Virginia Stephen's education was in part extraordinary, tailor-made for her profession, and better than most young women at the time received: rich in resources and with considerable freedom. On the other hand, it was terrible: erratic, narrow, lonely. She educated herself, receiving informal instruction from various teachers, but like the working-class students she would teach, she had to provide initiative, motivation and discipline on her own. Her education, no matter its strengths and weaknesses, gave her no preparation for teaching at Morley College. She lacked experience with numerous teachers, institutional training or guidance, and cultural awareness about difference. She also, one suspects, lacked knowledge about Morley College or its place within the educational debates of the time. She walked into a rough section of town, into a building which had its classes behind a stage, and into a situation for which nothing in her life or education had prepared her. When she entered her first Morley classroom, Virginia Stephen, just shy of 23, faced the task of negotiating the difference between her own educational background and that of her students. Those negotiations had a lot to do with class, and they influenced the strategies for reaching readers she would eventually develop as an essayist.

Morley College's History, Mission

Morley College's origins make a fascinating story. As Sybil Oldfield puts it in her biography of Mary Sheepshanks and F. M. Mayor, ‘There has never been an institution of further education like it’ (SP 65). Thomas Kelly notes how Emma Cons changed the Old Vic Theatre, known for melodrama, prostitutes and thieves, into the Royal Victoria Coffee Hall in 1880, started offering classes in 1885, and established Morley Memorial College in 1889 with Samuel Morley's help (AE 193–4). As Denis Richards tells it (17–85), Cons moved south of the river to Lambeth to manage a struggling block of ‘model’ dwellings for Octavia Hill. For her, though, better housing was just the start; the poor also deserved educational and recreational facilities, and the latter should not tempt them to drink, which brought even more poverty, physical and mental deterioration, and brutality against women and children. She was determined to create a ‘centre for innocent and wholesome recreation’ (T. Kelly, AE 193), and she succeeded, with the Royal Victoria Coffee Hall offering not only inexpensive tea, coffee and meals,