Ellis, H. orcid.org/0000-0001-8571-0340 (2024) ‘Not in the college but city’: networks of higher learning in Manchester before 1824. Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 100 (2). pp. 11-31. ISSN 2054-9318
Abstract
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 institutions – dissenting academies, teaching hospitals, learned societies, independent libraries and individual initiatives – which complicate existing narratives of the development of higher education in the city which 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. 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 for some time now, this article considers, for the first time, how such models influenced the history of educational cultures in Manchester.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 Author(s). This is an author-produced version of a paper subsequently published in Bulletin of the John Rylands Library. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | Manchester; higher education; higher learning; literary and philosophical societies; dissenting academies |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > School of Education |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 28 Oct 2024 14:22 |
Last Modified: | 20 Dec 2024 11:26 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Manchester University Press |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.7227/BJRL.100.2.2 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:218611 |