Oxford English

When I learnt that it wasn’t too late to seek a newer world

A Fantasy of Kubla Khan’s Palace (1915) by Albert E. Richardson

As my legal education got into its second term, and thanks in part to the brilliance of my tutors, especially Roy Stuart, I found my brain being whittled into a sharp pencil, as per the dictum of Edmund Burke I shared in the Prologue to this essay.

But as I sat in the company of yard upon yard of law reports in the faculty library, as I fretted over the intricacy of Roman law and tried to make sense of the law related to a constitution that my country’s careless oligarchs have never bothered to codify, that level of sharp precision was increasingly not what I wanted.

I looked back at the roads to freedom I’d glimpsed during my gap year and became more certain that law wasn’t taking me down a route I wanted to follow: law school (one year) and articled clerkship (a kind of apprenticeship as a lawyer) and then out into the wide world, where I’d help clients navigate the legal white-water of life, becoming, in my fretful imaginings, a boatman who would guide people through the rapids but would never himself escape the gorge, living forever amid the roaring waters of the law.

I was also distracted by the other subjects I saw my friends and neighbours in the college studying. I didn’t envy anyone their study of physics or chemistry, much less medicine. But PPE (politics, philosophy, and economics), history, and even geography all had their appeal.

However, it was to the realm of literature that my attraction strayed. The seeds of my infidelity to the law had been sown during that gap year of frantic, untutored reading, and their fruits now flourished like a forbidden garden.

When I arrived at university to study law in the autumn of 1981, I was perhaps already unconvinced that it was the course I wanted to pursue. After a few months, the sight of some of my peers carrying their volumes of poems, plays, or novels from the English faculty to their tutorials and hearing them discuss their essays on Charlotte Brontë or William Hazlitt became wormwood.

Because I was already hooked:

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise. ¹

I felt there could be no going back. During the year I’d helped my father repair the old mansion that gazed at a horizon shaped like an improbable future, I’d begun to walk in “the shadow of the dome of pleasure”.

Now I wanted to move in.

In those days, and I have no reason to suppose things have changed much in this respect, changing courses was frowned upon in Oxford. Unlike in Cambridge, with its Tripos system, where (I was told) you could move from one Tripos (set of classes on one subject) to a second one, usually after the first year, Oxford strongly discouraged such a frivolous, inconstant approach to learning.

The first part of the Law course was called Moderations (“Mods”) and lasted two terms. The first part of the English course, Preliminary Examinations (“Prelims”), lasted three terms. There were exams at the end of them, but they weren’t considered end or entry points but rather staging posts on the way to the final degree.

So I was far from confident of being able to change my course of study as I considered approaching my tutor, Roy Stuart, about abandoning the law. I also remembered how flexible he’d been in accepting me in the first place, essentially on the basis of a single interview, and since then he’d shown me only kindness. I felt I was being ungracious or even ungrateful.

But back then, I seemed to have the inner strength to come up with such plans and see them through. And I consulted no one—certainly not my parents, anyway—and pushed to one side all practical considerations about what I’d do after university with a degree in English Literature and Language. If I’m honest, my “future career” was not something I spent much time thinking about at all. I was simply living in the here and now.

So I asked for an appointment with Roy in his paper-strewn room. I sat in the armchair opposite and told him, wincing with embarrassment, that I wanted to change to English. Possibly slightly aggrieved and certainly surprised, he nevertheless kindly agreed to put the matter to the English tutors, who would have the final say on whether to accept me. This was a nihil obstat, a key part of the process, but I wasn’t by any means assured of being accepted by the English tutors.

Apart from those tutors’ likely objections to the sheer effrontery of someone wishing to change course, I knew there would be another obstacle: my final English grades at school (in the A-level exams) hadn’t been very good. I knew I’d been lazy and careless in my approach to the subject, and it showed. What chance did I have of being accepted by a bunch of austere literature dons who had handpicked students who’d all excelled in the subject at school?

There wasn’t much time if any change was to be made during the eight-week terms that flashed by in an instant. A meeting was soon arranged with two of the English tutors, including the senior one at the college. The latter indeed seemed austere and demanding. In his early 60s, grey-haired and serious to the point of intensity in his demeanour, Tony Cockshut’s critical/quizzical glance at me as I shuffled in made me feel that my request was already being covered in disapproving red ink.² His colleague, Julia Briggs, was much younger. She was dark-haired and equally intense, though with a slight trace of a welcoming smile on her face. ³

They began by asking my reasons for wanting to change to English. I stumbled over the arguments touched on above. Julia then remarked upon my English results at school. They were below what other students in the college would normally achieve. So why should they accept me?

I gulped and then managed to mumble a few half-rehearsed sentences about having had time to consider my options during my gap year and widen my reading through that period before stammering through a list of some of the books I’d read over the last year, throwing in the ones that I thought would impress them. When I finished, however, there was no sign that they were impressed at all.

“We’ll need you to write a short essay,” said Julia. “To check your aptitude.”

Of course, I’d be happy to do this.

They’d send me notice of the essay shortly, Julia told me, and the interview was over. I left feeling despondent. I was caught between a world I no longer wanted to be part of and another where perhaps I didn’t belong.

Like Tennyson’s Ulysses, I had thought

Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

But maybe it was.

I forget the exact essay topic now, but it was related to Virginia Woolf, probably because I’d mentioned how much I enjoyed reading her. After a few days of flurried rereading and note-taking, I duly handed in the handwritten assignment and waited.

Just a few days later, I was summoned by Mr Cockshut. Once again, I met him with Julia. Their demeanour gave nothing away. I’m pretty sure that neither played poker, but if they did, I suspect they could have won a fortune.

There was a brief pause. It was Julia who broke the silence, as she allowed herself a half smile.

“Your essay showed some promise, and we’ve decided to accept you to read English with us.”

I was in.

Behind the scenes, there was no doubt a certain amount of paperwork to be done and formalities to be observed. After all, the college would need to alter my matriculation with the university to a different subject.

But at 19, I knew nothing of all that, and with all the uncaring single-mindedness of youth, I probably wouldn’t have cared much either. I’d got what I wanted, and I was going to spend the rest of my time at university reading the kind of books I’d come to cherish. I felt lucky, I guess, and certainly grateful. I stammered my thanks to my new tutors, as I did later to Roy Stuart when I spoke to him to confirm the move was happening. He wished me luck, politely. I don’t think we ever spoke again.

All of this happened in the Hilary term, the name given at Oxford to the one that leads from the new year to Easter. I had to pass my law Mods at the end of term to be able to continue into English. The current English students, however, still had one more term to go before their Prelims at the end of the Trinity (summer) term.

The spring 1983 edition of the Hertford magazine would duly record my name among the English students but, unusually, with no grade against my name for Prelims. My name also did not appear among those who took law Mods.

All this meant that for the summer term, I had the luxury of shadowing the English courses—Middle English poetry and Tennyson and Browning—with no pressure of any exam at the end of it. And so I got to spend a blissful, pressure-free summer reading poetry in the University Parks.

I had indeed entered Kubla Khan’s “dome of pleasure”.

View of University Park looking towards New College, Oxford (after 1825). By William Turner of Oxford (not JMW Turner).

**

It was, though, a curious place, this dome of pleasure.

For one thing, although I had met a few of the students reading English at my college and knew that they were Catholics or identified as High Church Anglicans (“Catholics without the Pope”), I was still pretty shocked to find that description included just about all of them. I’m not sure I’d met an avowed Catholic before going to Oxford outside the pages of James Joyce or Graham Greene.

As someone with no declared religious affiliation (other than attending a Church of England school, which, as a kind of administrative default in England, didn’t really count), I was never made to feel an outsider, and it clearly hadn’t prevented me from entering this cohort. But had my loose religious affiliation been a consideration in the process? I’ll never know. More broadly, was some conscious or unconscious bias at work in the selection of the students? Mr Cockshut and Julia were both Catholics. My other tutor, the affable John Kitely (1934-2011), was Anglican, I believe.

And then there was the English Literature and Language course itself. Starting with Beowulf and stopping for the most part with Woolf, James, TS Eliot, and YB Yeats, it was a chronological curriculum aimed at giving students a taste of the then-established canon (already under threat, of course).

And there was little hint of new literary theory. Foucault was just a French fable and Derrida a distant rumour. Even in the language component, I’m not sure Saussure ever got much of a mention between the Great Vowel Shift and Johnson's Dictionary. If you picked up whispers of French theory or other outlandish thinking that might have wafted from the continent of Europe via Cambridge or even one of the newer universities, you were welcome to explore them, but it was generally unwise to rely on them in any essay or exam.

In fact, there was a debate raging at the time about the direction the English curriculum should take at the university. Some of this came from the younger Dons, who included at that time Terry Eagleton. It seemed to me that this denim-clad quoter of Marx was no great fan of French theory, which may have been a distraction from the verities of dialectical materialism, but he, too, was impatient for change.

It all came to a head in a heated debate that I and many of my peers attended in one of the university’s grand halls. The conservatives vehemently defended the traditional close reading that most teachers seemed to follow, along with the desire to expose students to the full forest of the established and by-now-ancient canon.

The reformers wanted Marx, Freud, and the structuralists to be given an airing and for contemporary literature to be studied. As the progressives lined up, they each mildly or stridently derided the conservatives for their “belles lettres” approach. They successively “out-lefted” the other, ending with Eagleton and his plea for the kind of approach exemplified in his famous textbook on literary theory. On the other side, the final rallying call from one of the few female Dons who spoke that day about the curriculum was, “Cut it off at Jane Austen.” I think she believed that nothing written after Persuasion was worth bothering us with.

As I recall, the debate ended much as such discussions often do. Nothing much resulted from it; the status quo continued, and the fractious babble of theory and theorists coming from across the English Channel was successfully kept at bay for the time being.

Overall, I really enjoyed the course despite its constraints and feel truly grateful for being given the chance—or obligation—to read literature that I probably wouldn’t have got around to on my own.

Something, however, was missing. In due course I would look elsewhere for it, but I’ll get to that in another essay.

My teachers’ general lack of appetite for imported literary theory didn’t indicate a lack of interest in independent thought, however. I remember clearly one day when it was my turn to read out my essay (on TS Eliot)—that was what we did; one read their essay, one handed theirs in for marking—and at one point during my reading, Mr Cockshut interrupted me and asked, with a hint of exasperation in his voice, “Are you only saying that because it’s what Helen Gardner thinks?" ⁴ I muttered my assurance that, of course, this was not the case. But actually he was right. He’d caught me in the act of committing the cardinal academic sin at Oxford: not thinking for myself. I’d like to think I learnt an important lesson that day.

Mr Cockshut took some getting used to. I’d never met anyone like him (or Julia, for that matter). I don’t know if there was or is a “Catholic” way of thinking or reasoning. But it was a while before I felt I could reason on the same wavelength. The issue was never theology —just something indefinable about his worldview. And of course he’d read so much and so widely for so long that his knowledge seemed unbounded. He’d already published books on Anthony Trollope, religion and disbelief in 19th-century England, and, notably, love: Man and Woman: A Study of Love and the Novel 1740–1940 (1977). He knew what he was talking about.

But I was unaware of most of this, and if I grew to admire him, it was because I found out that beneath layers of morally driven conservative values that seemed a mile away from the more custom-based conservative values I knew from home, his sensibility was mixed with genuine compassion.

He could sometimes come over as slightly crusty as he explained moral elements in Wordsworth’s poetry while putting Keats in his place (much lower than Wordsworth in the hierarchy) or dismissing HG Wells as the “village idiot blaspheming against God” while voicing respect for that other famous atheist of the same period, Bertrand Russell, whose views were equally objectionable to him but whose mind, not unreasonably, he considered immeasurably superior to Wells’.

In tutorials, he’d sit in his armchair, and we’d each sit in ours, but despite the soft carpets and home sitting room-like decor, this was no tea party. You’d need to stay as sharp as possible to cover up the fact that you’d not even covered half of the suggested reading list for this week’s topic (e.g., “The sublime in Wordsworth’s The Prelude”) and avoid, at all cost, using bluster to cover up your ignorance. He’d seen it all a thousand times.

But sometimes Mr Cockhut’s eyes would water with tears of genuine feeling. I particularly remember the resigned look on his face when he confessed to us that during the busy season of marking exam papers, he would always re-read Kenneth Grahame’s classic children’s book The Wind in the Willows (1908), unable to concentrate on his usual heavyweight reading because of all the handwritten student essays he had to wade through.

Julia Briggs was described in her obituary after her untimely death in 2007 as “beautiful and brilliant”. She was a gifted scholar who would go on to become the general editor of the Penguin paperback reissue of Virginia Woolf’s work when it came out of copyright in 1991. But I knew her simply as an inspiring teacher, for whom you always wanted to do your best work. I was lucky to have two such talented and humane academics as my tutors.

Looking back, my experience of such matters since those days suggests that Mr Cockshut and Julia were always going to accept me as long as I didn’t prove completely inept. They probably trusted Roy Stuart’s word that I wasn’t a complete dullard. But I wasn’t aware of that then. So I battled with my constitutional indolence and, for the first (and perhaps only) time in my life, applied myself to my studies.

The high point of the year came in the late autumn, after a summer of reading that helped me catch up (at least a bit) with some of the impressively well-read fellow students I now joined for tutorials.

One day, I had a one-to-one tutorial with Julia, as my tutorial partner was sick. At the end of the tutorial, where I’d read out my essay, Julia said to me, “You’ve got a good feel for a text, haven’t you?” This seemed like heartfelt praise, though there was probably an element of relief in this for her, given her role in accepting me in the first place.

But for me it was the moment, about halfway through my 3-year course, when I finally felt at home at Oxford. First, I’d wriggled my way out of the discomfort of the law library. Then I’d been allowed to step into the dome of literary pleasure. Now I was being told I belonged there – and by someone whose good opinion I especially valued.

I felt like I’d come home.

1. From Kubla Khan, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

2. He died in 2021 at the age of 94. You can read about him here. He was always "Mr Cockshut" to us. Never "Tony".

3. July died in 2007 at the age of 64. You can read about her here. We always thought of her as "Julia". She had a special place in the college's history as its first woman fellow (1978). We all adored her, and she is still remembered with huge affection.

4. A good example of the kind of critic then still read and invoked at Oxford, Gardner was a very distinguished scholar.

Note: I gratefully acknowledge the support of

Amanda B. Hinton

and

Antonia Malchik

as developmental editors on this essay.