Literature and Theatre
Manchester’s Mechanics’ Institution, established in 1824, has during the past two hundred years been co-opted into narratives increasingly remote from the essence of its foundations. A substantial body of literature has evaluated the Mechanics’ Institution with a focus on ‘social control’, and has routinely privileged the history of ‘science’, narrowly conceived. Such histories have tended to conclude the Mechanics’ Institution ‘failed’. Detailed archival study, focused on the first ten years of the Mechanics’ Institution’s existence, tells a different story. This article places the foundation and early years of this institution within the story of Manchester and the broader history of working-class education. It explores some of the tensions and concerns underpinning its establishment, in particular the impact of the Peterloo Massacre, on Manchester’s Liberal nonconformist leadership. It then traces a rapid movement from fear and distrust between different elements of Manchester’s industrial society towards an environment where deeper levels of mutual support and understanding became possible.
The University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) was created for the advancement of technical education in post-war Britain. Born of an existing technical college, fondly known as ‘the Tech’, UMIST represented optimism and Manchester’s prominent position in the ‘white heat’ epoch. Historians have recognised the political and personal role of the first principal, Vivian Bowden, in the expansion of UMIST in Manchester’s metropolitan and intellectual landscapes. Alongside colleagues and councillors, Bowden selectively harnessed Manchester’s scientific reputation and industrial heritage to forge the future. The purpose of this article is to contextualise this and understand how historical narratives and acts of commemoration aided the rapid expansion of UMIST in Manchester’s educational and civic realms. Considering the relationship of key actors with concepts of the past, present and future of technology underlines the significance of attitudes towards ‘the Tech’ in this process.
This article explores some overlooked aspects of the University of Manchester’s efforts in the 1930s to support Lancashire’s industry and commerce. Two examples are considered: ‘realistic economic research’ conducted by the Economics Research Section into Lancashire’s post-war economic problems, and the reintroduction of Chinese studies aimed at supporting Lancashire cotton merchants. While the successes of both endeavours were limited, the article concludes by briefly considering the legacy of such efforts on the university’s research philosophy, particularly through the introduction of the Simon Fund in 1944.
This article explores in what ways and to what extent it is possible to talk about ‘higher learning’ and ‘higher education’ in Manchester before 1824, the date formally chosen by the University of Manchester to mark its foundation. It considers diverse sites and institutions, revealing a complex, interconnected web of knowledge spaces – dissenting academies, teaching hospitals, learned societies, independent libraries and individual initiatives – which complicate existing narratives of the development of higher education in the city that usually focus on the origins of the university. In the early nineteenth century, with Manchester rapidly becoming the ‘world’s first industrial city’, we see emerging at the same time a vibrant urban educational landscape, with no parallel in the British Isles at that time. 1 In contrast to England’s ancient universities which remained, for the most part, closed and private entities until the mid-nineteenth century, Manchester’s educational culture was self-consciously diffused, civic and participatory, strongly influenced by the city’s prominent dissenting communities. Excluded from Oxford and Cambridge, Manchester’s Unitarians, in particular, sought to shape the city’s educational culture according to the Enlightenment ideal of polite learning as a public endeavour. While civic participatory models have been foregrounded by historians of knowledge and ideas in recent years, this article considers, for the first time, how such models influenced the history of educational cultures in Manchester.
This article demonstrates that the ‘extension’ of Owens College, Manchester – the ancestor of the University of Manchester – in 1870–73 represents an important and misunderstood moment in the history of English civic universities. The new model of governance instituted by the extension movement subsequently became normative for the civic universities, and remained largely in place throughout the twentieth century. The reformers set out to devise a model of public accountability appropriate for a public institution as distinct from a private trust. The article centres on the relationship between James Bryce and the lay leaders of the extension movement, and explores the connections between the Owens College reform, the Taunton Commission’s inquiry into the endowed grammar schools, and contests over the control of three major educational foundations in Manchester (Chetham’s Hospital, Manchester Grammar School and Hulme’s Charity).
Following its charter of 1956, the Manchester Municipal College of Technology appointed a new principal, who oversaw the rapid expansion of the campus. The development of a suite of new buildings, on one of the city’s most polluted and derelict tracts, required cooperation between the College, the Victoria University of Manchester, the Manchester Corporation, and a host of central government ministries. This initiative was driven by the recognition that technology and technological education were vital tools in the retention of Britain’s global influence. Manchester was identified for the accelerated growth of higher technological education due to its history of engineering, manufacturing and the development of commercial computing. Founded on archival sources, this article explores the complex relationships between statecraft, Whitehall policy, municipal governance and space. Using the manifestation of urban planning and architecture, it argues that the ‘Warfare State’ had influence beyond overt military programmes, which informed certain civic and municipal local enterprise with objectives other than rearmament, such as education, employment and economic recovery.
The Coda argues that like the first three Romantic-period novels covered in Injured Minds, Wide Sargasso Sea reimagines the love-mad maid to expose the forms of patriarchal control and abuse that inflict psychological damage on women. Failed male guardianship, unjust marriage laws, and libertine male behaviour all work together in Wide Sargasso Sea to drive a sympathetic young heroine to madness while the male perpetrator hides behind a flimsy screen of medical science. While on the surface the heroine, Antoinette, may look like a love-mad maid, she does not lose her mind because she loses her man. Rather, she is driven mad by her husband’s purposeful actions and by his determination that she is mad, which compounds the psychological damage she has already suffered from a traumatic past that includes her mother’s own male-inflicted injuries. Like the feminist authors of the early Romantic period, Rhys gives the mad woman both a backstory and a subjectivity to which the reader has access. This backstory, which combines the inner monologues of both Antoinette’s husband (an unnamed Mr Rochester) and the woman he calls ‘Bertha,’ inculpates not only the husband himself, but also the very avenues of patriarchal control identified and exposed by Rhys’s predecessors over a century and a half before. Abusive male power replaces lost love as the cause of ‘Bertha’s’ mental affliction in this classic revision of the classic literary incarnation of female madness.
Chapter three focuses on an admirable heroine who, like Fenwick’s Sibella, is psychologically destroyed by guardianship, libertinage, and Rousseauvian educational ideas. In Hays’ hands, the guardian is enlightened and well-meaning, not retrograde and tyrannical; nonetheless, he injures the heroine, Mary Raymond, by following Rousseauvian ideas about isolating children to preserve them from social contamination. The chapter examines Mary’s battles with melancholia as she struggles to recover from her privileged lover’s abandonment and her sexual assault by a powerful man and attempts to avoid her mother’s fate as a fallen woman. Through Mary’s story, Hays makes the point that women’s mental disease comes directly from their disadvantaged position in relation to men, and most particularly from libertinage in its most destructive form—as a social practice that controls women through sexual assault. In contrast to both Wrongs of Woman and Secresy, Victim of Prejudice never considers the role of sentimental literature or the romantic imagination in women’s plight, which makes the line of causality from men’s actions to women’s victimization more direct and the novel more didactic. Although it focuses much more than the other two novels on just one avenue of male control, Victim concludes, like Secresy, with the tragic death of its heroine from mental illness and with the failure of female friendship to provide shelter from male abuse. And like Secresy, Victim ends by suggesting that the only salvation for women is to write tragic novels that might prompt men to reform their ways.
This short coda reflects on Richard Field’s current condition and on the trial of new drugs which promise to slow the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. Discussing the role that art plays in the portrayal of this disease, the Epilogue discusses a cluster of novels, including Matthew Thomas’s We Are Not Ourselves (2014) and Stefan Merrill Block’s The Story of Forgetting (2008). The Epilogue ponders whether novels can in fact tell us what the sufferers of dementia are experiencing.