In nineteenth century England much charitable activity was directed towards the relief of poverty, but such provision developed significantly to support a variety of requirements. Although from the eighteenth century onwards there were instances of co-operation between voluntary charitable effort and the state, governments in the early and mid Victorian era tended to be cautious about intervention. During this period and beyond, voluntary provision was frequently underpinned by a desire that individuals in receipt of charity should as far as possible be self-reliant and contribute in some way towards the costs of their upkeep; that they should not become unnecessarily a burden on the State; and that donations and subscriptions given for the purposes of supporting and furthering charitable activities should be expended with care, with an emphasis upon obtaining good value for money spent. These criteria were applied also to charities which were active in providing for those with disabilities. These charities included the ones designed to meet the particular needs of blind people and deaf people in London which are the focus of this study and where demand for such facilities was high. These criteria, with their emphasis upon self-help, are a legacy from nineteenth century voluntary effort and shaped the nature of much charitable activity in the twentieth century as reflected in the images by which many charities are represented even today. 1 The writers are aware that they may not on occasion have employed politically correct language in describing certain disabilities and in the use of words such as 'infirm' and 'deaf and dumb' because the terminology of the period has been employed.
Readers of Thompson, the earliest historian of Owens College, 1 could be excused for believing it to be an organization without students. The book concentrated on the constitutional development of the institution, the evolution of a curriculum of studies appropriate to higher education and the development of the premises in which the College functioned. Any awareness of an organization devoted to the education of students as participants in a collegiate activity appeared to be entirely lacking, yet evidence suggests that this was far from the reality intended by the first professors. This omission was a characteristic contemporary approach to historical studies of educational institutions from schools to universities. The nineteenth-century genre which portrayed schools in an environmental limbo, populated by masters, governors and (occasionally) parents through which young people passed ghost-like, appearing to the historian only as names on honours boards and in sporting teams, is a familiar stereotype. Lack of knowledge of the early cohorts of undergraduates in the new civic universities of the mid-nineteenth century is no less profound. Fiddes, writing in 1937, does refer to the student body but briefly in a chapter shared with an analysis of the professors. This is intrinsically regrettable for historians of education but in particular because the students of the university colleges were pioneers in a social and educational revolution which exposed young men to a level of study and style of teaching, as well as a 1 The two histories which examine the Quay Street years are J. Thompson, The Owens College: its foundation and growth
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