There were many other minor literary outputs which made their appearance from time to time through the century, but it would be tedious to analyse all of them. The outstanding ones were The Oxford Packet, Academia: or the Humours of Oxford, The Oxford Act, Tom Warton’s fighting poem entitled The Triumph of Isis, and The Oxford Sausage.
The Oxford Packet was a purely topical piece of writing containing heated articles on the burning questions of the moment in Oxford. It was published in London, “printed for J. Roberts in 1714,” with a list of contents including “(1) News from Magdalene College (Sacheverell’s Inscription on a piece of plate); (2) Antigamus: or a Satire against Marriage, written by Mr Thomas Sawyer; (3) A Vindication of the Oxford Ladies, wherein are displayed the amours of some Gentlemen of All Souls and St John’s Colleges.”
Academia, perpetrated by a woman, Alicia d’Anvers, ridiculed the manners and customs of the university in a pointed and quite scurrilous manner. It lived up to its sub-title, however, for it was an extremely humorous piece of work.
In 1733 there appeared the The Oxford Act, a ballad opera. A crude and unamusing play, it is nevertheless interesting as containing the germ of modern musical comedy. The idea of the piece was to satirise university politics, but the lack of construction and the laboured manner in which the dramatist introduced his songs and manœuvred his characters makes it tedious and rather difficult to appreciate.
The Triumph of Isis was occasioned by a denunciation of Oxford by a Cambridge man, William Mason, who was guilty of a poem entitled Isis. In it he taunted Oxford upon the degeneracy of her sons who
“... madly bold
To Freedom’s foes infernal orgies hold.”
This was more than any devoted son of Alma mater could stand. Accordingly, Tom Warton, stung to a retort, girded up his loins and flung off The Triumph of Isis, in which he hurled ten thousand thunderbolts at The Venal Sons of Slavish Cam. Dr Anderson, who wrote a preface to the collection of Warton’s poems, says, “It is remarkable that though neither Mason nor Warton ever excelled these performances, each of them as by consent, when he first collected his poems into a volume, omitted his own party production.”[23]
It was not until 1764 that The Oxford Sausage was concocted. Its title is singularly apt. It was a volume of choice scraps—selected pieces in prose and verse which had already made their appearance in other and earlier publications. It included several poems by Tom Warton, who edited The Sausage, and contained others from The Student and the Oxford Journal.
These then are the literary productions which distinguished the eighteenth century in Oxford. From the numerous excerpts and passages quoted in preceding chapters it will have been seen that there is not only an enormous difference between the writing of the eighteenth century and to-day in style and treatment, but in the method of conducting a paper. To-day it is quite impossible to call a spade a spade. In those days it was exactly the opposite. The whole point of writing was to call things by their proper names. In fact, any other method would have been completely misunderstood. The morals of the time were not more lax than now—that would be impossible—but the language employed was, to put it mildly, very much more unguarded.
Matters were openly discussed in the drawing-rooms of the eighteenth century which nowadays are supposed to be whispered in smoking-rooms. Drunkenness and other kindred vices were held in high esteem. It was “the thing” for him who had any aspirations to be a man of the world to have a half dozen bottles of wine to his own cheek at one sitting, and unless he succeeded in arriving at that state of helplessness which necessitated bodily assistance from persons unknown, he was a dismal social failure. Women, whose husbands were carried home night after night, smiled leniently and did not dream of interfering. Many ladies indeed did not deny themselves the solace of the bottle, and in the records of the time I have found more than one reference to women who were well-known, almost licensed, topers. The question of toasts, too, and the light in which the university held them, was Gilbertian. The statutes sternly forbade them under penalty of dire pains and punishments, but for all practical purposes the statutes were a waste of time. Oxford was famed for her toasts, and their dealings were not confined solely to the gownsmen but also to Dons and Heads of colleges, who, far from carrying out the statutes which they had made, pooh-poohed them and indulged themselves to their heart’s content.