Beauty and the Footnote: Universities and the Study of Literature

Stefan Collini, FBA.Professor Emeritus of Intellectual History and English Literature, University of Cambridge.

The Donald Winch Lectures in Intellectual History.University of St Andrews.11th, 12th & 13th October 2022.

In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, universities expanded to include a wide range of what came to be regarded as academic ‘disciplines’. In Britain, the study of ‘English literature’ was eventually to become one of the biggest and most popular of these subjects, yet it was in some ways an awkward fit: not obviously susceptible to the ‘scientific’ treatment considered the hallmark of a scholarly discipline, it aroused a kind of existential commitment in many of those who taught and studied it. These lectures explore some of the ways in which these tensions worked themselves out in the last two hundred years, drawing on a wide range of sources to understand the aspirations invested in the subject, the resistance that it constantly encountered, and the distinctive forms of enquiry that came to define it. In so doing, they raise larger questions about the changing character of universities, the peculiar cultural standing of ‘literature’, and the conflicting social expectations that societies have entertained towards higher education and specialized scholarship.

Handout - Lecture 2: Careers

1. ‘His tastes and pursuits would no doubt lead him to lecture on the Structure of the English Language and its affinities with cognate tongues, rather than upon Rhetoric or the Art of Composition, but when it was mentioned to him that the latter formed part of the duties of the chair, he made no difficulty about undertaking it.’

2. ‘We think that the Professor of the English Language and Literature at our College ought, if it were possible, to unite all the qualifications which we think desirable, to be a thoroughly educated man, a man whose peculiar learning is based upon the sound scholarship which is the general training of English gentlemen. He ought to have made a systematic study of the English Language and English Literature: a systematic study of the Language, so as to be thoroughly conversant with its etymological structure, and the history of its formation through its successive stages; a systematic study of the Literature, so that his familiar knowledge of it may not be confined within the limits of one or two periods. He ought to have experience as a Lecturer, and to be able to lecture well: but he ought to be prepared not only to lecture, but to teach. We must bear in mind, and our Professor must bear in mind, that the practical end of our English Class is to teach our students to use their own language well both in speaking and writing.’

3. ‘All the world is standing, every chatterer in every newspaper thinks he is good enough for English language and literature.’

4. ‘The lecture list of Easter Term was considered. It was agreed that the Reader in Phonetics should be asked either to change the subject of his lecture on Ugrian Phonetics or to remove it from the list, as in the opinion of the Board the subject did not fall within the scope of the school.’

5. ‘The main point, of course, was to choose a scholar and not a chatterer; now the chatterers have command of the newspapers and the scholars have not. That’s all. I have no doubt that to any maker of paragraphs, Matthew, Ealdorman of babblers, seems a greater man than William of Chester’.

6. ‘In those early years everyone, whatever her natural bias, read for the English School at Oxford, because that was the only course for which adequate preparation could at that time be secured.’

7. ‘Well, I have no hesitation in de-classing the whole professorial squad - Bradley, Herford, Dowden, Walter Raleigh, Elton, Saintsbury’... [Saintsbury is allowed to have some strengths, though in spite of his style rather than because of it] ...For the rest: Professor Walter Raleigh is improving. Professor Elton has never fallen to the depths of sterile and pretentious banality which are the natural and customary level of the remaining three.’