A history of the University of Oxford

by George C. Brodrick

If we seek to estimate the intellectual life of Oxford during the century following the Revolution, we find a significant dearth of trustworthy materials. Such evidence as we possess, however, justifies on the whole the received opinion that this period is the Dark Age of academical history. The impulse given to culture and scholarship by the new learning of the Renaissance had died away as completely as that given by the scholastic revival of the thirteenth century, and nothing came in to supply its place. The old disputations were almost obsolete, the Laudian system of examinations had fallen into scandalous abuse, the sex solemnes lectiones required for the B.A. degree had degenerated into ‘wall lectures’ read in an empty school. The practice of cramming, however, was unknown, and there were no artificial restrictions to prevent Oxford becoming a paradise of mature study and original research.

Contemporary evidence

Unhappily, it was far otherwise. Though undergraduates were freely admitted to the Bodleian Library, and it was frequently enriched by donations, we learn that between 1730 and 1740 many days passed without there being a single reader there, and it was rare for more than two books to be consulted in a day. Dean Prideaux, who had long resided in Oxford, professes, in 1691, ‘an unconquerable aversion to the place,’ doubtless aggravated by his impatience of Jacobite ascendency in the University, but partly founded on his conviction of its decline as a seat of education. Hearne, writing in 1726, declared that in nearly all the colleges the fellows were busied in litigation and quarrels having no connection with the promotion of learning, adding that ‘good letters miserably decay every day, insomuch that this Ordination on Trinity Sunday at Oxford there were no fewer (as I am informed) than fifteen denied Orders for insufficiency—which is the more to be noted, because our bishops and those employed by them are themselves generally illiterate men.’ Similar complaints against the degeneracy of University teaching abound in eighteenth-century literature. Adam Smith, in particular, attributes the inefficiency of tutors and professors chiefly to the fact of their being paid by fixed stipends instead of by fees. Johnson testifies that he learned very little at Pembroke College; Lord Malmesbury regarded his two years at Merton College as the most unprofitable of his life; Swift represents drinking strong ale and smoking tobacco as the chief accomplishments—not indeed of all students, but of ‘young heirs’ sent to Oxford in deference to custom; Lord Chesterfield speaks of the University as known only for its ‘treasonable spirit,’ and says that, having been at Oxford himself, he resolved not to send his son there; Lord Eldon describes the degree-examination in his own time as merely nominal. But perhaps the most emphatic condemnation of the Oxford system in the eighteenth century is supplied by the historian Gibbon, whose reminiscences of his own University career are often quoted as conclusive evidence on the state of the University in 1752-3. He laments the fourteen months which he spent at Magdalen College as the ‘most idle and unprofitable of his whole life.’ He declares that ‘in the University of Oxford, the greater part of the Public Professors have for these many years given up even the pretence of teaching.’ He testifies that, in his time, ‘the Fellows of Magdalen were decent easy men who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the Founder; their days were filled by a series of uniform employments: the chapel and the hall, the coffee-house and the common-room; till they retired, weary and well-satisfied, to a long slumber. From the toil of reading, or thinking, or writing, they had absolved their conscience.’ He proceeds to allege that gentlemen-commoners were left to educate themselves, that ‘the obvious methods of public exercises and examinations were totally unknown,’ that no superintendence was exercised over the relations of tutors with their pupils, that his own tutor, though a good old-fashioned scholar, took no pains to stimulate or encourage his industry, and that he was allowed to make ‘a tour to Bath, a visit into Buckinghamshire, and four excursions into London, in the same winter.’

Decline in numbers and dearth of eminence in science and literature

We cannot but acknowledge that Gibbon’s estimate of the University in the middle of the century is confirmed by an examination of University records. If we may judge by the statistics of matriculation, the nation at large had lost confidence in Oxford education, for the annual number of admissions, which had often exceeded 300 in the reigns of Anne and George I., never reached that modest total between 1726 and 1810, while it often fell below 200 about the end of George II.’s reign. It is equally certain that Oxford contributed far less than in former ages to politics or literature. In learning it was distanced by Cambridge, where the modern examination system was developed earlier, and where the immortal researches of Newton and the solid learning of Bentley had raised the ideal of academical study. But the real intellectual leadership of the country was transferred from both Universities to London. Indeed, London itself was no longer the only non-academical centre of science, art, and culture; for even provincial towns, like Birmingham and Manchester, Derby and Bristol, Norwich, Leeds, and Newcastle, were already acquiring an industrial independence, and intellectual life, of their own. The Methodist Revival, indeed, of which Gibbon was probably unconscious, owed its origin to a small band of enthusiasts at Oxford.[15] But, except Methodism, the great movements of thought which underlay the artificial society of the eighteenth century had no connection with the University, and the minds which dominated the world of politics and literature were trained in a wholly different school. The broad constructive ideas, and ‘encyclopædic spirit,’ as it has been well called, which animated so many writers and politicians of that age, in all the countries of western Europe, had little or no place in the University of Oxford. It was hardly to be expected that engineers and inventors, like Watt, Arkwright, and Brindley, should have received an University education, nor do we look in degree-lists for the names of eminent soldiers like Wellington, or nautical explorers like Cook. But it is certainly remarkable that so many English poets and humourists—Pope and Gay, Defoe, Smollett, and Hogarth—should have received no University education, while Swift, Congreve, and Goldsmith were students of Dublin, Thomson of Edinburgh, Fielding of Leyden, Prior, Sterne, and Gray, of Cambridge. Again, if we look to graver departments of literature, or the history of science, the result is still the same. Robertson was educated at Glasgow, Hume in France, Berkeley in Dublin; Herschel and Priestley owed nothing to University education, nor did John Howard, or Joshua Reynolds, or John Wilkes, or many others who powerfully influenced the minds of the Georgian era. Jeremy Bentham, it is true, received a part of his education at Queen’s College, but he carried away no kindly recollection of his college life, and sums up his estimate of Oxford training in a single acrimonious sentence—‘Mendacity and insincerity—in these I found the effects, the sure and only sure effects, of an English University education.’

Counter-evidence showing that education and learning were not wholly neglected

On the other hand, it would be easy to overstate both the intellectual sterility and the educational torpor of the University in the century following the Revolution. The ripe scholarship and academic wit of Addison may still be appreciated in the pages of the ‘Spectator,’ and Dr. Parr, in replying to Gibbon, was able to compile an imposing list of Oxford graduates in the eighteenth century ‘distinguished by classical, oriental, theological, or mathematical knowledge, by professional skill, or by parliamentary abilities.’ We must remember that when the historian entered Magdalen College as a gentleman-commoner, he was in his fifteenth year; when he left it, he was barely sixteen. The college did not then bear a high reputation for industry, there were no commoners, and gentlemen-commoners, being of a different social class from the ‘demies,’ were supposed to enjoy the privilege of idleness. Gibbon himself mentions that Corpus was fortunate in possessing an admirable tutor in John Burton. He also candidly admits that Bishop Lowth was a bright exception to professional sinecurism, and quotes the bishop’s description of his own academical life, which is too often forgotten, when Gibbon’s adverse criticism is magnified into a judicial utterance. ‘I spent many years,’ says Lowth, ‘in that illustrious society, in a well-regulated course of useful discipline and studies ... where a liberal pursuit of knowledge, and a genuine freedom of thought, was raised, encouraged, and pushed forward by example, by commendation, and by authority.’ Moreover, Gibbon allows that his father may have been unfortunate in the selection of a college and a tutor, that Sir William Scott’s tutorial, and Blackstone’s professorial, lectures had done honour to Oxford, that learning had been made ‘a duty, a pleasure, and even a fashion’ at Christchurch, and that reforms in the system of instruction had been effected elsewhere. Lord Sheffield, the editor of his memoirs, adds further proofs of the same improvement, and, on the whole, Gibbon’s testimony must be taken as a somewhat one-sided statement of a witness strongly prejudiced against the ecclesiastical character of Oxford, and irritated by the necessity of quitting it, owing to his conversion to Romanism. Similar deductions must be made from the testimony of Bentham, who entered Queen’s in 1760, at the age of 13, and took his degree, in 1763, at the age of 16, having cherished a precocious contempt for juvenile amusements, and a precocious, though reasonable, objection to signing the XXXIX Articles, in spite of conscientious doubts.

It is impossible to ascertain how far the admitted decay of University lectures and examinations was compensated by college tuition. But it is clear that some colleges maintained an educational system of their own, and imposed exercises on their members, often in the form of declamations or disputations, which stood more or less in the place of those formerly required by the University. At Merton College, for instance, there were regular hall-disputations, in which even gentlemen-commoners were expected to bear their part, besides more solemn disputations in divinity for Bachelors of Arts, and ‘Variations’ for ‘Master-Fellows’ at the end of the Act Term. These Variations, as described in a work published in 1749, do not seem to have possessed any great educational value, and, according to a contemporary author, ‘were amicably concluded with a magnificent and expensive supper, the charges of which formerly came to 100l., but of late years much retrenched.’ Such logical encounters were clearly mere survivals or revivals of mediæval dialectics, but there is some reason to believe that sounder and more useful knowledge was quietly cultivated, and rewarded by fellowships, though not yet recognised by University honours. When John Wesley was elected a fellow of Lincoln, in 1726, disputations were held six times a week, as at Merton, but he formed his own scheme of studies. He allotted Mondays and Tuesdays to classics; Wednesdays to logic and ethics; Thursdays to Hebrew and Arabic; Fridays to metaphysics and natural philosophy; Saturdays to rhetoric, poetry, and composition; Sundays to divinity; besides which, he bestowed much attention on mathematics. Doubtless, John Wesley was no common man, but he was never regarded as a prodigy of learning by his fellows, and it was the deliberate opinion of Johnson, in the next generation, that college tuition was not the farce which Gibbon imagined it. Speaking of Oxford in 1768, Dr. Johnson said: ‘There is here, sir, such a progressive emulation. The students are anxious to appear well to their tutors; the tutors are anxious to have their pupils appear well in the college; the colleges are anxious to have their students appear well in the University; and there are excellent rules of discipline in every college.’ Sir William Jones, who obtained a scholarship at University College in 1764, and a fellowship two years later, found means to prosecute his Oriental researches there, and mapped out his own time, like Wesley, between different branches of study. By the statutes of Hertford College, framed in 1747, undergraduates were required to produce a declamation, theme, or translation every week, composing it in English during their second and third years, and in Latin during their fourth. Nor were fellowship-examinations by any means an unmeaning form in good colleges. Those at All Souls’ had long been a real test of intellectual merit, though motives of favouritism sometimes governed the choice of the electors. At Merton, in the early part of the eighteenth century, we read of fellowship-elections being preceded by a thorough examination, including two days of book-work in Homer, Xenophon, Lucian, Tacitus, and Horace, besides a ‘theme,’ doubtless in Latin. When we find that some two hundred and fifty editions of classical works, mostly, but not wholly, in the ancient languages, were published in Oxford during the first half of the eighteenth century, it is hardly possible to doubt that many industrious readers must have existed among the students and fellows of colleges, however imperfect may have been the organisation of lectures. Dr. Charlett, the eminent Master of University College, writing in 1715, was able to praise the youths under his own charge as ‘sober, modest, and studious,’ nor is there any reason to doubt that many students in other colleges deserved a like character. Degenerate as it was, and far inferior to Cambridge in the performance of its higher functions, the University was not so utterly effete as it is sometimes represented. It produced few great scholars and fewer great teachers, but it was not wholly unfaithful to its mission of educating the English clergy and gentry, and the great philosopher, Berkeley, who had described it as an ideal retreat for learning and piety, deliberately chose it as his final home and resting-place.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] No description is here given of the origin and progress of Methodism in Oxford, since the history of the Methodist Revival is reserved for a separate volume in the present series.