Dickens Studies as a University Examination Subject in the 1850s

In the second half of the nineteenth century many enthusiastic readers of Dickens were familiar with a “Pickwick Examination Paper” devised by the eccentric Oxbridge student Charles Stuart Calverley.¹ The paper was used initially at an “examination” held at Christmas 1857 in Calverley’s rooms at Christ’s College, Cambridge. Ten-or-so of his friends and colleagues sat the exam, which Calverley, dressed in cap, gown and hood, conducted with mock formality. The prizes awarded – two first editions of Pickwick – were won by Walter William Skeat (later the Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge) and Walter Besant (later a popular novelist). Besant remembered that the candidates refreshed themselves after their exertions with oysters, stout and milk punch (52). Eventually the questions set in the Examination were published in the second edition of Calverley’s collection of verses Fly Leaves in 1872 (121–24). Calverley went on to become a lawyer, poet and composer of witty literary parodies (ODNB).

The Examination Paper itself consists of thirty whimsical questions, all of which are capable of being answered intelligently – at least by a (very) close reader of Pickwick. Typical questions are:

1. [a]. Mention any occasions on which it is specified that the Fat Boy was not asleep; and that (1) Mr. Pickwick and (2) Mr. Weller, senr., ran. Deduce from expressions used on one occasion Mr. Pickwick’s maximum of speed.

2. [b]. Give, approximately, the height of Mr. Dubbley; and, accurately, the Christian names of Mr. Grummer, Mrs. Raddle, and the fat Boy; also the name of the Zephyr.

3. [c]. Deduce from a remark of Mr. Weller, junior, the price per mile of cabs at the period.²

Philip Collins has remarked that, when Calverley assembled his Paper, “Pickwick was, clearly, already a cult-book: and swopping arcane Dickens tags was something of an undergraduate fashion” (39). Andrew Lang noted in 1889 that the “number of people who could take a good pass in [… the] Paper is said to be diminishing” (Lost Leaders 126–27), but two years later a periodical commented that the examination had, by then, “been taken quite seriously by thousands.”³

The purpose of the present paper is to note briefly another, now largely forgotten set of mock examination questions⁴ based on the works of Dickens and others. It preceded Calverley’s jeu d’esprit, and, although, like it, it was essentially light-hearted, unlike it, it embodied a topical and mildly political comment.

The Times of 4 January 1855 (5) included an unusual item. Sandwiched between a lengthy and earnest comparison of books on Oliver Cromwell by Carlyle and Guizot and a shorter notice of the latest edition of Dod’s Peerage, the newspaper devoted a column to a review of a short, anonymous pamphlet entitled The Student’s Guide to the School of Litterae Fictitiae.⁵ It begins:

Among the literary productions which are reviewed in these columns works of imagination form a considerable item, and this of necessity, since they are become as much a part of the common stock of society and the common medley of conversation as the reports of the law courts [… and the notices] of […] births, deaths, and marriages. […] Novels […] can be regarded […]as bearing on the manners and principles, the education and the life, of all who read them. This circumstance might have escaped our memory […] had not an ingenious Oxonian […] been […] prompted to publish his thoughts […] that in a system where history and philosophy, and logic and grammar, are each and all applied to the cultivation of the intellect, the great arena of the imagination should not be allowed to lie fallow […] He has accordingly issued a proposal […] for […] a new branch of learning […] We have felt it our duty to allude to this proposition, because it has a general bearing upon all the education of the country […]

The spoof proposal contained in the reviewed pamphlet, then, is that the famous and archetypal undergraduate Humanities course, Literae Humaniores, studied at Oxford by reference to works in Latin and ancient Greek, be replaced or supplemented by one studied...