Without Walls

In ‘Towards aWoman-Centred University’ (1973–4), Adrienne Rich cautions herself that ‘it would be naïve to imagine that the university can of itself be a vanguard for change’. Instead, she concedes: ‘It is probable that the unrecognized, unofficial university-without-walls … will prove a far more important agent in reshaping the foundations on which human life is now organized.’ Rich, however, cannot wholly relinquish the institution that she has critiqued: ‘The orthodox university is still a vital spot … if only because it is a place where people can find each other and begin to hear each other. (It is also a source of certain kinds of power.)’ The vexed question of what is possible within and outside the academy has been debated in a variety of contexts. Rich’s starting point is a Brandeis University statement from the early 1970s that claimed that the institution had ‘set itself to develop the whole man’. For Rich ‘this is no semantic game or trivial accident of language’ but an assertion of ‘masculine privilege’.¹

Alexandra Lawrie’s timely study of the origins of university English is fascinating, in part because it presents such a variety of responses to the experience of being ‘extra-mural’, a term that entered the language in the 1880s to describe the particular work that universities performed for nonresident students. Chapter 2, for example, considers the work of John Churton Collins, a ‘prolific Extension lecturer … who vehemently pushed for the introduction’ of English literature at Oxford and Cambridge (p. 32). Collins spent most of his career ‘outside’, arguing for a more professionalised mode of literary criticism. Lawrie seems to inhabit Collins’s anxieties when she remarks that he ‘would never reach beyond the confines of a provincial university’ (p. 55). Chapter 4, in contrast, describes the work of Richard G. Moulton, an extramural lecturer who embraced the novel, which was absent from Collins’s syllabus and which Lawrie describes as ‘a relatively new genre, ill-defined, diverse in form and style, and hugely popular’ (p. 86). Moulton’s mode of ‘inductive criticism’, which relied heavily on interpretation of the text and not on what Lawrie calls ‘extraneous literary knowledge’ (p. 88), anticipated I. A. Richards’s experiments in practical criticism by several decades. Moulton positioned himself more comfortably outside the British academy, taking up a chair at the University of Chicago in 1892, where Lawrie reports that extramural work was viewed more favourably. She argues persuasively that Moulton ‘had good reason to be grateful for his ideological, as well as geographic, distance from the academy’ (p. 114).

In between these two accounts, Lawrie provides an overview of the university Extension movement in chapter 3, with illuminating details of course content and attendance figures. Chapter 1 traces

the development of literary studies in various settings beyond Oxbridge before and during the late nineteenth century … coffee houses, Dissenting Academies, Edinburgh University, Literary and Philosophical Societies, Mechanics’ Institutes, University College London, Owens College in Manchester, the Settlement Movement (specifically Toynbee Hall), and Ruskin College in Oxford.

(P. 13)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was an emphasis on the ‘usefulness’ of study in many of these contexts. Their variety speaks to how widespread English was as a subject at this time; indeed, Lawrie notes that ‘by the 1880s, Oxford and Cambridge stood among the very few university-type educational establishments in the country that still refused to embrace English literature as a subject of academic study’ (p. 31). Chapter 5 is perhaps the most surprising since it focuses on Arnold Bennett, who was ‘not an English literature teacher in any formal sense’. Lawrie makes a convincing case that ‘the practical advice Bennett offered to urban working- and lower-middle-class readers, in the pages of popular newspaper T.P.’s Weekly, was the basis for a practicable and hugely popular scheme’ that is comparable to Extension, albeit with a wholly different emphasis on pleasure (p. 115). As this turn towards Bennett might imply, Lawrie’s study is...