Mass-Market Spires: Varsity Paperbacks, Guidebooks, and Commodified Nostalgia

Broadly, this essay considers the ever-familiar Arnoldian "dreaming spires" and "whispering" towers variety of Oxford nostalgia as a commercial impetus in Victorian mass-market university touristic literature. Specifically, it brings together two seemingly disparate genres of touristic literature—Oxford tourist guidebook and Victorian varsity novel—in order to highlight their discursive compatibility as purveyors of commodified nostalgia. In both the Victorian Oxford guidebooks (Alden's and Murray's) and Cuthbert Bede's popular varsity novel series, Mr. Verdant Green: Adventures of an Oxford Freshman (1857), Oxford University is a site curated for the tourist's or visitor's nostalgic appreciation, and nostalgia is as much a packaged product as a souvenir—meant to stoke the outsider's sentimental longing for the ancient university but a token of non-belonging nonetheless. Two strands of commodified nostalgia are considered in this essay: a nostalgia of approach and a nostalgia for Oxford as a site/sight of the past, both of which set the university at a distance in the touristic imagination. This essay argues that com-modified nostalgia grants the target outsiders of these neighbouring touristic literatures—varsity novel readers and guidebook tourists—temporary or restricted access to ways of knowing and venerating Oxford, simultaneously allowing the ancient university to maintain its exclusivity, resist touristic trespass, and retreat behind a veil of nostalgic distance.