What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew

by Daniel Pool

  Oxford and Cambridge

  yes, ’tis a serious-minded place. Not but there’s wenches in the streets o’ nights,” says a carter to Jude Fawley in Jude the Obscure about Christminster, which Thomas Hardy meant to stand in for Oxford. “You know, I suppose, that they raise pa’sons there like radishes in a bed? And though it do take—how many years, Bob?—five years to turn a lirruping hobble-de-hoy chap into a solemn preaching man, with no corrupt passions, they’ll do it, if it can be done, and polish un off like the workmen they be, and turn un out wi’ a long face, and a black coat and waistcoat, and a religious collar and hat.”

  And so they did—just as Oxford and Cambridge also turned out future prime ministers, distinguished physicians, would-be barristers, and countless numbers of perfectly ordinary aristocrats and country squires.

  Each some fifty or so miles north of London, both Oxford and Cambridge dated back to the 1200s when Oxford was founded along the Thames by a “university” or collective organization of scholars and their masters, and Cambridge by a splinter group from Oxford a few years later.

  The two universities were organized around colleges, which were some twenty or more units of residency and instruction. Each college had a head (known variously as a president, dean, warden, provost, or master), a governing body of “fellows,” some of them tutors of the undergraduates, and a number of undergraduate students. All Souls, Balliol, Christ Church, Jesus, Magdalen, Merton, Oriel, and Trinity were among the more famous of the colleges at Oxford; Corpus (Christi), Emmanuel, Jesus, King’s, Magdalene, Queen’s, St. John’s, and Trinity among the more celebrated at Cambridge. Collectively, the heads of the colleges ran the university. Although administration was nominally in the charge of a chancellor (Prince Albert for a while at Cambridge), a vice-chancellor selected by the colleges really ran things. Instruction—such as there was—took place within the colleges, since for much of the century the university made only perfunctory attempts to provide university-wide instruction. The tutors who took charge of this instruction within a college were fellows, that is, undergraduates who had been elected to permanent membership in the college’s governing body as a consequence of doing well on undergraduate exams. Fellowship brought with it not only influence within the college but a permanent stipend, frequently without any duties attached to it, so that a fellowship, if you wanted to be nonresident, as some were, was really a kind of permanent subsidy to start you—or keep you—going in a career. Angel Clare apostrophizes Tess Durbeyfield, calling her “the great prize of my life—my Fellowship, I call you. My brother’s fellowship was won at his college, mine at Talbothays Dairy.”

  What was college life like? Students attended chapel at eight o’clock, then they had meetings with their tutors in the morning and lectures—if there were any—in the afternoon. They dined “in Hall” at five and were required to be back in their college by nine. If they were not, they were fined. Discipline for the colleges was enforced by two proctors assisted by men known as “bull-dogs.” An American visitor to Oxford in the 1870s noted that they wandered in search of rule-breaking undergraduates through “the streets day and night and are obliged to look into billiard rooms, hotels, and bars, and have the right to search any house in town with only ten minutes’ notice, by virtue of an old provision in the charter of Oxford.” Infractions of the rules could result in confinement within the college boundaries (being “gated”), suspension (being “rusticated”), or expulsion (being “sent down”). (To be “plucked” was to fail an exam.) The undergraduate curriculum took three years to complete, the university terms being Michaelmas, Hilary, Easter, and Trinity at Oxford; Michaelmas, Lent, and Easter at Cambridge.

  Class distinctions were rife. In some colleges the nobility wore distinctive clothing and sat at special tables. Their caps sometimes carried special tassels or “tufts”; “tuft-hunting” passed into the language as a synonym for sucking up to the aristocracy. Scholarship students (“sizars” at Cambridge; “servitors” at Oxford) were publicly distinguished from their fellow students, who were called “commoners” at Oxford and “pensioners” at Cambridge. Scholarships could provide great opportunity, though; we are told in Barchester Towers that Obadiah Slope has progressed from sizar to M.A. to preacher.

  For many years, an inordinate percentage of Oxford and Cambridge graduates became Church of England clergy. At Oxford, for example, 18 of the 19 heads of colleges were clergymen as late as 1851, as were 349 out of the 542 fellows, and 215 undergraduates were ordained that year. The university offered several routes into the church. On the one hand, you could graduate as a simple B.A. and become a rector or vicar, as Fred Vincy considers doing in Middlemarch. On the other, as in the case of Mr. Arabin in Barchester Towers, if there was no living immediately available, you could become a fellow and teach—Mr. Arabin is a professor of poetry—while waiting for a parish position to open up.

  Partly because of this clerical tradition, fellows had to be unmarried until the 1880s (even though clergy outside the universities were almost always married). And until 1871 you could not hold the post of fellow or any other faculty or administrative position in the universities without being a member of the Church of England, nor could you matriculate in either of the universities without church membership until 1854. It is this deep intertwining of the church and academic life that suggests why the most important movement within the nineteenth-century Church of England—the aptly named Oxford Movement—originated at one of the two universities. Mr. Arabin—sent to Barchester to do battle with the Low Church Obadiah Slope—is, of course, an Oxford man, but then Oxford was always the more Tory and High Church of the two universities, even before Newman and Keble. The liberal-leaning Mr. Brooke, the adherent of Wilberforce and of “Thought,” tells us in Middlemarch how he “was at Cambridge when Wordsworth was there.” Indeed, Cambridge had a reputation for rationalism and mathematics exemplified in the career of her most famous scholar, Isaac Newton. In reviewing a prospective teacher’s qualifications for a young Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, Mr. Riley thinks that, after all, the man in question “was an Oxford man, and the Oxford men were always—no, no, it was the Cambridge men who were always good mathematicians.”

  There were, of course, those undergraduates who did not become clerics, who kept horses, led dissolute lives, caroused, got into debt, and did all the other things that were the essence of a solid liberal arts education for many in the upper classes. Each college at Oxford, for example, had its own crew of eight oarsmen. At the end of Jude the Obscure, the boat racing, or “bumping,” provides an ironic counterpoint to the description of Jude’s death.

  At the same time, however, there was a gradual effort during the 1800s to introduce higher academic standards in the colleges. In the early part of the century, Cambridge created its tripos exams, so called from the three-legged wooden stools on which the examiners usually sat. These were honors exams in classics and math. The best math honors students were called wranglers and the best of these wranglers was called the senior wrangler. At Oxford, the top distinction in a subject was a “first”—starting in 1808 the man who did best in both math and classics there got a “double first”—an award given to both William Gladstone and Sir Robert Peel. (But not—we are clearly told—to Mr. Arabin, who “had occupied himself too much with High Church matters . . . to devote himself with sufficient vigour to the acquisition of a double first.”)

  The pace of educational reform, however, was slow, and in the middle of the century Parliament unleashed a commission on the universities to inquire if they couldn’t—like everything else retrograde in the country—be reformed. The commission recommended that the university side of things be built up, the colleges’ power be reduced, the antiquated provisions for scholarships and the like be ended, and various other reforms be introduced to nudge the universities quietly into the nineteenth century. This was done, and, in addition, the Test Acts were abolished, fellows were allowed to marry, and the universities expanded
in size—by 1900, Oxford was some 2,500 strong; Cambridge had grown to almost 2,800.

  Schools

  The picture of educators in the nineteenth-century novel is fairly grim—tormented governesses like Jane Eyre, evil schoolmasters like Wackford Squeers or Bradley Headstone, fatuous headmistresses like the pompous Miss Pinkerton, the obnoxious Mr. McChoakumchild, and the unhappy would-be instructress Sue Bridehead, who runs away from her teacher’s college—the dreary catalogue goes on and on.

  The reality most children encountered was perhaps not as bad as this list would suggest. At the top of the ladder came the great “public” schools, so called because originally they were open to all. The public schools were nonprofit institutions founded with money left by generous donors to teach the local lads in the town of Eton or Harrow or wherever Latin and Greek grammar. (Hence, “grammar schools.”) It was not until later that they began to take rich children, and, in so doing, to become more like what we would consider private schools. The public schools were of great social importance but little literary consequence; not even Dickens, perhaps the novelist most concerned with education, deals with them other than by a passing reference.

  However, they at least provided some form of education. Much of what passed for elementary and secondary education in England in 1800 was—to put it kindly—catch as catch can, as witness the kind of dame or evening school that Pip attends in Great Expectations, “taught” by an old woman “of unlimited means and unlimited infirmity, who used to go to sleep from six to seven each every evening, in the society of youth who paid twopence per week each, for the improving opportunity of seeing her do it,” or her real-life counterpart who was appointed parish schoolmaster because “he was past minding the pigs.”

  There was no national school system at the beginning of the era, and no one cared. The poor were apprenticed at an early age or went to work in the fields, and the rich had a governess for their daughter and a clergyman tutor for their son until he went away to Eton or Oxford. (Women, of course, generally did not learn Latin and Greek, “those provinces of masculine knowledge,” as Eliot calls them in Middlemarch, whose mastery, Dorothea Brooke initially believes, would allow her a vantage point from “which all truth could be seen more clearly.” In 1869, an etiquette manual observed that “gentlemen should not make use of classical quotations in the presence of ladies, without apologizing for, or translating them.”)

  It was not until members of the Church of England became appalled at the thought of lower-class children growing up in godlessness because they could not read the Bible that things changed. In 1811 those who were worried formed the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church throughout England and Wales to spread the Word of God by teaching people to read the Bible.

  At first the institutions they created were Sunday schools only, but gradually they became weekday elementary schools. They were such a hit that by 1839 Parliament was supporting these “national” schools, as they were called, with an annual grant of £30,000, a public subsidy of religious education that is not quite so surprising if we recall that the Church of England was the official state church. Most national schools were run on the monitorial, or mutual, system, which was advertised as permitting the remarkably cost-saving and efficient pupil-teacher ratio of 500 to 1. The teacher taught the monitors, who were students themselves, and then the monitors went and taught the bulk of the children while the teacher taught still more monitors. After a special Privy Council committee report, this evolved into the pupil-teacher system, that is, pupils were formally apprenticed to a teacher for a period of time during which they were trained in teaching techniques, at the end of which time they could take an exam for “training college” (a teacher’s college). If they completed the training college curriculum they would theoretically be in excellent shape to obtain the certificate that allowed them to teach.

  It was a noble idea and a chance—the only chance—for a “poor” person to get any higher education in Britain for much of the nineteenth century. The training school, however, often emphasized mastery of a killingly heavy dose of facts. Mr. McChoakumchild, the schoolmaster in the ghastly opening scenes of Hard Times, is a product of just such a course: “He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs . . . he had worked his stony way into Her Majesty’s most Honourable Privy Council’s Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science, French, German, Latin and Greek. He knew all about the watersheds of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains. . . . If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!”

  Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure attends such a college near the end of the century, a grim place from the sound of it, as Hardy points out while telling us the population from which its students were drawn: “The seventy young women, of ages varying in the main from nineteen to one-and-twenty, though several were older, who at this date filled the species of nunnery known as the Training School at Melchester, formed a very mixed community, which included the daughters of mechanics, curates, surgeons, shop-keepers, farmers, dairymen, soldiers, sailors and villagers.”

  In 1862 the government took another halting step toward uniform national education (elementary education was not made compulsory until 1880) by requiring children in subsidized schools to meet a series of standards—the boys and girls being required by the end of the sixth standard to read and write simple passages and to do arithmetic, and the girls to be capable in needlework, too. As late as 1871 more than 19 percent of the men and 26 percent of the women getting married could only make an “X” next to their name in the parish register. By 1891 these percentages dropped to about 7 each.

  But it was not a matter of simply learning to read or write when one attended these schools, for the children were exposed to the world outside their own local area, sometimes in ways that set them apart from the older generation. “Mrs. Durbeyfield habitually spoke the dialect,” Hardy tells us of Tess’s mother, “her daughter, who had passed the Sixth Standard in the National School under a London-trained mistress, spoke two languages; the dialect at home, more or less, ordinary English abroad and to persons of quality.” It was a dramatic change in the old ways—one can scarcely conceive of the intellectually egalitarian romance between Angel Clare and a cottager’s daughter like Tess taking place half a century earlier.

  “The Law Is a Ass”

  In the early 1800s there were three kinds of law in England: common law, equity, and church, or canon, law. Common law was the ancient, everyday law of the land, the law built up century after century through the accretion of custom, countless decisions by judges, and the practices and understandings of the commercial, criminal, and rural worlds as they went about their routine or nefarious business. As a rule it was common law to which people turned to determine if a contract was good, if someone were guilty of murder, or if the land that they disputed ownership of with their neighbor was theirs or his. Three great London courts heard common-law cases—King’s Bench, the Exchequer, and Common Pleas. King’s Bench usually heard criminal matters, the Exchequer—so called from the checked cloth that originally adorned the table when the court sat—disputes over monies like customs and fines owed the Crown, and Common Pleas heard cases involving disputes between two citizens. (It is in Common Pleas, for example, that Mrs. Bardell sues Mr. Pickwick for breach of promise.) The judges of these courts—called lord chief justices in Common Pleas and King’s Bench, barons in the Exchequer—held court during the four “terms,” or sessions, of Michaelmas, Lent, Easter, and Hilary. Their decisions could be appealed to the Court of the Exchequer Chamber, which consisted of the judges of the two common-law courts not being appealed from listening to an appeal from the other, and from there appeal
lay to the House of Lords, which, in one of its roles, acted as the country’s Supreme Court. In London the common-law judges heard cases generally at Westminster Hall in the Houses of Parliament. When they were not sitting in London, some of the judges went circuit-riding to the hinterlands, where, adorned in magnificent scarlet robes, they held the assizes. These were the periodic itinerant sessions at which the London judges heard civil and criminal cases that were too difficult or too grave for local magistrates.