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Securing Literary Values in an Age of Crisis: The Early Argument for English Studies By John L. Kijinski Idaho State University A century has passed since the beginning of the movement to win a place for the study of English literature at Oxford and Cambridge, a campaign which caused a great deal of debate at the two institutions which could do most to give English the academic status of classics or philosophy or philology.1 Resistance to the new discipline was so strong at the ancient universities that Oxford did not establish an English School until 1894, and Cambridge held out until 1911. English as a fully credible discipline, then, was born—rather recently as the humanities go—amid ideological controversy. For those of us particularly interested in late Victorian and early modern British literature, this controversy and the documents it generated provided a source of valuable information on the literary and critical values of the "official culture" of the time. Especially revealing is the work of Henry Morley (1822-1894) and that of John Churton CoUins (1848-1908), two of the most effective and (at the time) best known early advocates of the study of English literature. An investigation of this generally neglected late Victorian phenomenon and attention to the issues raised by advocates of English studies during this period reward our efforts in two ways. First, the debate over English studies in the 1880s offers a particularly revealing mirror on our own enterprise as teachers of literature. In this debate we have the first record of sustained commentary on how the institutionalized study of literature could help to shape a new and—for most of the traditionally educated people of the time—frighteningly large reading public. This debate calls up questions that have consistently occupied our profession since then: What is the proper relationship between a cultured minority and a mass reading public? What programs can make that larger public better readers of literature? How can the institutionalized study of English help to form the cultural values of the general public at a time when traditional values seem to be under attack? A better understanding of the controversial beginnings of our own profession should give us an enlightened historical perspective on the current debate over the scope and aims of English studies which attracts so much attention today. Second, and perhaps of more immediate interest to students of the literature of the 1880-1920 period, the debate on English studies reveals how one important part of the institutional culture of the late Victorian age interacted, or failed to interact, with what we can now see as a larger cultural movement: the 38 Kijinski: Securing Literary Values in an Age of Crisis rise of literary modernism. Both literary modernism and early English studies can be viewed as projects for forming critical values, and the two movements do, in fact, share some significant features. They come onto the cultural scene at approximately the same time. Moreover, each movement, to some extent, worked to widen the scope of what was seen as culturally significant and to enfranchise within the cultural community groups that had been excluded. To illuminate this parallel we need only think of the view of university education Thomas Hardy conveys in Jude the Obscure (1895) and compare a statement from a leading article of 1887 from the Pall Mall Gazette arguing for English studies: "The time is gone by when Oxford and Cambridge were enclosed in ring fences, and the 'dons' sipped their nectar in blessed indifference to public opinions on their potations." The argument for systematic training in English was, in fact, often based on the need to prepare University Extension lecturers to teach people from backgrounds quite unlike those of traditional university students. Furthermore, advocates of both modernism and English studies were concerned with the plight of women: as modernists began to examine the "New Woman," English studies (in, admittedly, an often condescending way) was proposed as one avenue by which women could participate within the culture. Finally , both early modernists—particularly those who would create the modernist novel—and advocates of English studies had to overcome popular prejudice. As late Victorian novelists faced the widely...

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