after George Trevelyan supplied money for a scholarship, he went on to a brilliant career at Cambridge, as a Fellow of Caius College in modern German literature. Bennett was one of a very few pioneering working-class dons.
So in the dank November of 1902, Morgan traveled back and forth across Russell Square, between the bustle of the male world of the Working Men’s College and the Kingsley Hotel, where, like Jane Austen at her writing table, he had almost no time to write and almost no privacy. He was picking his way along on a new Italian novel. A heroine named Lucy, a wide-eyed tourist, was his surrogate. He planned to dedicate the novel to HOM.
Meredith was living in Bloomsbury to retool—to begin an academic career as an economic historian, which would lead him first to Manchester and finally to Queen’s College, Belfast. He remained a romantic, penning “week-day poems” from the point of view of working-class Londoners. Hugh was indecisive, intensely self-critical, and prone to appreciate things just after they had gone out of reach. Perhaps inadvertently, perhaps because of his mixture of darkness and adamantine wit, he continued to exert a magnetic, quasi-sexual attraction on a whole circle of friends long after he left King’s. A kind of soap opera of alienated affection swirled around
The Working Men’s College was the fruit of Christian socialist idealism. It had been founded forty years before by a man called F. D. Maurice to provide a university-style education for men of the working classes. There were already mechanics’ institutes devoted to vocational training, but F. D. Maurice’s liberal imagination was not satisfied. Did workingmen not yearn for knowledge for its own sake? Did they not deserve the human fellowship of university life? So the course of the Working Men’s College was set to self-consciously mirror the most advanced curricula of the day: systematic study of controversial political subjects, great literature, and art. The founders’ ideals emphasized “rational enjoyment and hard work mingled with education” and encouraged “the formation of friendships” between faculty and students. The opportunities for friendship centered on manly pursuits—boxing and other sports. For the less hearty there was a library.
Though the intended clientele were laborers, most of the students who attended the college in fact came from a rung up the social ladder. These were clerks and lower-level professionals—men like Leonard Bast in
Howards End
, or indeed like Hugh Meredith’s father, men who stood on their feet for twelve hours a day, filing cards in the new modern systems of cross-ledgers and indexing, or scratching out copies of business documents with inky fingers. Manual laborers, the reformers discovered, “demanded more practical subjects.” No reading of Ruskin’s “Stones of Venice” for them. They wanted to
get on
in the world.
There is very little record of Morgan’s time teaching at the college. It was essentially a private pleasure. But he did succeed at making one lifelong close friend. One of his students was a brilliant young man who worked as aclerk in a Crosse and Blackwell pickle factory. E. K. Bennett, known as Francis, was quiet, gentle, and homosexual. Despite his tendency to denigrate himself, Bennett’s career was a remarkable success story: he rapidly progressed from student to teacher at the Working Men’s College, and after George Trevelyan supplied money for a scholarship, he went on to a brilliant career at Cambridge, as a Fellow of Caius College in modern German literature. Bennett was one of a very few pioneering working-class dons.
So in the dank November of 1902, Morgan traveled back and forth across Russell Square, between the bustle of the male world of the Working Men’s College and the Kingsley Hotel, where, like Jane Austen at her writing table, he had almost no time to write and almost no privacy. He was picking his way along on a new Italian novel. A heroine named Lucy, a wide-eyed tourist, was his surrogate. He planned to dedicate the novel to HOM.
Meredith was living in Bloomsbury to retool—to begin an academic career as an economic historian, which would lead him first to Manchester and finally to Queen’s College, Belfast. He remained a romantic, penning “week-day poems” from the point of view of working-class Londoners. Hugh was indecisive, intensely self-critical, and prone to appreciate things just after they had gone out of reach. Perhaps inadvertently, perhaps because of his mixture of darkness and adamantine wit, he continued to exert a magnetic, quasi-sexual attraction on a whole circle of friends long after he left King’s. A kind of soap opera of alienated affection swirled around
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