"There Will Ever Be an Aristocracy of Talent": The Mason College Magazine, 1883–1900

Mason Science College, Birmingham, opened its doors in November 1880. Founded by manufacturer Josiah Mason, whose rags-to-riches story entered local mythology long before his death, the college was designed "to give thorough systematic education and instruction to all who might come, unfettered by restrictions of class, creed, race, or sex."¹ While Mason privileged science education above literary studies for those "who have to enter early upon the business of life," he insisted that his college also provide "classical education" for men and women, both in "regular systematic instruction" for day students and "popular instruction" in the evenings.² Ninety-five full-time day students entered in the first class. Within a year, fifty-three of those students had founded the Mason College Union, and in January 1883 they inaugurated the Mason College Magazine, which appeared monthly and then quarterly until the college was absorbed into the University of Birmingham in 1900. This article examines the ways in which two generations of Mason students used the magazine to explore their own fluid understandings of higher education; they did so within the pages of a journal that purportedly represented all Mason College students but in time became more interested in asserting elitist notions of intellectual competence. The first generation of editors, from 1883 to about 1892, was focused on forging intense, almost familial, bonds inspired by the shared experience of creating "the Mason student"; the second generation, from about 1893 to 1900, was a more self-confident group of students who regarded their predecessors as quaintly enthusiastic and provincial. Their engagement with the ideals of higher education was focused on the many meanings of a university pedigree. Examining the ways in which students claimed a higher status over time provides insight into Victorian anxieties over status, access, inclusivity, and credentialing in higher education in ways that prefigure debates in today's university institutions.

Mason College was founded to fill a gap in local and regional higher education.³ Birmingham was already home to Queen's College, a local medical school whose students would form an important, if unassimilated, cohort of Mason science students until the two colleges were officially conjoined in 1892.⁴ It also boasted the Birmingham and Midland Institute, which had absorbed the local mechanics' institution and a variety of other adult education institutions in 1854. By 1880, the Midland was a widely respected provider both of evening education for artisans through its industrial department and of consistently well-attended public lecture programs and other cultural events through its general department. While the industrial department inspired a fiercely loyal following of teachers and students, it was not designed to facilitate courses of study that could lead to university examinations. Mason College was envisioned as an institution that would provide access to full-time, purposeful, coherently organized college instruction for day students, both male and female, who would inevitably sit for degrees through the University of London. For upwardly mobile workers, there were also courses of evening lectures on "science" topics, priced at ten shillings per term or three pence per lecture.⁵ Josiah Mason had imagined these day and evening programs as parallel tracks, each leading to the kind of structured higher education he himself had never enjoyed.

The day students were consistently described as pursuing a "thorough and systematic education,"⁶ and their numbers rose from ninety-five in the first session to 615 by 1897–98.⁷ However, Mason governors quickly realized that "systematic" and "standardized" were not interchangeable: many day students, especially women, took only one or two courses per session and preferred a smorgasbord approach over a set curriculum.⁸ Perhaps the most famous of these early day students was Constance Naden, the poet-philosopher whose six-year Mason career was divided between taking science courses outside of any preset curricular guidelines and producing a steady output of poetry and prose, much of which was published in the Mason College Magazine.⁹ She and her fellow day students—men and women pursuing relatively independent courses of study—were the "earnest and enthusiastic" individuals...