Scottish vs. English Universities, 1867

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 102-104:

In November 1867, just as he was turning seventeen, Louis entered the University of Edinburgh as the first step toward a professional career, and his life changed dramatically. It was the same year in which the Stevensons took their lease on Swanston Cottage....

As an undergraduate Louis continued to live at home; there was no residential housing at the university, and students from out of town had to rent lodgings. All the same, he enjoyed plenty of freedom, unlike students at Oxford and Cambridge, who had compulsory chapel and lectures, wore caps and gowns, and were punished if they stayed out after curfew. It’s notable that those were the only two universities in all of England. In Scotland, in addition to Edinburgh, which was the most recently founded, there were also St Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen. In an essay some years later Louis celebrated his university’s freedom and urban energy.

The English lad goes to Oxford or Cambridge; there, in an ideal world of gardens, to lead a semi-scenic life, costumed, disciplined and drilled by proctors. Nor is this to be regarded merely as a stage of education; it is a piece of privilege besides, and a step that separates him further from the bulk of his compatriots. At an earlier age the Scottish lad begins his greatly different experience of crowded class-rooms, of a gaunt quadrangle, of a bell hourly booming over the traffic of the city to recall him from the public-house where he has been lunching, or the streets where he has been wandering fancy-free. His college life has little of restraint, and nothing of necessary gentility.... Our tasks ended, we of the North go forth as freemen into the humming, lamplit city. At five o’clock you may see the last of us hiving from the college gates, in the glare of the shop windows, under the green glimmer of the winter sunset. The frost tingles in our blood; no proctor lies in wait to intercept us; till the bell sounds again we are the masters of the world.

As a master of the world, Louis declined to do much studying. He found the teaching formal and tedious, and was already accustomed to self-education. Besides, he was supposedly there to learn engineering, which he already knew he disliked. That engineering was taught at all made Edinburgh very different from the English universities, where the curriculum was heavily classical and mathematical. At Cambridge Isaac Newton, one of the greatest physicists of all time, had been a professor of mathematics, not physics.