John Hoppus

The Rev. John Hoppus LL.D., PhD, FRS (1789–1875), was an English Congregational minister, author, Fellow of the Royal Society, abolitionist and educational reformer. He was appointed the first Chair of Logic and Philosophy of Mind at the newly formed London University (now University College, London), a position he secured and held against his formidable opponents from 1829 to 1866.

John Hoppus was educated at a dissenting academy in the north of England, the Rotherham Independent College, and completed his studies first at Edinburgh University under Dugald Stewart, then at Glasgow University where Thomas Chalmers taught. Between 1824 and 1825 he was pastor of the independent Carter Lane Chapel, Bermondsey.

When Hoppus was a young man, England had only two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, and they were restricted to Anglicans. This led to the emergence of many privately funded independent Dissenting academies, many of which functioned as colleges, preparing young men for university studies abroad, in Scotland or on the Continent. In the early nineteenth century, a group of English reformers with liberal educational ideas promoted the idea of a place of further education that might open its doors to men of all religious affiliations or beliefs. This proposal succeeded between 1825–8 with the founding of London University, now University College London, the first entirely nondenominational college of higher education in England.

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