E.M. Forster

Read Maurice and a new bio of Forster, A Great Unrecorded History which justifies the impact of his intimate life on his work with an understanding of the legitimacy of inquiry into those details.

Morgan came to Cambridge at a moment of transition for the university. Even

a generation before, a boy like him would probably not have been admitted

to King’s. At that time the college favored the kind of confident young man

who transformed the word university into the languid drawl of varsity. The

sort of “silly and idle” fellow who “takes pass-degrees, roars round football

fields,” the sort of young man who in drunken oblivion “sits down in the

middle of Hammersmith Broadway after the boat race . . .” At King’s, this

kind of chap breezed in, with no questions asked, directly and almost exclu-

sively from Eton.

For more than four hundred years Eton College had been the Wellspring

for King’s students. But the luster of the founder’s pious intentions had

dulled over the centuries. In I441 the king in question——Henry VI, the

young son of the victor of Agincourt——established a fund to educate young

men training for holy orders. The whole of the college comprised seventy

souls: the number of Jesus’ disciples, according to St. Luke. Like the kneel-

ing figures carved in stone in the college’s wondrous Gothic chapel, Henry’s

acolytes proceeded in a “steady pilgrimage” from Eton, the king’s charitable

school near Windsor palace, to King’s, where they remained until they mar-

ried or died, then presumably on to heaven above.

But by the mid-eighteenth century this design had devolved into a system

of “automatic and effortless advancement” for privileged young gentlemen.

Secular, wealthy, and well-connected Etonians began to swell the college.

There were no entrance exams; students had “the right to claim a degree

without sitting for an examination”; and the degree, once conferred, entitled

its holder to a life fellowship, so putatively all graduates, and all masters at

Eton, had lifelong refuge in King’s.

By the 1880s, the medieval structure of the university had begun to give

way to the social necessity of educating a crop of men to fill the needs of a

rapidly growing professional class. The imperial civil service in particular

had a hungry mouth. In Asia and Mesopotamia, India and Ceylon, Egypt and

southern Africa, and in London, too, now a world city, professional men were

needed, bright men, organized men, men with a head on their shoulders for

business, hearty, clubbable, oar-pulling men. Some Kingsmen still lived by

the public school ethos, with its reverence of “team work . . . and cricket”;

some still believed that “firmness, self-complacency and fatuity . . . between

them compose the whole armour of man.”

But within the university King’s began to earn a distinctive place, thread-

ing the needle between the demands of rigor and the call to modernity. In

"1869 King’s began to require that all undergraduates sit the Tripos, the uni-

versity examinations toward an honors degree, which had real intellectual

bite; and King’s students disproportionately took first-class honors in clas-

sics, which Morgan had chosen for his subject. The result was a crop of

graduates inclined to public service and intellectual pursuits. Kingsmen

became schoolmasters and parsons, professors and lawyers, doctors or

diplomats, but rarely stockbrokers or businessmen. Fewer Etonians were

admitted. The college began to make room for “oddities and the crudities—

people who had not enjoyed their public schools or had been to the wrong

school or even to none.”

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 It was a testament to the success of

his carefully crafted public persona during these years that even so close a

friend as Virginia Woolf could thoroughly misread his situation. Writing to

her sister, Vanessa Bell, Woolf lamented that Lily, with her iron-willed love,

“is slowly dispatching him . . . he is limp and damp and milder than the

breath of a cow.” This was not so true as Virginia believed. Morgan’s adven-

tures would have shocked her. ‘

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He mailed the letter to Karachi from West Hackhurst, “the frail house of

old women,” admonishing that both he and Lawrence had been wrong to

“hanker at all after a notion of escaping” such a world. It was far too resilient,

Morgan understood: “a twig from the elm tree would shatter it, yet it preserves

its relative strength internally. My mother still keeps the maids in order.”

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The Sunday Express explicitly rejected Radclyffe Hall's cry for tolerance of inverts, arguing that the novel is a seductive and insidious piece of special pleading designed to display perverted decadence as a martyrdom inflicted on these outcasts by a cruel society.

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In Germany it was illegal to listen to the wireless with the windows closed- the radio became the perfect instrument to foster national conformity