CHAPTER II STUDENTS School and College-Medicine and Chemistry-Theology I Among the many motives which took Americans to England immediately after the Revolutionary War, there was none so pressing as the desire for self-improvement. The colonies had looked to England as the natural source of education in all branches of knowledge, and it was many years before the desire for self-sufficiency in such matters could overcome the precedent set by the immediate past. Jefferson,' Noah Webster, and others protested that an independence in such matters was a natural corollary to political freedom and a necessity if America were to have any real independence in the future, but it took from ten to twenty years for the idea to take root. When we consider the superiority of the educational opportunities in England over those in America, and add to this a kinship based on language and material interests, it is surprising that the transition was accomplished even in the space of a quarter century. Noah Webster's protest was perhaps the most emphatic. In 1788 he wrote an essay on the Education of Youth in America, in which he admitted that it might be useful for young men to cross the Atlantic to pursue higher studies, but he insisted that they be as few as possible, and he saw 1 Writings, Washington, 1905, v, 186-8. no justification for a trip to England for elementary or college courses. Both he and Jefferson based their arguments on the ground that European educations made American youth dissatisfied with the less polished state of society at home, and they both pointed out the dangers from immorality in undergraduate life. Yet behind all their arguments was the plea that America must assert her self-sufficiency in all things, and that education was one of the most important of all matters and therefore a good factor with which to begin. 2 Strangely enough, the facts seem to indicate the efficacy of these pleas. True, John Quincy Adams was himself educated at Leyden and Paris, and he sent his sons to school at Ealing, near London; Henry Laurens tried both English tutors and schools for his three sons, but finally reached the conclusion that their morals would be safer at Geneva; and the Pinckney brothers studied at Westminster; but they are rather the exception than the rule. Most of these boys were in England only because their fathers were there of necessity, and they naturally went to school there. Even so, the linguistic advantage of studying on the Continent lured many away from England. There were therefore very few Americans of the time, with the exception of the loyalists, who received their elementary education in English schools. Edgar Allan Poe must likewise be mentioned among the exceptions. His experience is especially interesting as he himself describes an English school in his story of William Wilson, no doubt, as Stedman suggests, drawing upon his own youth. John Allan, Poe's foster father, sailed for England in 1815 when Poe was but six years old, and the following five years of the boy's life were spent in the 2 D. D. Wallace, Life of Henry Laurens, N. Y., 1915, pp. 182-97. secluded grounds of the old White Manor-House School at Stoke Newington, a suburb of London. There he learned to run and leap, to construe Latin and to speak French, and there too he probably absorbed much of that love of romance which so dominated his later writings. "My earliest recollections of school life," he makes William Wilson say, "are connected with a large, rambling Elizabethan house, in a misty-looking village of England, where were a vast number of gigantic and gnarled trees, and where all the houses were excessively ancient. In truth, it was a dream-like and spirit-soothing place, that venerable old town." Of the routine life of the school, Poe's other self continues, "The house, I have said, was old and irregular. The grounds were extensive, and a high and solid brick wall, topped with a bed of mortar and broken glass, encompassed the whole. This prison-like rampart formed the limit of our domain; beyond it we saw but thrice a week-once every Saturday afternoon, when, attended by two ushers, we were permitted to take brief walks in a body through some of the neighboring fields-and twice during Sunday, when we were paraded in the same formal manner to the morning and evening service in the one church of the village. Of this church the principal of our school was pastor. With how deep a spirit of wonder and perplexity was I wont to regard him from our remote pew in the gallery, as, with step solemn and slow, he ascended the pulpit." His perplexity was due to the paradoxical vision of the master, of sour visage, ruler in hand, who was within the glossy and clerically flowing robes of the priest. It was in this antique house, with its long, narrow, and dismally low-ceilinged school room, oakpaneled and Gothic windowed, that Poe spent perhaps the most impressionable years of his boyhood. It was not un like the schooling which Charles Lamb describes in his Christ's Hospital, for, once within the walls of an English school, liberty departed from rich and poor alike. A régime such as this would hardly appeal to the American mind. It is even more surprising that a similar condition prevailed with respect to college education. In spite of the historic veneration associated with their names, even Oxford and Cambridge drew few students from America. It must be remembered that Cambridge was and still is chiefly noted for theoretical mathematics and Oxford for the classics. Neither of these subjects could have had much appeal for the leaders among the youth of a country rich in natural resources but almost wholly lacking in the advantages of a highly developed civilization. What young America went to England to acquire was knowledge and experience in the professions, in the problems of the economic and industrial world, in religion, literature, and the fine arts. Few Americans omitted a reverential visit to England's two oldest universities, but fewer still looked upon them as suitable places to pursue their own educations. II In the matter of education for the professions, the situation was altogether different. The practical ends of education, which so dominate our plans of study to-day, were even more operative in the early days of our independence than they now are. For many years before the war, Americans had trained themselves in medicine, chemistry, theology, and law by study in British institutions, and the war was only partially effective in curbing the practice. It was natural, therefore, that American eyes should turn to Edinburgh, then the center of scientific training in the British Isles and the cultural capital of the north as well. The Scottish character was likewise particularly pleasing to the American, and his reception was uniformly cordial. "In open-heartedness," says George Ticknor in 1819, "I imagine it is almost unrivaled. . . . It is a great thing, too, to have so much influence granted to talent as there is in Edinburgh, for it breaks down the artificial distinctions of society, and makes its terms easy to all who ought to enter it, and have any right to be there." A fuller account of this engaging society is given in an unsigned letter in an early issue of the North American Review. "The New Town," says this writer, "which contains about 30,000 people, is the winter residence of a greater part of the rich families in Scotland. The seat of a university, to which 1,800 or 2,000 students annually resort, many of them young noblemen and men of fortune, who add something to the gayety, and little to the industry of the place. This is also the portico, in which several of the most distinguished literary men in Great Britian assemble their disciples. "The society is then reckoned very literary-it is no pedantry to talk about books-Lord Byron's monthly muse makes conversation for the next month's routs-the young men walk up and down the street with an elegant book under their arm instead of a small stick-the character of the place betrays itself in various other symptoms; and while the fashion of some towns is the most approved arrangement of a dinner party or a drawing room, the prevailing fashion of Edinburgh is for literature. Not that this makes them ceremonious, or takes away a relish for the thousand brilliant trifles and elegancies of life. . . . The carnival begins in the middle of January and lasts to the middle of March. 3 "Letter to W. P. from Edinburgh," N. A. Review, 1, 188-91. |