Alec

by William di Canzio

He also started to open his mind beyond the limits of rainy Wiltshire. The Working Men’s College was offering courses at nearby Wilton. The teachers, young idealists with degrees from Cambridge and Oxford, were advancing the founder’s vision of university-style learning for men of the working classes. The scholars made regular trips from London to regional towns to deliver the goods. Most of the men who came to sign up for school sought practical training in mechanics or drafting, with an eye to getting ahead in business. They were disappointed to find that those subjects were taught only in the city. Rather, the Wilton extension offered courses for “enrichment” in the humanities: literature, history, art, and political philosophies. Alec chose two classes that met on Tuesday evenings—The English Poetic Tradition and Italian City-States. Harrison Grant’s course in poetry was crowded with clerks with ink-stained fingers, who spent their days copying contracts, their backs hunched over desks. Word had gotten out that this particular teacher was a genuine Cambridge don volunteering his service pro bono. He was older than the other instructors—fifty, Alec guessed—nice-looking, with brown hair going gray and clean-cut features. At the first meeting, he mapped their course of reading, emphasizing Milton and Shelley, and introduced the men to the college’s mission: they were to acquire knowledge through hard work, but he hoped they would also form friendships, essential to educat...