Herbert Somerton Foxwell

In the late ‘sixties and early ‘seventies of the last century St John’s College was the nursery of Cambridge economics. In 1868 Marshall left Mathematics for the Moral Sciences,2 in the same year Foxwell came up to enter for that tripos, and in 1870 Henry Cunynghame; and in two of her children, Marshall and Foxwell, St John’s gave the University two antitheses, two complementary forces, as different from one another as possible except in their single-heartedness. It was due, I think, to the influence of the Master, the great Dr Bateson, that St John’s joined with Trinity to foster the new studies of the Moral Sciences which had at that time no endowment whatever in the University for the younger teachers; but whilst Trinity’s interests gravitated towards philosophy (Sidgwick and James Ward) or to law and history (Maitland and Cunningham), those of St John’s were entirely towards economics (Marshall and Foxwell). This single college had, indeed, made a remarkable provision for the new subjects, J. B. Mayor and J. B. Pearson having been appointed College lecturers in the Moral Sciences in the earlier ‘sixties, Marshall in 1868 and Foxwell in 1875. In the decade from 1873 prior to the New Regulations and the abolition of the Senior Moralist, a period when, to judge by subsequent achievement, it was more distinguished to be Senior Moralist than to be Senior Wrangler, nine out of the eighteen candidates in the first class were Johnians.