GEORGIAN OXFORD
OXFORD has usually been described either by her lovers or her
malcontents. She has suffered the extremes of filial ingratitude and
affection. There is something in the place that makes all her children
either adore or detest her; and it is difficult, indeed, to pick out the
truth concerning her past social condition from the satires and the
encomiums. Nor is it easy to say what qualities in Oxford, and what
answering characteristics in any of her sons, will beget the favourable
or the unfavourable verdict. Gibbon, one might have thought, saw the
sunny, and Johnson the shady, side of the University. With youth, and
wealth, and liberty, with a set of three beautiful rooms in that ‘stately
pile, the new building of Magdalen College,’ Gibbon found nothing in
Oxford to please him—nothing to admire, nothing to love. From his poor
and lofty rooms in Pembroke Gate-tower the hypochondriac Johnson—rugged,
anxious, and conscious of his great unemployed power—looked down on a
much more pleasant Oxford, on a city and on schools that he never ceased
to regard with affection. This contrast is found in the opinions of our
contemporaries. One man will pass his time in sneering at his tutors and
his companions, in turning listlessly from study to study, in following
false tendencies, and picking up scraps of knowledge which he despises,
and in later life he will detest his University. There are wiser and
more successful students, who yet bear away a grudge against the stately
mother of us all, that so easily can disregard our petty spleens and
ungrateful rancour. Mr. Lowe’s most bitter congratulatory addresses to
the ‘happy Civil Engineers,’ and his unkindest cuts at ancient history,
and at the old philosophies which ‘on Argive heights divinely sung,’ move
her not at all. Meanwhile, the majority of men are more kindly compact,
and have more natural affections, and on them the memory of their
earliest friendships, and of that beautiful environment which Oxford gave
to their years of youth, is not wholly wasted.
There are more Johnsons, happily, in this matter, than Gibbons. There is
little need to repeat the familiar story of Johnson’s life at Pembroke.
He went up in the October term of 1728, being then nineteen years of age,
and already full of that wide and miscellaneous classical reading which
the Oxford course, then as now, somewhat discouraged. ‘His figure and
manner appeared strange’ to the company in which he found himself; and
when he broke silence it was with a quotation from Macrobius. To his
tutor’s lectures, as a later poet says, ‘with freshman zeal he went’; but
his zeal did not last out the discovery that the tutor was ‘a heavy man,’
and the fact that there was ‘sliding on Christ Church Meadow.’ Have any
of the artists who repeat, with perseverance, the most famous scenes in
the Doctor’s life—drawn him sliding on Christ Church meadows, sliding in
these worn and clouted shoes of his, and with that figure which even the
exercise of skating could not have made ‘swan-like,’ to quote the young
lady in ‘Pickwick’? Johnson was ‘sconced’ in the sum of twopence for
cutting lecture; and it is rather curious that the amount of the fine was
the same four hundred years earlier, when Master Stoke, of Catte Hall
(whose career we touched on in the second of these sketches), deserted
his lessons. It was when he was thus sconced that Johnson made that
reply which Boswell preserves ‘as a specimen of the antithetical
character of his wit’—‘Sir, you have sconced me twopence for
non-attendance on a lecture not worth a penny.’
Sconcing seems to have been the penalty for offences very various in
degree. ‘A young fellow of Balliol College having, upon some discontent,
cut his throat very dangerously, the master of his College sent his
servitor to the buttery-book to sconce him five shillings; and,’ says the
Doctor, ‘tell him that the next time he cuts his throat I’ll sconce him
ten!’ This prosaic punishment might perhaps deter some Werthers from
playing with edged tools.
From Boswell’s meagre account of Johnson’s Oxford career we gather some
facts which supplement the description of Gibbon. The future historian
went into residence twenty-three years after Johnson departed without
taking his degree. Gibbon was a gentleman commoner, and was permitted by
the easy discipline of Magdalen to behave just as he pleased. He
‘eloped,’ as he says, from Oxford, as often as he chose, and went up to
town, where he was by no means the ideal of ‘the Manly Oxonian in
London.’ The fellows of Magdalen, possessing a revenue which private
avarice might easily have raised to £30,000, took no interest in their
pupils. Gibbon’s tutor read a few Latin plays with his pupil, in a style
of dry and literal translation. The other fellows, less conscientious,
passed their lives in tippling and tattling, discussing the ‘Oxford
Toasts,’ and drinking other toasts to the king over the water. ‘Some
duties,’ says Gibbon, ‘may possibly have been imposed on the poor
scholars,’ but ‘the velvet cap was the cap of liberty,’ and the gentleman
commoner consulted only his own pleasure. Johnson was a poor scholar,
and on him duties were imposed. He was requested to write an ode on the
Gunpowder Plot, and Boswell thinks ‘his vivacity and imagination must
have produced something fine.’ He neglected, however, with his usual
indolence, this opportunity of producing something fine. Another
exercise imposed on the poor was the translation of Mr. Pope’s ‘Messiah,’
in which the young Pembroke man succeeded so well that, by Mr. Pope’s own
generous confession, future ages would doubt whether the English or the
Latin piece was the original. Johnson complained that no man could be
properly inspired by the Pembroke ‘coll,’ or college beer, which was then
commonly drunk by undergraduates, still guiltless of Rhine wines, and of
collecting Chinese monsters.
_Carmina vis nostri scribant meliora poetæ_
_Ingenium jubeas purior baustus alat_.
In spite of the muddy beer, the poverty, and the ‘bitterness mistaken for
frolic,’ with which Johnson entertained the other undergraduates round
Pembroke gate, he never ceased to respect his college. ‘His love and
regard for Pembroke he entertained to the last,’ while of his old tutor
he said, ‘a man who becomes Jorden’s pupil becomes his son.’ Gibbon’s
sneer is a foil to Johnson’s kindliness. ‘I applaud the filial piety
which it is impossible for me to imitate . . . To the University of
Oxford I acknowledge no obligations, and she will as cheerfully renounce
me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother.’
Johnson was a man who could take the rough with the smooth, and, to judge
by all accounts, the Oxford of the earlier half of the eighteenth century
was excessively rough. Manners were rather primitive: a big fire burned
in the centre of Balliol Hall, and round this fire, one night in every
year, it is said that all the world was welcome to a feast of ale and
bread and cheese. Every guest paid his shot by singing a song or telling
a story; and one can fancy Johnson sharing in this barbaric hospitality.
‘What learning can they have who are destitute of all principles of civil
behaviour?’ says a writer from whose journal (printed in 1746) Southey
has made some extracts. The diarist was a Puritan of the old leaven, who
visited Oxford shortly before Johnson’s period, and who speaks of ‘a
power of gross darkness that may be felt constantly prevailing in that
place of wisdom and of subtlety, but not of God . . . In this wicked
place the scholars are the rudest, most giddy, and unruly rabble, and
most mischievous.’ But this strange and unfriendly critic was a
Nonconformist, in times when good Churchmen showed their piety by
wrecking chapels and ‘rabbling’ ministers. In our days only the
Davenport Brothers and similar professors of strange creeds suffer from
the manly piety of the undergraduates.
Of all the carping, cross-grained, scandal-loving, Whiggish assailants of
_Alma Mater_, the author of _Terræ Filius_ was the most persistent. The
first little volume which contains the numbers of this bi-weekly
periodical (printed for R. Franklin, under Tom’s Coffee-house, in Russell
Street, Covent Garden, MDCCXXVI.) is not at all rare, and is well worth a
desultory reading. What strikes one most in _Terræ Filius_ is the
religious discontent of the bilious author. One thinks, foolishly of
course, of even Georgian Whigs as orthodox men, at least in their
undergraduate days. The mere aspect of Mr. Leslie Stephen’s work on the
philosophers of the eighteenth century is enough to banish this pleasing
delusion. The Deists and Freethinkers had their followers in Johnson’s
day among the undergraduates, though scepticism, like Whiggery, was
unpopular, and might be punished. Johnson says, that when he was a boy
he was a lax _talker_, rather than a lax _thinker_, against religion;
‘but lax talking against religion at Oxford would not be suffered.’ The
author of _Terræ Filius_, however, never omits a chance of sneering at
our faith, and at the Church of England as by law established. In his
description of the exercises of the Club of Wits, only one respectably
clever epigram is quoted, beginning,—
‘Since in religion all men disagree,
And some one God believe, some thirty, and some three.’
This production ‘was voted heretical,’ and burned by the hands of the
small-beer drawer, while the author was expelled. In the author’s advice
to freshmen, he gives a not uninteresting sketch of these rudimentary
creatures. The chrysalis, as described by the preacher of a University
sermon, ‘never, in his wildest moments, dreamed of being a butterfly’;
but the public schoolboy of the last century sometimes came up in what he
conceived to be gorgeous attire. ‘I observe, in the first place, that
you no sooner shake off the authority of the birch but you affect to
distinguish yourselves from your dirty school-fellows by a new drugget, a
pair of prim ruffles, a new bob-wig, and a brazen-hilted sword.’ As soon
as they arrived in Oxford, these youths were hospitably received ‘amongst
a parcel of honest, merry fellows, who think themselves obliged, in
honour and common civility, to make you _damnable drunk_, and carry you,
as they call it, a CORPSE to bed.’ When this period of jollity is ended,
the freshman must declare his views. He must see that he is in the
fashion; ‘and let your declarations be, that you are _Churchmen_, and
that you believe as the _Church_ believes. For instance, you have
subscribed the Thirty-nine Articles; but never venture to explain the
sense in which you subscribed them, because there are various senses; so
many, indeed, that scarce two men understand them in the same, and no
_true Churchman_ in that which the words bear, and in that which they
were written.’
This is pretty plain speaking, and _Terræ Filius_ enforces, by an
historical example, the dangers of even political freethought. In 1714
the Constitution Club kept King George’s birthday. The Constitutional
Party was then the name which the Whigs took to themselves, though,
thanks to the advance of civilisation, the Tories have fallen back upon
the same. The Conservative undergraduates attacked the club, sallying
forth from their Jacobite stronghold in Brasenose (as seen in our
illustration), where the ‘silly statue,’ as Hearne calls it, was about
that time erected. The Whigs took refuge in Oriel, the Tories assaulted
the gates, and an Oriel man, firing out of his window, wounded a gownsman
of Brasenose. The Tories, ‘under terror of this dangerous and unexpected
resistance, retreated from Oriel.’ Yet such was the academic strength of
the Jacobites and the Churchmen, that a Freethinker, or a
‘Constitutioner,’ could scarcely take his degree.
_Terræ Filius_, who lashes the dons for covetousness, greed, dissipation,
rudeness, and stupidity, often corroborates the Puritan’s report about
the bad manners of the undergraduates. Yet Oxford, then as now, did not
lack her exquisites, and her admirers of the fair. _Terræ Filius_ thus
describes a ‘smart,’ as these dandies were called—Mr. Frippery:
‘He is one of those who come in their academical undress, every
morning between ten and eleven, to Lyne’s Coffee-house; after which
he takes a turn or two upon the park, or under Merton Wall, whilst
the dull _regulars_ are at dinner in their hall, according to
statute; about one he dines alone in his chamber upon a boiled
chicken or some pettitoes; after which he allows himself an hour at
least to dress in, to make his afternoon’s appearance at Lyne’s; from
whence he adjourns to Hamilton’s about five; from whence (after
strutting about the room for a while, and drinking a dram of citron),
he goes to chapel, to show how genteelly he dresses, and how well he
can chaunt. After prayers he drinks tea with some celebrated toast,
and then waits upon her to Magdalen Grove or Paradise Garden, and
back again. He seldom eats any supper, and never reads anything but
novels and romances.’
The dress of this hero and his friends must have made the streets more
gay than do the bright-coloured flannel coats of our boating men.
‘He is easily distinguished by a stiff silk gown, which rustles in
the wind as he struts along; a flax tie-wig, or sometimes a long
natural one, which reaches down below his [well, say below his
waist]; a broad bully-cock’d hat, or a square cap of about twice the
usual size; white stockings; thin Spanish leather shoes. His clothes
lined with tawdry silk, and his shirt ruffled down the bosom as well
as at the wrists.’
These ‘smarts’ cut no such gallant figure when they first arrived in
Oxford, with their fathers (rusty old country farmers), in linsey-woolsey
coats, greasy, sun-burnt heads of hair, clouted shoes, yarn stockings,
flapping hats, with silver hatbands, and long muslin neck-cloths run with
red at the bottom.
[Picture: Magdalen College and Bridge from the Cherwell]
After this satire of the undergraduates we may look at the contemporary
account-book of a Proctor. In 1752 Gilbert White of Selborne was
Proctor, and may have fined young Gibbon of Magdalen, who little thought
that Oxford boasted an official who was to become an English classic.
White paid some attention to dress, and got a feather-topp’d, grizzled
wig from London; cost him £2, 5s. He bought ‘mountain wine, very old and
good,’ and had his crest engraved on his teaspoons, that everything might
be handsome about him. When he treated the Masters of Arts in Oriel Hall
they ate a hundred pounds weight of biscuits—not, we trust, without
marmalade. ‘A bowl of rum-punch from Horsman’s’ cost half a crown.
Fancy a jolly Proctor sending out for bowls of rum-punch, and that in
April! Eggs cost a penny each, and ‘three oranges and a mouse-trap’
ninepence.
White, a generous man, gave the Vice-Chancellor ‘seven pounds of
double-refined white sugar.’ I like to fancy my learned friend, the
Proctor, going to the present Vice-Chancellor’s with a donation of white
sugar! Manners have certainly changed in the direction of severity.
‘Share of the expense for Mr. Butcher’s release’ came to ten and
sixpence. What had Mr. Butcher been doing? The Proctor went ‘to
Blenheim with Nan,’ and it cost him fifteen and sixpence. Perhaps she
was one of the ‘Oxford Toasts’ of a contemporary satire. Strawberries
were fourpence a basket on the ninth of June; and on November 6, White
lost one shilling ‘at cards, in common room.’ He went from Selborne to
Oxford, ‘in a post-chaise with Jenny Croke’; and he gave Jenny a ‘round
Chinaturene.’ Tea cost eight shillings a pound in 1752, while rum-punch
was but half a crown a bowl. White’s highest terminal battels were but
£12, though he was a hospitable man, and would readily treat the other
Proctor to a bowl of punch. It is well to remember White and Johnson
when the Gibbon of that or any other day bewails the intellectual poverty
of Oxford.