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The Growth of Economic Studies at Cambridge: 1776–1860

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Salim Rashid
Salim Rashid*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics at Dartmouth College
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Extract

It is no exaggeration to state that political economy was the most popular subject with the British public in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Ricardo lectures of 1824, delivered by J. R. McCulloch, were attended by the elite of London society, and the popularization of Ricardian political economy by Harriett Martineau in the 1830s outsold many of the popular novels of the day. Nonetheless, despite this deep public curiosity, political economy did not form part of the required knowledge at either of the two English universities, Oxford and Cambridge. Although the 1820s saw the institution of professorships at both universities, the subject was not especially popular at either place. Indeed, when George Pryme, the professor of political economy at Cambridge, wrote to William Whewell, the powerful Master of Trinity College, of his intention to resign, he worried about the future of political economy at Cambridge. “The Absence of any endowment for a Professorship,” he wrote, “has made me hesitate as to offering this Resignation; but as I have confidence of the desire of the University not to let so important a study be neglected (and this would be the only University in the Kingdom where it would be so) I have no right to suppose that the Council and the Senate would not give effect to this feeling by making an adequate provision for the continuance of the Professorial duties.” It is strange to think today that the predecessor of Alfred Marshall and John Maynard Keynes would have stayed on at his post many years after he felt he had ceased to be useful for fear that the University would abolish his post if he resigned.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , Fall 1980 , pp. 281 - 294
Copyright
Copyright © 1980 by History of Education Society 

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References

Notes

This paper would not have been possible but for the very generous assistance of the staff of Trinity College Cambridge, who have provided me copies of all the relevant parts of the Whewell papers. Whenever no explicit mention is made, I am relying on this source for information. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for his/her comments.Google Scholar

1. Blaug, M., Ricardian Economics (New Haven, 1958), Chs. 3 and 7; O'Brien, D. P., J. R. McCulloch (London, 1970), 48–56.Google Scholar

2. Autobiographical Recollections of George Pryme ed., by his daughter (Cambridge, 1870), 346. Referred to hereafter as Pryme .Google Scholar

3. For a more detailed theoretical treatment see Rothblatt, Sheldon, The Revolution of the Dons (New York, 1968), 15–28; Vaughn, M. and Archer, M. S., Social Conflict and Educational Change in England and France 1789–1848 (Cambridge, England, 1971), 1–32. More general views have been gleaned from Adamson, J. W., English Education 1789–1902 (Cambridge, 1930); Simon, B., Studies in the History of Education 1780–1870 (London 1960); McPherson, R. G., The Theory of Higher Education in Nineteenth-century England (Athens, Georgia, 1959).Google Scholar

4. Checkland, S. G., “The Advent of Academic Economics in England,” The Manchester School of Social and Economic Studies (1951): 43–70.Google Scholar

5. The following is based on the Townshend correspondence as calendared by the Historical Manuscripts Commission, Eleventh Report (1887), Appendix, hereafter referred to as H.M.C. The correspondence is not noticed in Winstanley, D. A., The University of Cambridge in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1922). The correspondence is of considerable interest in the history of laissez-faire.Google Scholar

6. Some forty years later an appeal by the Rev. Josiah Tucker to the Universities, along lines similar to those of Lord Townshend, to encourage the study of political economy, also appears to have fallen on deaf ears. European Magazine, 21 (1792): 17–18.Google Scholar

7. Pryme, , 92.Google Scholar

8. Paley's life and works have most recently been treated by Clarke, M. L., Paley: Evidence for the Man (Toronto, 1974). The most prominent, and original, idea of Paley was measuring national welfare by the size of population, with larger populations implying greater happiness. It is possible that Malthus, T. R., another Cambridge man, had Paley in mind when he criticized pro-population views in his Essay of 1798.Google Scholar

9. Quoted by Wordsworth, C. in Scholae Academiae (Cambridge, 1910), p. 151.Google Scholar

10. Pryme, pp. 120–121. The Professor of Chemistry, Smithson Tennant, was well-versed in political economy and had wished to endow a chair, but he was accidentally killed before he could carry out his play; ibid., p. 115.Google Scholar

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13. See e.g., the Quarterly Review (November, 1831) for Jones and the Edinburgh Review (January, 1833) for Babbage.Google Scholar

14. Edinburgh Review (October 1809): 40 ff., an article more critical of Oxford than Cambridge. For the 1830's see Walsh, B. D., A Historical Account of the University of Cambridge (London, 1837).Google Scholar

15. The following details are taken from Winstanley, D. A., Early Victorian Cambridge (Cambridge, 1940) pp. 259–281; and from the Report of Her Majesty's Commission on the Universities (1852).Google Scholar

16. For the persistent influence of the ideal of a liberal education see Rothblatt, Sheldon, Tradition and Change in English Liberal Education (London, 1976).Google Scholar

17. The situation was not much better for the Natural Sciences, but for some reason its chances of success were considered much better.Google Scholar

18. Pryme, 345–50. There was, however, a furious pamphlet from Clarke, C. B. objecting to the inclusion of Carey's, H. Political Economy among the list of recommended books. In Clarke's opinion the work was “altogether unsound, and so barrenly unsuggestive as to be worthless reading….” Google Scholar

19. Marshall did not succeed without a struggle over the content of the new tripos with the Rev. Cunningham, W. “Marshall, Cunningham and the Emerging Economics Profession,” by Maloney, J., Economic History Review, 29 (August, 1976): 440–451.Google Scholar

20. H. M. C., p. 384.Google Scholar

21. Pryme, p. 121.Google Scholar

22. Ibid., p. 123.Google Scholar

23. Ward, W. R., Victorian Oxford (London, 1965), p. 50.Google Scholar

24. Checkland, , “The Advent of Academic Economics in England,” p. 53. Cochrane apparently accepts this imputation in his Manchester School article (December, 1973).Google Scholar

25. Whewell, to Jones, , (October, 1828). Whewell's subsequent letters show that he did not consider approval a certainty.Google Scholar

26. Letters from Cambridge (London, 1828), p. 52.Google Scholar

27. Bristead, C. A., Five Years in an English University Vol. II (New York, 1852), Ch. 3.Google Scholar

28. H. M. C., p. 389.Google Scholar

29. “A Petty Professor of Modern History,” Cambridge Historical Studies, 9, no. 2(1948):231.Google Scholar

30. Pryme claimed with pride that his auditors could not tell whether he was Whig or Tory. This was not so much because he was politically undecided —he was a staunch Whig—but rather became of his careful attempts to please all parties. A letter to his friend, Thompson, T. P., an extreme Free-Trader, on the Corn-Laws clearly elaborates Pryme's practical economics. “My views on the Corn-Laws tend to a total repeal by degrees, coupled with relief from those burthens which press on the production of Corn. Your plans are more imposing and splendid. I deem mine more practicable.” Pryme, p. 322.Google Scholar

31. Simon, , Studies, p. 287.Google Scholar

32. It is questionable whether the difference between Smith and Ricardo is as sharp on the above issues as contemporaries thought it was.Google Scholar

33. Bristed, , Five Years, p. 48. In 1845 Ramsay asked for Whewell's recommendation for the post of Professor of Moral Philosophy at St. Andrew's. Whewell's predecessor as Master of Trinity, Christopher Wordsworth, was himself an innovator with respect to examinations in the Classics. Clarke, M. L., Classical Education in Britain 1500–1900 (Cambridge, 1959), p. 104.Google Scholar

34. P. 4 of the notes taken at Pryme's Lectures, I am grateful to Lambeth Palace Library, London for having made a copy of these notes available to me. Beyond their initials—W. M. and C. J. — I know nothing about the notetakers. The notes refer to the 1818 lectures.Google Scholar

35. This incident has been covered in some depth by de Marchi, N. and Sturges, R. P., “Malthus and Ricardo's Inductivist Critics: Four Letters to William Whewell,” Economica, (November, 1973). For more details about the inductive viewpoint, see the author's, “Richard Jones and Baconian Historicism at Cambridge,“ Journal of Economic Issues (March, 1979).Google Scholar

36. Viner, J., The Role of Providence in the Social Order (Philadelphia, 1972), pp. 71–74.Google Scholar

37. Sedgwick, , Discourse, p. 45 ff.Google Scholar

38. Quoted by Vaughan, and Archer, , Social Conflict, p. i.Google Scholar

39. Quoted by Rothblatt, , Revolution, p. 248.Google Scholar

40. Whewell, to Jones, (October 1820).Google Scholar

41. Pryme, p. 122. The importance of material wealth is much more dramatically stated in a letter of 1814 by Nassau Senior, the first Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford in 1824. “I have not seen much of life, but that money is the sinews of happiness every year's, every month's and every week's, and every day's and every hour's experience convinces me—at least to those who are capable of enjoying it,” Levy, S. L., Nassau W. Senior (New York, 1970), p. 40.Google Scholar

42. As the dominant emphasis of classical economics was to leave things alone whenever possible, a study of economics would only provide the negative knowledge that, apart from providing justice and security of property, one should do nothing—hardly the most exciting prospect for a budding bureaucrat. In addition, political economy did not teach economising, in the usual sense of the word, so businessmen would have no incentive to hire graduates in a field whose primary message was that businessmen were doing well enough by themselves. It was observed in Scotland in the 1830s that bankers, manufacturers, agriculturists and engineers, all entered their professions without “going through any scientific system of instruction bearing directly on their pursuits,” quoted by Sanderson, M., The Universities and British Industry 1850–1970 (London, 1972), p. 4. Not only did Oxford and Cambridge send very few graduates to industry, but only ten percent of entering students were from business families in the years 1800–1850. Sanderson, pp. 48–58, and Rothblatt, , Revolution, pp. 86–92.Google Scholar

43. Sanderson, , The Universities, p. 29.Google Scholar

44. Vaughan, and Archer, , Social Conflict, chapter 1, make the important point that the French educational system (and the German too, for that matter) showed greater adaptation to the needs of industrialization in the mid-nineteenth century, even though France was less industrialized than Britain.Google Scholar