Rowlandson's Oxford

by A. Hamilton Gibbs

From both their accounts, differing so widely from each other, it would seem that the ceremony of matriculation, which to-day is conducted with an almost ecclesiastical solemnity, was in those days simply a matter of form, a tedious business which the Vice-Chancellor hurried through with all speed. One man performed his part in a condition of semi-intoxication without an inkling of the meaning of the oaths to which he subscribed, while another was presented to the Vice-Chancellor in clothes more suitable to a fancy dress ball than to his formal admittance to the university. Neither man drew upon himself the reprimand which to-day would immediately be levelled at him.

In becoming a member of the university, therefore, the eighteenth-century freshman received his first experience of the complete inanition and futility of the Don world. Apparently he suffered no apprehension on the score of not conducting himself with fitting politeness when in the presence of the authorities. Their opinion of him gave him no concern. He was far more anxious not to contravene the unwritten laws of the Undergraduate world. Once the tiresome but necessary matriculation became a thing of the past, he began to look about him, anxiously at first from the desire to avoid grievous blunders which would make him a laughing-stock. All initiative was far too dangerous when the lynx eyes of the entire college were upon him. Actuated by the firm belief that at least he could not be criticised for politeness and good-breeding, the timid freshman endeavoured to ingratiate himself in the eyes of all by doffing his cap with humble frequence. From “Academia, or the Humours of Oxford,” the following bitter excerpt on the question of the freshman’s manners is vastly entertaining.

“Now being arrived at his College,
The place of learning and of knowledge,
A while he’ll leer about, and snivel ye,
And doff his Hat to all most civilly,
Being told at home that a shame face too,
Was a great sign that he had some Grace too,
He’ll speak to none, alas! for he’s
Amased at every Man he sees:
May-hap this lasts a Week, or two,
Till some Scab laugh’s him on’t, so
That when most you’d expect his mending,
His Breeding’s ended, and not ending
Now he dares walk abroad, and dare ye,
Hat on, in peoples’ Faces stare ye;
Thinks what a Fool he was before, to
Pull off his Hat, which he’d no more do;
But that the devil shites Disasters,
So that he’s forc’d to cap the Masters, ...
He must cap them; but for all other,
Tho’ ’twere his Father, or his Mother,
His Gran’num, Uncle, Aunt, or Cousin,
He wo’ not give one Cap to a dozen.”

What wonders may be worked in a week or two! From almost servile politeness he went to the extreme of discourtesy with the assurance of a second-year man.

Imitation is, however, the essence of life. Because certain things are done, all men are compelled to do them unless they wish to incur social ostracism. We are like sheep and must follow our leaders with docility and readiness. If we decline to bow the neck to convention, and declare for originality and freedom, society turns and rends us. At Oxford the punishment for such a crime as originality is swift. A horde of outraged seniors descends like an avalanche upon the sinner’s rooms. They visit their wrath not only upon his belongings but upon his person, and eventually they leave him in a condition of mental and physical chaos, to realise the utter futility of kicking against the pricks.

In the eighteenth century the same social creed was practised. For any transgression from the commonplace the chastisement of the culprit was inevitable. The freshman undoubtedly realised the truth of this, however vaguely, and conducted himself according to the rules laid down by his seniors. His excessive good manners lasted only until the moment when it was born in upon him that rudeness was the policy of his leaders.

But though he might be no more than a scant fifteen years of age, as soon as he wiped away the last tear caused by the departure of his mother, the fresher became a Man, aggressively and consistently so. “No character,” wrote Colman, “is more jealous of the Dignity of Man (not excepting Colonel Bath, in Fielding’s Novel of Amelia), than a lad who has just escaped from School birch to College discipline. This early Lord of the Creation is so inflated with the importance of virility, that his pretension to it is carefully kept up in almost every sentence he utters. He never mentions any one of his associates but as a gentlemanly or a pleasant man—a studious man, a dashing man, a drinking man, etc., etc.—and the Homunculi Togati of Sixteen always talk of themselves as Christ Church men, Trinity, St John’s, Oriel, Brazen-nose men, etc.—according to their several colleges, of which old Hens, they are the Chickens—in short, there is no end to the colloquial manhood of these mannikins.” This passage might easily have been written to-day and not about the middle of the eighteenth century, for the point of view of the modern Oxford man is exactly the same as it was then.

The parents of the old-time fresher looked at his going up and his immediate assumption of manhood from very opposite points of view. The mother, with regulation anxiety, conceived him to be a hardly-used, homesick, half-starved, uncomfortable, thoroughly wretched fellow, doomed to live in stone walls in a fever-stricken and miasmic locality.

“Most dearly tender’d by his Mother,
Who loves him better than his brother;
So she at home a good while keeps him,
In White-broath, and Canary steeps him;
And tho’ his Noddle’s somewhat empty,
His Guts are stuffed with Sweet-meats plenty.”

This is how “Academia” described the mother’s far-reaching apron-string still feeling out, though some weeks cut, for her far distant son. Not so the father! When his wife sent a servant up to Oxford with a well-stuffed hamper for her boy and fond messages as to his health, he went down to the servants’ hall and, planting himself in front of the returned messenger, asked “If’s Son has got a Punck yet Whores he, and gets ye often drunk yet; Being told by’s Man, he took him quaffing, For joy he bursts his sides with laughing; and prithee John (says he) and how was’t—Ha, Drunk i’ the Cellar, as a Sow, wast?”