Virginia Stephen's education gave her no framework for understanding the working-class students she was asked to teach. She was a novice, with no theoretical information at her disposal about class difference and little experience with it. Her everyday experience of class was anchored in an unconscious maintaining, not erasing; hierarchies were accepted as a matter of course; attitudes about difference were not identified, discussed or questioned. Given her prior experience, knowledge and context, it is not surprising her comments about students sometimes seem detached or condescending. We still struggle to create equitable social policies and living arrangements, even with a wealth of information about class, difference and diversity.

Information Virginia Stephen did not have. Recent scholarship tells us early twentieth-century London was home to a great variety of people: tens of thousands of people in London in 1901 had been born in Czechoslovakia, Italy and Germany; the Irish Catholic population was around 435,000; and by 1900, the Jewish population had risen to around 135,000 due to Europe's pogroms (Schneer 7–8). Other kinds of difference were inaccurately perceived as being located in the Empire, not in London (J. Whitaker 481). Jonathan Schneer estimates around 1,000 Indians lived in London in 1901 (184); says over 1,300 Chinese lived in England and Wales by 1911 (the Westminster Gazette mentioned Chinese laundries in 1900) (266 n9); and notes ‘a sprinkling’ of African and West Indian immigrants ‘organized the world's first Pan-African Conference’ in 1900 with W. E. B. Du Bois as opening speaker (8). Yet conscious awareness of this diversity was minimal. Whitaker's Almanack for 1917, for example, lists separate demographic information for only the Jewish population (Whitaker 290) and ‘foreigners’ (486–7). Thus, Stephen had little knowledge of other peoples in London and no awareness she should have it. The concept, let alone any resulting obligation, was not on the cognitive map. Activists had been working to make class inequity and solutions visible, but such efforts were easily confused with Victorian middle-class moral pronouncements and, for Stephen, with her mother's charitable service, making it difficult for her to consider, let alone confront, class assumptions. Woolf would later wrestle with class, if not always successfully, but in 1904, Stephen had much to learn.

When Virginia Stephen began teaching at Morley, she knew little about teaching, her students or their context, but as at home, she learned from teachers – a mentor and her students – about the nature of education, the forces of class and