Gothic Britain by Ruth Heholt & William Hughes

Author:Ruth Heholt & William Hughes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786832351
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)
Published: 2013-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

‘Seekers after knowledge’: inside the university

The ancient universities and the role played by scholars were in fact the subject of intense national debate and relatively unsuccessful attempts at reform throughout the nineteenth century.38 As Frank M. Turner notes, the liberal education the universities provided was intended to train a national and imperial elite with the ‘particular expansion of outlook, turn of mind, habit of thought, and capacity for social and civic interaction’ associated with that elusive ‘person of broad knowledge, critical intelligence, moral decency, and social sensitivity’ known as ‘the Gentleman’.39 However, as Soffer observes, the ‘ancient universities, with their well-deserved reputations for sloth and isolation, became conspicuous targets’ for reformers who felt that more practical and professional training was needed to maintain Britain’s competitiveness.40 In ‘agreement about the need to preserve traditions’, the universities, however, resisted reform by attempting ‘to preempt and control changes that might otherwise have been forced upon them’, in fact conserving the past and bygone modes of thought when they were charged with providing for the future.41 Thus, The Times had earlier in the century described Oxford as ‘the seat of isolated barbarism amongst an ocean of wholesome knowledge and of useful action’ that is ‘generations behind the rest of the kingdom, and fitter to sympathize with the monks of the Escurial than with a free and reflecting people’.42 In keeping with such assessments, ‘University Gothic’ suggests that the ‘barbaric’, ‘decrepit and superseded’ ‘rottenness’ of the university does not in fact foster modern, progressive thinkers but drunken, womanising and Latinless undergraduates, degenerate gentlemen harbouring monstrous dual identities, and bigoted dons whose ‘blood-red robes’ point to a fundamental barbarity at the heart of university life.43

As Soffer notes, the university was ‘a closed community purposefully segregated from’ and ‘protected against intrusion from the outside world’.44 Until well into the twentieth century, this ‘intellectual aristocracy’ represented ‘a small, interrelated, and self-perpetuating caste’, an ‘almost exclusively male, quasi-monastic communit[y]’ drawn ‘from the upper and, increasingly, from the upwardly mobile middle classes’.45 In University Gothic, this monastic tendency facilitates the gathering of dangerous knowledge for personal gain that grants its possessor excessive levels of power. An institution designed to benefit the nation, the university is instead seen to foster secrecy and deviance, the physical appearance of the scholars often strongly hinting at their (moral) degeneracy. In Richard Marsh’s Gothic science-fiction novel A Spoiler of Men, for example, the anti-hero Cyril Wentworth’s academic uncle, Professor Hammond Hurle of St Clement’s College, Camford, is ‘a pathetic little figure of helplessness’, a ‘minute’, ‘delicate’ and ‘emasculate’ man who can only survive within the walls of ‘the pleasantest college in the university of Camford’.46 Hurle’s degeneracy is confirmed by his stationary life:

He had been a bookworm all his life... He had never even travelled... It was credibly reported that for nearly forty years he had never journeyed more than ten miles from St. Clement’s College, with the exception of a short annual visit which he made to London, during which practically the whole of his time was spent in the British Museum.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.