Page 34 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

THE RISE OF ENGLISH STUDIES

and secondly, by the eruption into the public sphere of social interests
opposed to its rational norms, in particular the working class, radicalism,
feminism and religious dissent. Criticism was thus increasingly faced
with the choice between, on the one hand, a general cultural humanism
which necessarily became increasingly amateur as capitalist society
developed, and, on the other, an expert professionalism which could
only achieve intellectual legitimacy at the price of social relevance.
The eventual outcome was the institutionalization of criticism within
the universities. 13
English had been taught as a subject during the 18th century, but
only in the dissenting academies and the Scottish universities (where
it was intended to facilitate cultural incorporation into the Anglo-
Scottish union). From the 1820s, however, University College London,
and from mid-century the University of Manchester, began to offer
similar such courses. And during the late 19th century, a properly
Arnoldian discipline began to evolve: chairs of English language and
literature were established at Trinity College Dublin, and at the
Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Birmingham and Newcastle. 14
But Oxford and Cambridge remained stubbornly resistant. Chris
Baldick has argued that the growth of English in higher education
was determined by three main factors: the movement for working
class education, the movement for women’s education, and the mid-
century reorganization of the Indian Civil Service. For both the labouring
classes and the weaker sex English would provide a liberal education
much less costly than that provided by classics, for the Empire it
would provide the means by which the natives might be educated in
a civilized culture. 15
In 1906, Sir Henry Newbolt founded the English Association to
promote the teaching of English; in 1917, an English paper was
introduced into the public schools’ common entrance examination.
Of the two ancient universities, it was Oxford which first appointed
a “literary” professor of English, Sir Walter Raleigh, in 1904, but the
subject’s future, in the face of determined hostility from both classicists
and philologists, remained very uncertain. Cambridge appointed its
first professor of English literature, A.W.Verall, as late as 1911, but in
general events proceeded rather more smoothly than at Oxford, and
in 1917 an independent English school, with a distinctly literary bias,
was finally established. It was the First World War which eventually
enabled English studies to liberate itself from the claims of a conveniently

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