HOME AND SCHOOL

The frustrated ambition of working-class scholars at the end of the nineteenth century is well captured in the hero of Hardy's novel, Jude the Obscure (1895). Having immersed himself in centuries of learning during every spare moment for well over ten years, Jude Fawley's dreams of formal study were brutally shattered by the Masters' indifference at the hallowed Colleges of ‘Christminster’ – Oxford in thin disguise. The lowest rungs of the ‘ladder of opportunity’ for which Jude yearned were not installed until 1902 when the Balfour Education Act laid the foundations of public secondary education in Britain. However, it was not entirely unknown for boys of poor birth to satisfy keen intellectual aspirations before the passage of that Act. A number of factors helped to smooth the path to academic distinction from the most unlikely backgrounds. These included various scholarship schemes, luck, generous benefactors, good voluntary educational institutions in the locality, and the invaluable Cassell's National Library of Classical Literature.

For example, Barker's friend and fellow-Mancunian, George Unwin, enjoyed many of these ‘advantages’ in an environment where public educational provision was meagre. The son of a publican turned shopkeeper, he left school at the age of thirteen to become a clerk in a Stockport hat-making firm. But he soon developed a wide knowledge of philosophy and literature, chiefly through the stimulus of the Stockport literary society, the local Mechanics Institute, and the Unitarian Church.