In case you missed it: public histories of student life
Posted on 19th October, 2026
Originally published on the IOE Blog, this article by Georgina Brewis explores how students in London have been represented in popular culture from the nineteenth century to the interwar period. Drawing on her open access UCL Press book Student London: A New History of Higher Education in the Capital, Brewis examines five recurring student archetypes, from medical students and ‘girl graduates’ to bohemian artists, Indian students and the ‘bright young things’, revealing how public perceptions of student life reflected wider social attitudes, anxieties and cultural change.
I’ve been interested in students as historical actors and university campuses as important sites of heritage, memory and meaning since my own undergraduate degree 25 years ago. In my professorial lecture in May 2026, I explained that a lot of my thinking on this topic of public and popular histories of student life has coalesced over the past five years during research for the book Student London. I started to understand how students had shaped the capital and how fascinated nineteenth-century audiences were by them. In an age when very few people got the chance to go to university, students were a source of intrigue and satire, and they regularly turn up as stock characters in press articles, novels and cartoons. In what follows, I summarise the five ‘archetypes’ that I discussed in my professorial lecture, archetypes that became a particular focus of attention across the press and literature of the time.
Medical students as portrayed in Punch, 2 Oct. 1841. Source: The Reading Room/Alamy Stock Photo.
Medical students
From the mid-nineteenth century, medical students were frequently caricatured in both the press and popular novels as drunken, lazy and rowdy. In 1841, its first year of publication, the satirical magazine Punch ran a weekly series documenting the trajectory of a London medical student. From a keen ‘new man’, diligently making copious lecture notes, he changes into a layabout rarely seen in class, frequently hungover and always broke. Charles Dickens similarly depicted the dissolute lifestyle of medical students in The Pickwick Papers, serialised across 1836-37.
In addition to fears about the dangers of the city, such negative representations also reflected concerns about the medical profession itself, and in particular the dubious ways in which students and professors were suspected of obtaining corpses for dissection at the time, with the notorious case of Edinburgh grave-robbers Burke and Hare fresh in the public imagination.
Two ‘sweet girl graduates’ in their ‘prettily furnished room’ in College Hall published by The Graphic, 1883.
Girl Graduates
There were a number of largely successful attempts to rehabilitate the medical student image – but by the end of the century they were old news, for the press had a new target: women. Women’s admission to higher education in England began in the 1860s and from 1878 they were allowed to study for degrees awarded by the University of London. There was a growing public fascination with the lives of these so-called ‘girl graduates’ who flouted convention by living away from home. Lavish descriptions of women’s college rooms featured regularly in magazines for middle-class girls, while reports of the Women’s Debating Society formed at UCL in 1879 appeared in ladies’ journals. Not all depictions of women students were so positive, with students often caricatured as ‘New Woman’: short-sighted, wearing rational dress, smoking or riding bicycles. Although not criminalised in the same ways as homosexual men, women’s relationships with other women came under increased scrutiny in the period, and by the first decades of the twentieth century supposedly ‘mannish’ women offended society almost as much as effeminate men. There is some truth to this stereotype, for Lesbian relationships, romantic friendships and gender nonconformity were a feature of female medical or academic circles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
London School of Medicine for Women students in the lab. Source: Royal Free Archives.
Bohemian art students
Another group of students that made themselves noticed by the press at this time were art students, some of whom began to affect a deliberately bohemian style of beards, corduroys, sandals and jerseys and eschew the conventional suits, stiff collars and hats that other students wore. They also had a passion for fancy dress: art balls became so notorious in Edwardian London they found their way into popular literature – in H. G. Wells’s 1907 novel the eponymous London student Ann Veronica is forbidden to attend such a gathering by her father, precipitating her to run away from the restrictions of her suburban home.
However, the real-life examples we have reveal much about the limits to change at this period. Students at UCL could be expelled for ‘idleness and going about with men’, as Olive Skene was in 1909. There was also a scandal in 1910, when assistant lecturer in the Egyptology Department, Walter Crum, unhappily married and unable to secure a divorce from his Roman Catholic wife, began an affair with a student, Margaret Hart Davis. Both were asked to leave the college, and they eloped to Austria, living together until Crum’s death in 1944.
Slade students prepare for the Chelsea Arts Ball in 1926. Source: Slade Archive.
Indian students
Another stock figure in late Edwardian popular culture was the supposedly friendless Indian student, rotting in his Bloomsbury digs and vulnerable to political radicalisation. As they grew in number, Indian students started to come under increased surveillance from the British government, which was concerned that students were becoming radicalised by the growing nationalist movement in the subcontinent, particularly after the unpopular partition of the Bengal Presidency in 1905. In 1907, the Secretary of State for India launched an inquiry into conditions which was deemed too controversial to be published at the time. This report argued that the hundreds of Indian students in London were experiencing isolation and faced various, mostly unnamed, ‘temptations’. It accepted that part of the problem was a hardening of ‘colour prejudice’ which made it difficult for such students to socialise with British students.
Again, there are real life examples. In July 1909 UCL student Madan Lal Dhingra assassinated the India Office official Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie on the steps of the Imperial Institute in Kensington. Dhingra sought a martyr’s death, declaring he was ‘proud to have the honour of laying down my life for the cause of my motherland’. Unsurprisingly, UCL at the time was not keen to publicise the connection; it made no public statement and references to the incident in college minutes are veiled. Dhingra’s student registry file recorded simply ‘died 1909’.
UCL student Madan Lal Dhingra is celebrated in India as a freedom fighter.
Bright young things
After the devastation of the First World War (1914-18) and the influenza pandemic, it is not surprising that students returning to the classroom sought what they described as ‘fun and fizz’. Commentators like the so-called ‘London Spy’ Thomas Burke might mock the ‘fashionable pleasures’ of post-war youth with their ‘midnight suppers, art balls, dance clubs and revels, exotic costume’, but such exploits proved fascinating to a public audience. From the early 1920s, the new-style ‘gossip columns’ in the Daily Express and Daily Mail covered the hedonistic antics of wealthy socialites, some of the best known of whom were Slade students Stephen Tennant, Rex Whistler and Oliver Messell. Tennant was a ‘glittering androgynous figure with an almost alien sexuality’ who became the ‘visual epitome’ of the bright young people. By this date, London’s student district had become notorious for its associations with the Bloomsbury Group of writers, artists and intellectuals, who ‘made sexual openness their watchword’. In the age of the cinema newsreel, there was strong public interest in the ragging activities of London students. In December 1927, for instance, a street collection featuring more than 500 students at UCL was filmed by Pathé News. Students recognised that there were double standards at work here. As one article in University College Magazine noted, the public ‘rowdyism and bonfires in Bloomsbury are good news and good entertainment for the public, as long as they don’t go too far … when the press is immediately righteously indignant’. The press began to feature complaints about students disrupting theatre performances or taking ragging too far. In 1929 the Daily Mail approvingly noted that King’s College authorities had ‘set an example’ by suspending three students after they poured paint on UCL’s war memorial. In fact, several students did find themselves in front of magistrates charged with acts of vandalism, criminal damage and rowdyism that would almost certainly have landed working-class boys in jail.
Rag antics in UCL’s quadrangle, 1920s.
Interested in hearing more about how London’s students were represented in popular culture? You can read Georgina Brewis and Sam Blaxland’s new book Student London: A New History of Higher Education in the Capital open access at Student London | UCL Press.