IV - THE AGE OF REFORM (1765–1882)

Summary

It is, in the nature of things, impossible to fasten upon a precise date on one side of which lies unreformed Cambridge and on the other the age of reform. Reform was inevitably intermittent; it could be halted or qualified by defenders of old ways or of vested interests; and it required time to produce its harvest of results. The most recent historian of the university has chosen the year 1800, as a date of convenience, for his watershed. It is a point in time as good as any other for the purpose; and yet, if we fix our eyes only upon St John's College, there is also something to be said for regarding the mastership of William Samuel Powell (1765–75) as the beginning of a new age. It is true that, until William Henry Bateson became master in 1857, St John's was more likely to be found in the rearguard than in the van of reform. On the other hand, between Powell's day and Bateson's, there was also some consistency in the attempt to introduce a measure of improvement into the ways in which the college fulfilled its duty and purpose. In that sense there was a real, if tenuous, continuity between Powell's new broom in 1765 and the sweeping reforms of the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the period which, without too much exaggeration, may be called the age of Bateson.