The New College at Hackney (more ambiguously known as Hackney College) was a
dissenting academy set up in
Hackney in April 1786 by the social and political reformer
Richard Price and others; Hackney at that time was a village on the outskirts of London, by
Unitarians.[1] It was in existence from 1786 to 1796. The writer
William Hazlitt was among its pupils, sent aged 15 to prepare for the
Unitarian ministry,[2] and some of the best-known Dissenting intellectuals spent time on its staff.[3]
History
The year 1786 marked the dissolution of
Warrington Academy, which had been inactive since 1756 as a teaching institution. Almost simultaneously the
Hoxton Academy of the
Coward Trust, under
Samuel Morton Savage, closed its doors in the summer of 1785.[4] Some of the funding that had backed Warrington was available for a new dissenting academy for the London area, as well as for a northern successor in
Manchester. The London building plans were ambitious, but proved the undoing of the New College, which was soon strained financially.[5]
The successors in the movement as a whole were Manchester New College, and a new Exeter College under
Joseph Bretland, which existed from 1799 to 1805.[6]
David Jones, previously at
Homerton College, moved to Hackney on becoming a Unitarian, then a tutor in experimental philosophy, moving away in 1792 to fill Priestley's ministry in Birmingham;[16]
Another Hackney College, properly Hackney Itineracy, also known as
Hackney Academy and Hackney Theological College, was set up in 1802 by
George Collison. It is this one that became part of
New College London, and in the end part of the
University of London.
Homerton College was at this time in the
parish of Hackney, and had been in some form from 1730, as a less ambitious academy; when the New College folded, its future became part of Homerton College's, which since 1894 has been in Cambridge.[25]Robert Aspland set up a successor Unitarian college at Hackney, in 1813.[26]
^David L. Wykes, The Dissenting Academy and Rational Dissent, pp. 131-2 in Knud Haakonssen (editor), Enlightenment and Religion: Rational dissent in eighteenth-century Britain (1996).