Travellers in a strange country: responses of working class students to the University Extension Movement – 1873-1910

The University Extension Movement' -ancestor of both the Workers' Educational Association and of extra-mural classes to-day - was started at Cambridge university in 1873 by James Stuart, a young Scottish radical who was later to be the Liberal-Radical MP for the London constituency of Hackney. The initial impetus to the movement came from within the ancient universities (Oxford followed Cambridge by setting up an Extension department in 1878), and it drew on the doubts and restlessness of young university graduates. There were, for example, clergymen, such as Rev. Hudson Shaw from Oxford, influenced by a rejection of fundamentalism and dogmatism in the church, and seeking some more secular plane on which to exercise their Christian vision. Rev. Moore Ede was one of several Cambridge disciples of the economist Alfred Marshall, who took their questioning of classical economics into the early Extension classes. Then there were the early economic historians, for whom there was no place in the university curriculum, pioneering a more historical approach to economics, and practising a critique of laissez-faire.