How did English literature become a university subject?

Even if you didn’t ‘read English’ at university yourself, you almost certainly know plenty of people who did, and more or less everyone has had to study English literature at school at some point or other. As a subject, ‘English’ (an adjective masquerading as a noun) has been central to educational arrangements in Britain for well over a century, seeming for much of that time to occupy a privileged place in the wider culture as well.

Yet literature may seem the most unlikely candidate for becoming a recognized academic discipline. For the most part, science and scholarship have operated with implicit canons of enquiry that have emphasized objectivity, verified knowledge, causal analysis, and impersonal, replicable forms of argument and presentation. But the reader’s encounter with works of imaginative literature does not easily lend itself to such treatment, involving instead subjectivity, degrees of responsiveness, evaluative judgement, and highly individual forms of imaginative re-creation.

As a result, there was initially scepticism about, even considerable resistance to, the idea that the study of vernacular literature might merit a place alongside the new disciplines being established in the expanding universities of the nineteenth century, and even when it had secured a foothold in the curriculum it continued to be derided in some quarters as ‘a soft option’. Surely the reading of enjoyable works of literature in one’s native language, so the objection went, was an activity to be pursued in one’s leisure hours? A university concerned itself with matters of exact scholarship and rigorous reasoning, as in the established disciplines of Classics and Mathematics: appreciation of the beauties of poetry had no claim to rank alongside these strenuous exercises, and, besides, it was clearly impossible to devise an objective way to examine achievement in such a personal, even emotional, activity.

So how did the improbable marriage of beauty and the footnote came to pass; or in other words, how did English, despite these and other objections, establish itself within British universities so successfully that it could sometimes be spoken of by the beginning of the 1960s as the ‘central’ subject in those institutions—even, in some hard-to-define way, as central to the culture at large? The answer to this question cannot take the form of a seamless narrative. We need, for example, to think about some of the larger enabling contextual conditions—the prior reverence for an established canon of English literature, the authority of Classics as a model and a rival, the formative role of history and philology as exemplars of serious scholarship. We also need to examine the relevant institutional developments between the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries: how far was the Scottish tradition of teaching ‘rhetoric and belles-lettres’ a genuine precursor of ‘Eng Lit’; what were the early civic universities actually like; why were Oxford and, especially, Cambridge comparatively late in establishing courses in English; why was English disproportionately prominent in the institutions founded for the higher education of women; and how did these developments relate to what was going on in schools?

Shifting the focus, we need to think about the roles played by some of those who are regarded as among the ‘founding figures’ of the discipline—some who are well-known, such as Matthew Arnold and A.C. Bradley, but also some who are not, such as John Churton Collins, George Saintsbury, Walter Raleigh, and Arthur Quiller-Couch, as well as thinking about the status of the ‘professorial estate’ more generally, looking at its economic circumstances, its recruitments patterns, and so on. And what about the everyday forms of departments, journals, professional associations and so on? They can’t be left out of the story, can they?

Once we’d done all this, we’d be in a position to challenge the conventional accounts of ‘the rise of English’, showing, for example, that I.A. Richards’s supposedly transformative effect on the discipline was in reality more limited, and that the vogue for ‘criticism’ spread more slowly and more unevenly than has been assumed. In fact, we would eventually discover that most English departments at the beginning of the 1960s still had very traditional-looking syllabuses.

At present, ‘Eng Lit’ is widely seen as a discipline in crisis, with reductions in courses and even closures of whole departments being reported across the country. These problems are systemic and there is no one answer to them, but whatever view we take of the current position and future prospects of the study and teaching of English literature, the essential starting point has to be a more adequate account of the history of the enterprise, one that does not reductively depict it in either sinister or salvationist terms.

_{Feature image by Patrick Tomasso via Unsplash.}