A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster by Wendy Moffat Page B
Authors: Wendy Moffat
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lifelong refuge in King’s.
By the 1880s, the medieval structure of the university had begun to give way to the social necessity of educating a crop of men to fill the needs of a rapidly growing professional class. The imperial civil service in particular had a hungry mouth. In Asia and Mesopotamia, India and Ceylon, Egypt and southern Africa, and in London, too, now a world city, professional men were needed, bright men, organized men, men with a head on their shoulders for business, hearty, clubbable, oar-pulling men. Some Kingsmen still lived by the public school ethos, with its reverence of “team work . . . and cricket”; some still believed that “firmness, self-complacency and fatuity . . . between them compose the whole armour of man.”
But within the university King’s began to earn a distinctive place, threading the needle between the demands of rigor and the call to modernity. In 1869 King’s began to require that all undergraduates sit the Tripos, the university examinations toward an honors degree, which had real intellectual bite; and King’s students disproportionately took first-class honors in classics, which Morgan had chosen for his subject. The result was a crop of graduates inclined to public service and intellectual pursuits. Kingsmen became schoolmasters and parsons, professors and lawyers, doctors or diplomats, but rarely stockbrokers or businessmen. Fewer Etonians were admitted. The college began to make room for “oddities and the crudities—people who had not enjoyed their public schools or had been to the wrong school or even to none.”
His father, Eddie, had been a Trinity man, but on the advice of family friends Morgan chose the less-rugged ethos of King’s, just next door. So King’s made room for Morgan, a suburban day boy from a middling school. Like his character Rickie Elliot in
The Longest Journey
, Morgan “crept cold and friendless and ignorant” from public school to university. At Michael-mas term 1897 Morgan and forty-seven other boys entered King’s for a three-year course of study. The college was small and civilized, with fewer than two hundred undergraduates and eighteen Fellows in residence. Morgan was eighteen, tall, gangly, impossibly shy, unformed, terribly underprepared, but more clever than he knew.
The atmosphere at King’s was conducive to Morgan’s growing agnosticism. King’s abolished the compulsory religious tests that other collegesretained. Mandatory attendance at chapel was relaxed; students who missed services were nevertheless obliged to sign a roster by eight in the morning, and Morgan, along with many other young men, shuffled out in slippers and dressing gowns to the Porter’s Lodge to autograph the book. In freshman year his lodgings were near the present-day Guild Hall, and daily Morgan “could be seen rushing up St. Edward’s Passage to mingle with the larger flood which surged from the College itself.”
More significantly, the college had abolished the requirement that Fellows must subscribe to the articles of faith in the Anglican Church (which had been a condition of employment at Cambridge for centuries), along with the rule of celibacy that accompanied it. The newer dons had progressive views, and under their influence the classical curriculum of Greek and Latin history, literature, and philosophy—in place since medieval times—was widened to include more modern subjects: first modern history and politics and the natural sciences, then the modern languages. But King’s continued to emphasize the teaching don, the bachelor don, the man who recognized that college life should rightly belong to the undergraduates. The teachers who made the greatest impression spiritually and intellectually on the young Morgan published very little, but they
listened
to young men.
To be listened to, one must first have something to say; but Morgan was too callow, too “stupefied” by Cambridge life to contribute to the conversation. He had
By the 1880s, the medieval structure of the university had begun to give way to the social necessity of educating a crop of men to fill the needs of a rapidly growing professional class. The imperial civil service in particular had a hungry mouth. In Asia and Mesopotamia, India and Ceylon, Egypt and southern Africa, and in London, too, now a world city, professional men were needed, bright men, organized men, men with a head on their shoulders for business, hearty, clubbable, oar-pulling men. Some Kingsmen still lived by the public school ethos, with its reverence of “team work . . . and cricket”; some still believed that “firmness, self-complacency and fatuity . . . between them compose the whole armour of man.”
But within the university King’s began to earn a distinctive place, threading the needle between the demands of rigor and the call to modernity. In 1869 King’s began to require that all undergraduates sit the Tripos, the university examinations toward an honors degree, which had real intellectual bite; and King’s students disproportionately took first-class honors in classics, which Morgan had chosen for his subject. The result was a crop of graduates inclined to public service and intellectual pursuits. Kingsmen became schoolmasters and parsons, professors and lawyers, doctors or diplomats, but rarely stockbrokers or businessmen. Fewer Etonians were admitted. The college began to make room for “oddities and the crudities—people who had not enjoyed their public schools or had been to the wrong school or even to none.”
His father, Eddie, had been a Trinity man, but on the advice of family friends Morgan chose the less-rugged ethos of King’s, just next door. So King’s made room for Morgan, a suburban day boy from a middling school. Like his character Rickie Elliot in
The Longest Journey
, Morgan “crept cold and friendless and ignorant” from public school to university. At Michael-mas term 1897 Morgan and forty-seven other boys entered King’s for a three-year course of study. The college was small and civilized, with fewer than two hundred undergraduates and eighteen Fellows in residence. Morgan was eighteen, tall, gangly, impossibly shy, unformed, terribly underprepared, but more clever than he knew.
The atmosphere at King’s was conducive to Morgan’s growing agnosticism. King’s abolished the compulsory religious tests that other collegesretained. Mandatory attendance at chapel was relaxed; students who missed services were nevertheless obliged to sign a roster by eight in the morning, and Morgan, along with many other young men, shuffled out in slippers and dressing gowns to the Porter’s Lodge to autograph the book. In freshman year his lodgings were near the present-day Guild Hall, and daily Morgan “could be seen rushing up St. Edward’s Passage to mingle with the larger flood which surged from the College itself.”
More significantly, the college had abolished the requirement that Fellows must subscribe to the articles of faith in the Anglican Church (which had been a condition of employment at Cambridge for centuries), along with the rule of celibacy that accompanied it. The newer dons had progressive views, and under their influence the classical curriculum of Greek and Latin history, literature, and philosophy—in place since medieval times—was widened to include more modern subjects: first modern history and politics and the natural sciences, then the modern languages. But King’s continued to emphasize the teaching don, the bachelor don, the man who recognized that college life should rightly belong to the undergraduates. The teachers who made the greatest impression spiritually and intellectually on the young Morgan published very little, but they
listened
to young men.
To be listened to, one must first have something to say; but Morgan was too callow, too “stupefied” by Cambridge life to contribute to the conversation. He had
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