ABSTRACT
Upon his return to Cambridge in 1885, one of Marshall’s main priorities was to attract students to the study of economics. Fawcett, his predecessor in the chair, had suffered, like many professorial colleagues, from students’ general indifference towards lectures that did not contribute directly to their work for the triposes.1 Rather than merely compete with college lectures, Marshall sought to draw also men whose interest in economics went beyond the specific requirements of triposes. In January 1885, he announced that he would be available at home to students seeking ‘advice and informal instruction’ and that he ‘particularly desires to see those students of the subject who are not intending to take it up for examination’.2 He began to attend meetings of the Society for the Study of Social Questions, and joined its committee.3 And in April he announced his first course, choosing for his subject an issue well suited to the interests of the members of the Society and the Cambridge Economic Club-‘Distribution of wealth with special reference to the causes that determine the incomes of different classes in England now, and to the inquiry how far the existing inequalities are unavoidable’. The course, he stated, would be ‘adapted to the wants of those who expect to be concerned with economic questions in the after life, but are not able to give much time to them while at Cambridge’,4 a category of students to which he had made a direct appeal in his inaugural lecture. In addition Marshall offered an advanced course on ‘Some difficult points in the theory of the distribution of wealth’ in the course of which he would ‘set some papers of questions’ with the possible intention of emulating the Oxford tutorial system of essay writing.5 Finally, he would continue to be available at home on Mondays and Wednesdays from 16.30 until 19.00 ‘to give informal instruction and advice as to their reading to any member of the University who may wish to consult him’.
