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Reviewed by:
  • Our Minerva: The Men and Politics of the University of London, 1836–1858
  • Sheldon Rothblatt
F. M. G. Willson. Our Minerva: The Men and Politics of the University of London, 1836–1858. London: Athlone Press, 1995. xvii + 363 pp. Ill. $90.00.

Negley Harte sagely writes in his foreword to Our Minerva that “the University of London has always been a very strange institution, barely understood by insiders, incomprehensible to outsiders” (p. xiv). Its federal structure, governance, and relationship to the metropolis, the nation, and the empire have always been unsettled. London was a Victorian “problem” for these and other reasons, and it is probably not widely appreciated that Cardinal Newman’s remarkable Idea of a University was partly conceived as a refutation of the first university to be founded in England since Oxford and Cambridge. The University of London can also claim to be the world’s first multiversity, as well as, after the reforms of the 1850s, the world’s first Open University.

Thanks to some recent additions to a corpus that includes fine older works like H. Hale Bellot’s study of University College London, our knowledge of the “godless university” continues to improve. Harte’s recent volumes and Lord Dahrendorf’s study of the London School of Economics have enlarged the pool of available sources and ideas. Bellot in his 1929 book hinted at the special role played by the medical profession in both promoting and inhibiting the idea of a new urban university, but Willson now gives us a thorough account. Logically our attention should be drawn to the opposition presented by the older universities, the Tory Establishment, and churchmen, including a few liberals, who were uncomfortable with the notion of a non-Christian university. They were indeed part of the original controversies. But the medical hierarchy was a more formidable threat. From that perspective, the history of the University of London is a subset of the history of nineteenth-century medical education, and consequently also closely connected to the history of professionalism.

The original backers of the pre-University of London, University College London, created a medical school to upgrade both the scientific quality of medical education and the social standing of physicians, whose ranks included a hotchpotch of practitioners. Implicit in the story, therefore, is the role of science itself (as distinguished from apprenticeship or clinical instruction). The backers immediately encountered vested interests led by the medical royal societies. Their entrenched positions could not be overrun in ways that benefited the autonomous development of the University until Parliament passed a comprehensive reform of medical licensing at mid-century. [End Page 162]

Willson also explains in great detail the struggle over the University’s system of governance and its involvement with Cabinets and Parliaments. With particular insight he analyzes the place of alumni in furthering the interests of the University party. He notes the quiet accretion of political strength by non-Anglicans, and he identifies key actors, hitherto invisible—most notably the influential medical reformer Henry Warburton. The earnest if weak Thomas Spring Rice, Baron Monteagle, is given more than customary attention. Willson suggests that Warburton may have been the critical figure in advancing the conception of the University of London as an administrative examining center composed of teaching colleges, but there still remains a gap in our knowledge between “advancing” and “originating” an apparently novel idea, as well as a structure for which little direct documentation appears to exist. This is the only ambiguous point in an otherwise steadily composed and indispensable study.

Sheldon Rothblatt
University of California, Berkeley
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