The Boy from Bermondsey

Digging out some stack requests from down below the other day, I came across this volume – Work and Wages by Thorold Rogers. Or Eight Chapters on the History of Work and Wages, Being a Reprint of Chapters VIII, XII, XIV, XV, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX of Six Centuries of Work and Wages to be unconcise. Not ostensibly of any great interest, unless you happen to be fascinated by economic history. But opening the cover revealed a note on the title page in a neatly flourished ink script. It reads thus:  W.J.Ashley. Ball:Coll:Oxon. Given me by Prof.Rogers. Jan.4.85. This bears a little stack sleuthing, I thought. 

It seemed reasonable to assume that the Prof.Rogers in question was the self-same Thorold Rogers whose work the book extracted. 1885 was the year this particular volume was published, so the professor must have handed a newly printed copy directly on to this W.J.Ashley. Oxon is a common abbreviation for Oxford; and Ball:Coll must refer to Balliol College, an august institution which has been a part of the University since its founding in 1263 by one John de Balliol of Barnard Castle, now a popular tourist destination. 

Thorold Rogers was actually James Edwin Thorold Rogers. He began his working life as a high churchman, becoming curate of St Paul’s in Oxford after his ordination, a position which he held from 1848-51, moving on to Headington, then a hilltop village to the east of Oxford, from 1854-8. It was here that he became acquainted with the extremes of rural poverty and became intent on discovering its root causes. He took up the professorship of economic science and statistics at Kings College in London and made a thorough study of the history of agricultural prices. These studies would feed into his great work of economic history, Six Centuries of Work and Wages. His politics became more radical, perhaps because of his experiences as a rural curate and his subsequent academic investigations. He took the position that self-interested class concerns dominated the course of history. His advocacy of a free trade economy was in part a way of attempting to undermine such entrenched interests, which he hated with a passion. His 1885 book The British Citizen: His Rights and Privileges suggested some ways in which (some) individuals might circumvent these interests. In the year of the 1868 elections, he actively campaigned for the Liberal Party (members of the clergy weren’t allowed to stand for election) and oversaw the 7th annual congress of the Co-operative movement in 1875.

Having left the curacy, and long since having stepped down from his high church position, he did stand for parliament as an Advanced Liberal candidate for Southwark in 1880, and gained the seat. In 1885, the year he gifted his book to W.J.Ashley, he was elected as member for Bermondsey; a strangely appropriate incidence of synchronicity, as we shall see. He didn’t make a great impact in parliament, however, being known for his ‘combative and outspoken temperament’, and lost his seat shortly thereafter, in no small part due to his support for Irish home rule.  

Rogers also campaigned for educational reform via the National Education League, specifically arguing that it should have a secular basis. Clearly, his high church ideals had changed considerably over time. His daughter, Annie Rogers, campaigned for educational reform of a different kind. She worked to gain provision of further education opportunities for women in Oxford. Her wittily titled 1938 book Degrees by Degrees was a personal history of this struggle. Annie herself became Oxford’s first female don at the precocious age of 23. Incidentally, she was also one of the children to whom the Reverend Charles Dodgson told tall tales. He is far better known today under his pen name, Lewis Carroll.  

So who was the W.J.Ashley who appended his name to the book which Prof.Rogers gifted him? Well, it is undoubtedly William James Ashley, the renowned economic historian. He later became Sir William, but would probably never have dreamed of such establishment honours when he was growing up in relative poverty in Bermondsey, the son of a journeyman hatter who struggled to make ends meet. Ashley was exceptionally intelligent and managed to gain a Brackenbury scholarship to study at Oxford in 1878. Brackenbury scholarships were set up by Hannah Brackenbury, who used part of her fortune to fund places for those from less privileged backgrounds to study in the fields of law, history and the natural sciences. Ashley fulfilled his promise, graduating with first class honours in 1881. During this time he attended lectures by Arnold Toynbee, the economic historian who was committed to bringing about social change and improving the conditions of the industrial working class. Ashley received his book from Prof.Rogers two years after Toynbee’s death and one year before the opening of Toynbee Hall in 1884, an institution named in his honour. It offered education to the residents of the Spitalfields area in which it was built, with lectures and courses provided by university students from Oxford and Cambridge who came to live amongst those they taught, and who in turn learned from those whose experience of life was so different to theirs. Toynbee Hall is still active to this day, although it operates in a somewhat different manner appropriate to the modern day needs of the local populace.  

 1885, the year he received the book, saw Ashley becoming a fellow of Lincoln College in Oxford and a lecturer at Corpus Christi. This was the year that Prof.Roberts became an MP for Bermondsey, and it’s easy to imagine the young and older man having a conversation about the area in which Ashley grew up. There seems to be a palpable sense of succession here, of a passing of ideas and shared aims. Ashley, like the Prof. didn't fit in with the Oxford establishment, who didn’t agree with his ideas about economics being a historical study as much as an objective ‘science’. He left for Toronto to further his academic career, which came to a new peak when he became the Harvard Chair of Economic History in 1892. This was a post which was specifically created for him, a great honour and recognition of the importance of his work. This was the first Chair of economic history in the English speaking world, so Ashley was a real pioneer in his field.

He returned to the UK in 1901 to become the first professor of commerce at the newly established University of Birmingham. Along with Joseph Chamberlain, another outspoken man from a working class background, he was instrumental in the development of this new institution. Ashley supported Chamberlain’s political campaigns in parliament for tariff reforms (essentially opposing free trade) on the grounds that he felt it would help in improving social conditions for the working classes. His position at Birmingham university is underlined by the fact that the book was destined to find its way into the library collection there, neatly labelled in a lovely calligraphic script as being in the Commerce section. We can see from the date stamp that it was there from at least 1922, five years before Ashley’s death, so he must have personally bequested it. When Ashley died, his funeral was held in Canterbury Cathedral where he was also buried; a recognition of his stature and the esteem in which he and his work were held. Not bad for the boy from Bermondsey!