Events

In 1825, a group of men that included Whigs, reformers and lawyers came together to found a university in London aimed at those excluded from the two established English universities Oxford and Cambridge – where teachers and students were required to be subscribing Anglicans.

To mark the anniversary of UCL’s foundation on 11 Feb 1826 – when it went by its original name the University of London – this lunch hour lecture by Professor Rosemary Ashton (UCL English Language & Literature) looked at the opposition to the new university among Tory politicians and journalists, especially in the ultra-Tory newspaper John Bull.

The new university was designed to have “all the leading advantages of the two great universities” and “no barrier to the education of any sect”. The intention was to exclude theological teaching from the curriculum and have no form of religious test for entrance.

The media ‘against’

John Bull took against the idea with vitriol and had a longstanding campaign to ridicule those behind it. Sweeping, exaggerated warnings of threat to church and state were driven by a fear of working-class revolution in the vein of the French model.

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The beauty of UCL’s Lunch Hour Lectures is that you don’t need any prior knowledge of the topic in question to enjoy one. This was certainly the case with Dr Adam Smith’s (UCL History) talk on 24 November, ‘Did democracy cause the American Civil War?’ – which is just as well, as my knowledge of that conflict is patchy at best.

Although I studied political history up to A level, American history rarely troubled the syllabus. However, I did learn, as every history student does, that wars very rarely have one, discrete cause.

In recognition of this, Dr Smith began by giving a succinct answer to the question in the lecture title: “No”. In fact, he said, the question was “phenomenally difficult to answer”, because although slavery is often cited as the main cause, it is actually the complex and unexpected interplay between democracy, slavery and modernity that lies at the heart of the conflict.

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If you look into a particular display cabinet in UCL Art Museum’s current exhibition, ‘Word and Image’, you might think that you are looking at a collection of dictionaries. But as Dr Alexander Samson – one of the curators of ‘Word and Image’– explained on Tuesday, they are a great deal more than that. Ben Davies was at the museum to hear more.

Copyright Special Collections

‘Dictionaries and Dialogues’ was part of the museum’s ‘Pop-Up’ programme, in which different speakers are given free rein to talk about particular pieces in the collections within the museum surroundings.

So, we listened to Dr Samson speak in more intimate surroundings than most lectures offer. We were encouraged to wander among the exhibits in the main gallery as the talk went on, not least because Dr Samson wove discussions of some of the pieces into his lecture, bringing pictures and historical texts to life with explanations of their political and historical significance.

He began by noting that contemporary English speakers are rather unusual in not having translation as a central aspect of our lives, because English is often used as a common language in business and politics, and is fairly dominant in culture such as music and film. (more…)

Conservative politicians struggling not to mention Europe at this month’s party conference might take some solace from the fact that the country’s ambivalent relationship with the continent dates back at least half a millennium.

England’s “two-way pull” towards isolationism on the one hand and exploration on the other can be traced to the mid-15th century, according to Professor Helen Hackett, who gave a whistlestop introduction to the period through the media of contemporary art and books during a lunch-hour pop-up talk at UCL Art Museum on 11 October.

The talk, which showcased highlights from the exhibition ‘Word and Image: Early Modern Treasures at UCL’, was entitled ‘England Looking Outwards’, and some stunning artefacts had been brought into the light of day from UCL Art Collections and UCL Library Special Collections to exemplify the itchy feet of our Early Modern forebears (The term ‘Early Modern’ refers to the period 1450–1800, and forms the focus of the new UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges, of which Professor Hackett is Co-Director).

Click on the player below to watch a short audio slideshow about highlights from the ‘Word and Image’ exhibition:

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