This provides a historical introduction to Part I of the book, focusing on Manchester as the quintessential city of industrial modernity, and how its economic and cultural elites, and its religious diversity, shaped the kinds of higher education institutions that were formed in the nineteenth century.
In 1891 Sheridan Delépine became the University’s first Professor of Pathology and Morbid Anatomy. He developed his department's work to become a national leader in applying the new bacteriology to public health, primarily through training medical officers of health and providing diagnostic and testing services for local authorities across the Manchester region. In a decade, his enterprise had expanded to support 60 councils. As well as routine work, his laboratory investigated specific issues, notably arsenic in beer, summer diarrhoea, anthrax, tubercular milk, disinfection and water filtration. The novel model of university-municipal cooperation was mutually beneficial. It brought income to the University and a favourable regional profile.
This provides a historical introduction to Part 2 of the book, tracing how the fortunes of the city of Manchester interacted with those of its universities. In the first half of the twentieth century Manchester remained economically and culturally vibrant and the idea of the civic university thrived. It was in the era of the city’s economic decline after 1945 that the sense of the distinctive mission of civic universities was eroded.
Dorothy Emmet (1904–2000) came to Manchester as a lecturer in philosophy just before the outbreak of the Second World War. She wrote her methodological treatise, The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking (1945), while fire-watching on the University rooftops. Emmet’s philosophy envisages ‘the world as a theatre of activities’. Human beings are both personas (role-players) and persons (creative individuals), and their activity within an unfolding administrative and institutional process can variously ‘form, dissolve, re-form, and sometimes produce a new kind with capabilities for new kinds of activity’. This chapter explores the way in which Emmet’s own creative (and quietly anarchistic) philosophical activity found expression at Manchester among a group of brilliant social scientists and philosophers (including Max Gluckman, Michael Polanyi, W. J. M. Mackenzie and Alistair MacIntyre). Her career shows how much is gained when a creative individual with imagination and intelligence finds herself in the right institutional setting.
Enriqueta Rylands (1843–1908), widow of the cotton magnate John Rylands, was an independent woman who founded Manchester’s John Rylands Library as an independent institution. This chapter demonstrates that the library, its collections, its architecture and its governance were very much the product of her vision, which was rooted in her allegiance to a non-denominational Protestant nonconformity. Theology, and biblical scholarship in particular, was central to her conception of the library, and she was also instrumental in the creation of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Manchester in 1904, notably by endowing the first two non-denominational chairs of theology in a British university.
Gilbert Gadoffre’s life encompassed a wartime role as Resistance hero and his postwar reinvention as a champion of civilised transnational intellectual exchange at the Institut Collégial Européen, which he founded in 1947. But his most enduring institutional connection, building on a youthful anglophilia, was with the University of Manchester, as lecturer (1938–40), senior lecturer (1954–63) and professor (1966–78). The contribution will focus on his ideas about the dissemination of culture in diverse institutional contexts – the French Resistance, the Institut Collégial, and Manchester – and consider the validity of his conviction that the humanism articulated in France during the reign of François I (1494–1547) should be the model for a modern, universal humanism.
Henry Enfield Roscoe was Professor of Chemistry at Owens College between 1857 and 1886, a period of nearly thirty years and a crucial one in the annals of the college. He not only built up the almost moribund Chemistry Department into one of the most important in the country, but he also played a crucial role in the move of the college to Oxford Road and the creation of Victoria University. He was also instrumental in bringing medicine into Owens College. Initially educated at UCL, Roscoe went to Heidelberg to study under the leading chemist Robert Bunsen and became one of his closest collaborators. Thereafter he became an advocate for the German model of higher education. Manchester at this time had a notable German community, the largest group of foreigners in the city, and they made a major contribution to the development of the British chemical industry and the German synthetic dye industry, as well as to Marxism. Roscoe brought German chemists to Owens (notably Carl Schorlemmer, a close comrade of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the SPD and the First International) and sent Owens students to be educated in Germany. This chapter explores the links between Roscoe, Owens College, Manchester and Germany and their impact on the development of the University of Manchester.
Esther Roper, a suffragist and one of the early cohorts of women graduates from Owens College, helped to set up the Manchester University Settlement in Ancoats, and a year later was joined in her work there by Eva Gore-Booth, the sister of the future Countess Markiewicz. This chapter examines the nature of their work together, how it developed in line with their work on suffrage, including their campaign against Winston Churchill's re-election in 1908, and how their work provides a new context for how we read Gore-Booth's recently republished poems, especially in her three 'Manchester' books, Unseen Kings (1904), The Egyptian Pillar (1907) and The Agate Lamp (1912).
The Introduction discusses the relationship of the book to the University of Manchester’s bicentenary. It explains the relationship of the two institutions founded in 1824 – the Mechanics’ Institution and the Pine Street School of Medicine – to the wider civic culture as well as to the subsequent development of higher education in nineteenth-century Manchester. It sets out the book’s rationale: providing a new kind of university history focusing on how ideas are generated in a particular place.
James Bryce was one of the foremost academic intellectuals of his time, and a notable polymath, eminent as historian, jurist, Americanist, humanitarian, mountaineer, cabinet minister, diplomat and much else. His Manchester connections are forgotten. Yet his connections with Owens College were deep (he drafted its first constitution in 1869) and enduring (he was for many years a governor, and fifty years later he opened the Arts Building). This chapter uses Bryce’s career at Owens (lecturer 1867–70; Professor of Jurisprudence 1870–75) to uncover the significance of the new kind of institution Owens became in the wake of the ‘extension’ of the college in 1870: one with a ‘public’ form of governance which tied it much more firmly to its civic mission. It explores the connections between the reconstitution of the college and heated political contests in Manchester and beyond over the control of educational endowments, and nationally over the abolition of religious tests.