£14 9s 3d for tuition fees? Bring in a cap!

We study Newton and Darwin - but not how they managed their student debt

The Times Online

November 5 2010 12:01AM

He is the very model of the kind of student the Government seems to have in mind: he graduates and goes on to make a pile of money - even though he had to struggle to fund his way through his studies. A reluctant farmer, he was fined 3s 4d at the age of 16 for allowing his swine to trespass and his fences to lie in disrepair. But just a few decades later he was Master of the Mint and (quite literally) coining it and paying himself a percentage of every pound coined. He was also, in effect, master of the universe.

Oddly enough, Isaac Newton didn’t study “science”. He barely knew the word. He concentrated on “natural philosophy” (and alchemy) at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was admitted in 1661 as one of the so-called “sizars”. In return for free tuition he had to run errands, feed and poke the fires of the well-off “fellow commoners” (gentry) or “pensioners” (studying for the ministry). It was the rough equivalent of getting a job at McDonald’s today. Then it was Super Sizar Me.

Fortunately it cost him nothing to contemplate apples falling from trees. But we know that he had enough money to afford a prism at Stourbridge Fair (leading to his theory of “differently refrangible rays”), so his mother, who had already provided him with a chamber pot, notebook, bottle of ink and some candles, must have slipped him a few shillings from time to time. His lot improved in 1667 when he was elected a Fellow (£2 a year). At the age of 27, he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, when he received the magnificent stipend of £100 a year.

It is likely that the new, post-state future of universities is going to resemble the pre-state past. It may be a kind of bitter-sweet consolation to a new generation of undergraduates to know that some of our best-known students of old had their share of funding (and other) crises.

William Wordsworth was another sizar. He was admitted to St John’s, Cambridge in 1787, where he had a “nook obscure” but, as he wrote in The Prelude, his autobiographical poem, he was already worried about costs: “[I had] some fears/ About my future worldly maintenance.” He didn’t too well in his exams (classics and “geometrical science”), which is unsurprising since “I was the Dreamer, they the Dream”.

The poet relied on a couple of well-off uncles to cover expenses - which they did grudgingly. “He has had near £300 since he went to Cambridge,” wrote Uncle Christopher, “which I think is a very shameful sum for him to spend, considering his expectations.” Wordsworth was a firm advocate of postponing the repayment of debts. As late as 1803, long after he had left university and was wandering lonely as a cloud full-time, he still owed his tutor £10.

Charles Darwin failed as a physician at Edinburgh (he didn’t fancy dissecting corpses). So, as a kind of punishment, he was sent to Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1828 to study divinity instead. His father was paying, so Darwin reluctantly signed up to become an Anglican minister. “Considering how fiercely I have been attacked by the orthodox,” he wrote later on in life, “it seems ludicrous that I once intended to be a clergyman.”

He claims to have done his share of partying, but admits that the highlight of his university career was hunting beetles. He used to go around picking them up but once, spotting a handsome new specimen, he had his hands full so he popped it in his mouth for safekeeping (only spitting it out when the beetle “ejected an acrid fluid”). “I am surprised what an indelible impression many of the beetles which I caught at Cambridge left on my mind.”

Darwin paid a total of £636 0s 9½d over three years, including bills to the barber, grocer, tailor, and chimneysweep, and extra for vegetables with his meals. In our terms, that is around £48,000. In the middle of the 19th century, even a sizar had to shell out £14 9s 3d in tuition fees - but in total more like about £60 or £70 per annum in living costs (about £5,000), including £3 10s (£283) for coal. If you want to become a physicist, poet, or a coleopterist in the Big Society of the future, it will definitely help to have rich relatives, or patrons, or a network of well-disposed scholars and teachers to help you along the way. Or make a mint.