Adult education in 19th-century Preston

I recently came across a dissertation on the Preston Institution for the Diffusion of Knowledge that traces its history from its formation in 1828. The institution, established to provide adult education and a library in the town, became the Harris Institute in 1882. It passed through several stages to emerge as today’s University of Lancashire.

Lecturers at what was Preston Polytechnic and then the University of Central Lancashire have written histories of their organisation that include accounts of the nineteenth-century institution. None is as detailed as the dissertation Peter Hindle wrote in 1971 when he was a student at Liverpool University..

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Read the dissertation here

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Two key figures in the setting up of the institute were the social campaigner Joseph Livesey and Thomas Batty Addison, the Recorder of Preston. Addison became the institute’s first president and Livesey its first treasurer. The two men were later to become fierce opponents in the administration of the New Poor Law in the town.

It was Livesey who urged that the new body should be named the Institution for the Diffusion of Knowledge and not the Preston Mechanics’ Institute. He argued that: ‘Although mechanics are a class which are to be benefitted by the institution, they are not the only class. There is a large class of labouring men who do not come under the term mechanics, and there are other classes of men, who will be benefitted by it.’ And it was Livesey the temperance campaigner who fixed the price of membership at 1s. 7½d per quarter, equivalent to the cost of ‘a gill of ale per week’.

At the inaugural meeting, Thomas Batty Addison pointed to the example of London University, which had similar small beginnings: ‘What has been done in London, might, upon a corresponding scale, be done in Preston.’ But Preston would have to wait nearly two hundred years to get its university.

One thing missing from Hindle’s dissertation is the opposition that Livesey mounted to the transfer from the institution’s original home in Cannon Street to a grand new building near Winckley Square, the district that had become the home to the town’s wealthier inhabitants. The building was named the Avenham Institute. This is what Livesey had to say about the building that later became the Harris Institute: ‘… a more unlikely site could scarcely have been chosen. It is quite at an outside corner of the town, and convenient only to the comparatively wealthy. And not only so, but it will become less and less central as the town extends …’. The town did extend, to the north and east, far away from Winckley Square.

The Livesey quotation is taken from Nigel Morgan’s 1981 Lancaster University MLitt dissertation that has a good deal more on Livesey’s criticism of the way Preston’s wealthy middle classes appropriated the cultural amenities of the town.

The three other histories of the institution are:

Pope, Rex, and Ken Phillips. University of Central Lancashire: A History of the Development of the Institution since 1828. University of Central Lancashire, 1995. https://knowledge.lancashire.ac.uk/id/eprint/55951/.

Timmins, Geoffrey, David Foster, and Harry Law. Preston Polytechnic: The Emergence of an Institution 1828-1978. Preston Polytechnic, 1979.

Vernon, Keith. A History of the University of Central Lancashire. University of Central Lancashire, 2018.