Henry Morley

• 1. Introduction

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  Henry Morley was born in Hatton Garden, London, on the 15th of September 1822, and by the time he died in 1894, he had helped invent the very idea of studying English literature as a serious academic subject. That is a peculiar journey for a man who trained as a physician, went bankrupt running a medical practice, and only came to writing by accident. What draws a doctor turned failed businessman into the orbit of Charles Dickens? And what does it mean that one of Great Britain's earliest professors of English literature began his career dispensing medicine in Shropshire? Those questions sit at the heart of Morley's story. He was also a champion of women's education at a moment when that cause was far from settled, a man who filled lecture halls across the country, and the author of a ten-volume history of English writing that reached all the way to William Shakespeare. His study for that larger work, First Sketch of English Literature, had circulated 34,000 copies by the time he died.

• 2. A Doctor's Detour

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  Morley's father was an apothecary, and the son followed a medical path from an early age. At ten years old, he was sent to a Moravian Church school in Neuwied, Germany, where he studied from 1833 to 1835. He then moved through a preparatory school in Stockwell before entering King's College London in 1838 to pursue medicine. He graduated in 1843 and in the same year joined the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, the professional body for his trade.

  What came next was not the career anyone would have planned. Morley set up a medical partnership in Madeley, Shropshire, but his co-practitioner turned out to be both dishonest and unlicensed. The practice collapsed financially. Rather than try again as a physician, Morley shifted direction entirely. In 1848, he opened a school in Manchester and began writing in the time he could spare from teaching. The satirical pieces he produced in that period caught the eye of one of the most famous editors in Victorian England.

• 3. The Dickens Connection

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  Charles Dickens read Morley's satirical articles and saw something worth cultivating. He invited Morley to London in 1850 to join Household Words, Dickens' own periodical, as both editor and contributor. That invitation transformed Morley's life. He had gone from an apothecary's son to a Manchester schoolmaster to a London literary editor in under a decade.

  When Household Words ceased publication, Morley stayed on with its successor, All the Year Round. He also took on editorial work at The Examiner from 1859 to 1864, building a reputation in London literary circles as a capable and versatile writer. Those fifteen years in journalism gave Morley the grounding he would need when the academy came calling. University College London appointed him Professor of English Literature in 1865, a post he would hold for the next twenty-four years.

• 4. The Professor and His Students

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  Morley's reputation as a teacher rested not just on his scholarship but on his manner in the room. His contemporaries described him as engaging and warm, and his lectures on literature drew audiences across Great Britain, not only inside university walls. Among the students who passed through his classes at University College London was Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian writer who would go on to win the Nobel Prize.

  The University of Edinburgh recognized Morley's standing in the field by awarding him an honorary LLD degree in 1879. His advocacy extended beyond literature into the question of who deserved access to education. Morley was a strong supporter of degrees for women, and he gave particular backing to Annie Leigh Browne when she opened a residence for women students at Byng Place in 1882. That residence was renamed College Hall in 1886. From 1882 to 1889, Morley also served as principal of University Hall, a research library in Bloomsbury, running that institution in parallel with his professorship until he stepped down from the chair in 1889.

• 5. The Shape of His Work

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  Morley edited two major book series that aimed to bring literature within reach of ordinary readers. Morley's Universal Library was published from 1883 by George Routledge, drawing on the concept of a universal library. Cassell's National Library followed from 1886 and ran to 209 weekly editions.

  As a biographer, Morley wrote lives of Bernard Palissy, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Gerolamo Cardano, and Clément Marot. He also wrote introductions to two works by John Locke: the 1884 edition of Two Treatises of Government and the 1889 edition of A Letter Concerning Toleration. His principal work, English Writers, ran to ten volumes and appeared from 1864 to 1894, tracing English literary history down to William Shakespeare. Morley died before he could go further, on the 14th of May 1894, in Carisbrooke on the Isle of Wight, where he is buried at Carisbrooke Cemetery. His son-in-law and former student Henry Shaen Solly wrote his biography four years later, in 1898.