"This book is not a contribution to the history of English higher education or of Victorian philanthropy. It is a biography, largely based on his own journals, of an English eccentric who left a fortune to Southampton, with an account of his forebears who made the fortune and of the problems that his bequest raised"--Page ix. Henry Robinson Hartley (1777-1850) " ... was anti-Christian, opposed to the social order of his day, a misanthropic and eccentric recluse who abandoned Southampton and even England in disgust and protest. His main con- cern, in his bequest to Southampton Corporation, was the preservation of his houses, books, writings and personalia, to continue after his death his mute protest in life against the town's nineteenth-century development and industralisation"--Page 1.