Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes. Richard Davenport-Hines

of England lost its privilege to exclude religious dissenters and Roman Catholics from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and from their constituent colleges. This reform followed hard on Gladstone’s order-in-council in 1870 that future permanent appointments to the civil service (excluding the Foreign Office) should be filled by open competitive examinations – for which university-trained candidates were most apt. Both the reform of civil service recruitment and the abolition of university tests dismantled England’s traditional system of jobbery and sinecures; but although hailed as bold progressive measures they were also socially defensive. They occurred shortly after the Second Reform Act of 1867, which had broadened the electoral franchise: the dual reforms of 1870–1 were intended to bolster the established order by accommodating dissenters within both administrative government and the ancient universities, thus defusing the power of outsiders’ dissident thinking and dispelling their grievances in a time of diffused democracy. Until the University Tests Act relaxed admissions policy to include religious nonconformists, most advanced, significant and enduring political, social, economic and scientific (although not theological) ideas had come from men working outside the ancient universities. After 1871, for nearly a century, until the two universities became less exclusive and less authoritative, the world of ideas was dominated by people who had trained at either Oxford or Cambridge.

      These twin reforms of 1870–1 established a new governing order of trained, non-partisan expertise to regulate human affairs and national destinies. They were, incidentally, the making of Maynard Keynes. Nearly fifty years later, in scornful and unforgiving mood, he compiled one of the deadliest indictments and most rousing rallying-cries against the corrupt and botched old political order: The Economic Consequences of the Peace is one culmination of the trends began by open competitive examination and the University Tests Act. Moreover, university reform – as a tempered experiment designed to forestall social upheaval – proved a model for later Keynesian economics.

      Social exclusions and cultural filters were retained in the ancient universities by the primacy of classical languages in the entrance requirements and by the narrow appeal of the curriculum. Dead languages were the antidote to the mercenary outlook that emphasized ownership, productivity, money-making, accumulation. The traditional educated classes feared that if the classics were ousted from their position as the chief instrument of education at Oxford and Cambridge, Greek would perish in the grammar schools and the ascent from elementary schools to those universities would become too easy. ‘Ancient Colleges shd be fortresses of the humanities,’ with newer universities in London, Manchester and Birmingham providing more utilitarian, modern systems, Maynard Keynes’s teacher H. E. Luxmoore wrote in 1901, explaining why he opposed the abolition of Greek as a compulsory subject for university admission examinations. ‘If a very smart Science or Math man knows no Greek I don’t see much harm … but I had rather he went to Owens College or Liverpool. Is that pig-headed?’5

      The University Tests Act enabled Neville Keynes to obtain promotion from London University to Cambridge a year after the legislation was ratified. In 1872 he won, at the age of twenty, the top entrance scholarship in classics and mathematics at Pembroke, one of the smaller Cambridge colleges. Dismayed by the drab, stilted teaching of mathematics by hacks who crammed their pupils for the examinations, he was drawn to moral sciences, where lively, innovative dons, notably Henry Sidgwick and Alfred Marshall, gave inspiring tuition in philosophy, political economy and logic. At the earliest possible moment, he transferred from mathematics to moral sciences, which he studied for two and a half years. He was elected as a Fellow of Pembroke in 1876 (the first nonconformist to be admitted into the fellowship), acquired the minor college office of domestic bursar, and for six years gave intercollegiate lectures on logic and political economy to male undergraduates and to students from the new women’s colleges, Girton and Newnham.

      Initially, as a provincial youth from a Baptist family in trade, Neville Keynes floundered in Cambridge college life. His isolation was mitigated by finding a congenial set of religious dissenters who met at a Congregationalist grocer’s home a few minutes’ walk from Pembroke: best of all, among them, a robust, clear-headed girl called Florence Brown (1861–1958). As the eldest child of John Brown, Minister of Bunyan’s Meeting at Bedford, she had been reared in the manse in Dame Alice Street, Bedford. Her father was the biographer of Bunyan, wrote books on puritanism and on the Pilgrim Fathers, and received an honorary degree in divinity from Yale. Her brother Walter Langdon-Brown became Regius Professor of Physic at Cambridge in 1932, and was knighted three years later. At seventeen she went to Newnham, the Cambridge woman’s college which had been founded in 1871 under the sponsorship of Henry Sidgwick. Although, from 1881, women students of Girton and Newnham were permitted to be examined and classed in tripos examinations, they were kept ineligible for titular degrees until 1923, and were not conceded membership of the university until 1947.

      Neville Keynes married Florence Brown in 1882. His paternal inheritance of £17,000, which he invested on the Stock Exchange, ensured that they both had well-kept, orderly lives. After the outlay required to set up his household, and to run it harmoniously, he still had in 1887 investments with a net worth of about £17,300, which provided 60 per cent of his family’s income. As a man who disliked uncertainty in all things, he was a fretful, pessimistic investor, who saw a steady increment in the net value of his investments: over £24,000 by 1900; £38,000 by 1908.

      In November 1882 the newly-marrieds moved into a newly built semi-detached brick house at 6 Harvey Road, Cambridge. The kitchen and servants’ room were in the basement; a study and dining-room lay on either side of the double-fronted, bay-windowed ground floor, with the larger drawing-room overlooking the small back garden; family bedrooms were on the first floor; with attic bedrooms for the cook, parlour-maid, and nursery-maid. The furnishings from Maple’s furniture emporium in Tottenham Court Road were well polished, but not too shiny. The walls were covered with family photographs and etchings of reassuring conventionality. For Neville Keynes his home was a sanctum beneath its curtain pelmets.

      The row of houses in Harvey Road, with their uniform bricks, angles and front steps, had been erected to accommodate married dons after the lifting of the celibacy restrictions on the tenure of fellowships. They were occupied, when Keynes was a child, by such Cambridge luminaries as the composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, the university’s Professor of Music; Sir Donald Macalister, a Fellow of St John’s for fifty-seven years and President of the General Medical Council for twenty-seven years; the physicist Sir Richard Glazebrook, senior bursar of Trinity; the mathematician William Besant, a Fellow of St John’s; and Anchitel Boughey, vicar of Great St Mary’s church, a lecturer in classics and theology, and a Fellow of Trinity. Harvey Road – a tree-lined residential street that was not a short-cut to anywhere except Fenner’s cricket ground – stood about midway between Pembroke College and Cambridge railway station (the latter within pleasant walking-distance). At the foot of the road a bulky Roman Catholic church was built in the early 1890s: it was said by E. M. Forster to have been funded by someone who made a fortune supplying movable eyes for dolls, but was in fact financed by a ballet-dancer who took to Christian repentance after marrying a banker.

      Cambridge in the 1880s, and for another century, resembled a country town rather than a university city. It was nearer to John Keynes’s native Salisbury than to Oxford. The atmosphere and values at 6 Harvey Road might have been those of a medical household in a provincial town if it had not been for the emphasis on educational striving, tripos results, the rating of young men as having ‘first-class minds’ or being ‘unsound’. Maynard Keynes was always proud to identify himself as a member of the educated middle class: he saw education as enlarging and redemptive.

      The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge Act of 1877 meanwhile facilitated reforms of college and university statutes, which came into force about the time of Neville Keynes’s marriage in 1882. Life fellowships (unless held with a major college office) were abolished; a progressive levy on colleges redistributed income throughout the university; and the ban on the marriage of college fellows was lifted. As a practical idealist, keen to raise academic quality, Neville Keynes diverted his energies towards the administration of the reformed university, became assistant secretary of the Examinations Board at Cambridge and vacated his fellowship. Two years later, in 1884, he was included among the first Cambridge University lecturers ever