English as a discipline has tended to obscure its controversial and difficult beginnings in favour of a story of inevitable rise. Indeed many might be surprised to learn how relatively recently the subject was introduced in tertiary institutions. But it was only as an act of hubristic forgetting that Arthur Quiller-Couch, who had successfully argued for an independent English course at Cambridge (introduced in 1917), could claim that studies of English literature published in the 1870s and 1880s came ‘as through parting clouds of darkness’, in which the English could behold their ‘ancestry, literary as well as political, radiantly legitimised’ (quoted in Doyle 21). As Quiller-Couch well knew, in the last decades of the nineteenth century the radiant legitimating of the study of English literature was a long way off, and in its early decades, English in the elite universities of England was marked by a distinct sense of uncertainty or inferiority. This mood in part reflected its status in relation to more established disciplines, notably classics, the study of Latin and Greek. For those hostile to the idea of studying English literature, it seemed self-evident that texts in one’s own language could not offer the kind of intellectual challenge presented by the literature of ancient Greece or Rome. Nor, they argued, were English works of the same value, for they could not offer exemplary models of character and mind. Many of the dons at Oxford shared the view of EA Freeman, one of the most vocal opponents of the new discipline, that English was merely ‘chatter about Shelley’ (quoted in Baldick, Social Mission, 75).1

32Frank Turner has argued that throughout the nineteenth century in Britain, the veneration of Greek literature and language and, for slightly different reasons, Latin and the Roman Empire, were central aspects of political culture and literary education. Latin was the language of European scholarship; Greek was compulsory for entry to Oxford; classics held a dominant place in Oxford and Cambridge until the 1950s at least, although it declined significantly in Australia after the First World War. Perhaps drawing too heavily on Turner’s impressive work, conventional histories of the discipline (including The English Men) have tended to understand the shift from classics to vernacular study in the first part of the twentieth century as a movement from ‘language’ to ‘literature’. But against this evolutionary model, it seems clear that in the nineteenth century a pedagogy which emphasised the value of the aesthetic qualities and moral lessons of literature was quite overtly in competition with a pedagogical practice which focused on the structure of language. Put simply, did one read the writers of antiquity to parse their sentences (and therefore to develop one’s capacities for logical analysis), or in order to absorb their lessons about humanity? Thus English and the modern languages (usually French and German) with which it was sometimes grouped were new playing fields on which an ongoing debate competition about what constituted the study of texts continued.

Resistance to the study of English, derided as an activity for dilettantes by those who could not see any value in the study of literature (as opposed to language), was played out in debates about introducing the subject to Oxford. English literature had long been studied at universities like Glasgow and Edinburgh, and at Cambridge had been part of the school of mediaeval and modern languages since 1878; it also had a presence at newer English universities like London and Liverpool. But the mood at the two older institutions is signified by the fact that there was not a full chair in the subject at Cambridge until 1911, and that when a chair of English was established at Oxford in 1893, the appointee was a language specialist not a literature scholar. As this appointment suggests, the charge of intellectual lightness was most readily countered by presenting English as language study. In the first 33instance, this meant Anglo-Saxon; it is no coincidence that that term was popularised, and that study aids for students for this subject began to proliferate, during the late nineteenth century when the battle to establish the academic credentials of English was at its height. Of these study aids perhaps the best known was Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer, which appeared first in 1882 and which assumed a prominent place in tertiary English curricula in Australia for many decades.2

That said, it is difficult to sustain the view that the influence of classics was felt purely in terms of the prestige given to language study. Just as importantly, classical texts helped to set parameters for understanding the term ‘culture’. For example, Peter Hulme argues that some classical literary works became models for differentiating civilised from savage in the ‘encounter’ with the ‘new world’:

In his reading of Virgil’s Aeneid, Hulme suggests that when Aeneas and his party arrive at Dido’s ‘outpost of civilisation’ on the North African coast, it is essential for them to establish their credentials: ‘the Trojans, strange and unexpected arrivals from the sea … need to assert, as it were, their own civilized pedigree’ (252). For these heroes what is at stake is that they be recognised – that they will be seen, and therefore be able to see themselves – not as barbarians, but as civilised men in exile. Hulme’s point is that these templates of value were redeployed and refreshed in writing about the encounter between Briton and ‘native’ throughout the empire. We can also reverse this, and suggest that it was the habits of thinking which energised imperial expansion that led nineteenth-century Britons in elite institutions to find special value and meaning in such tales.

34Arguably, a similar drama of recognition to that which Hulme discerns within The Aeneid is played out in the reading and teaching of literature, and what is termed ‘high culture’. WF Jackson Knight, translator of Virgil for the Penguin Classics edition, gives explicit warning that this is the case, telling readers the

It is not ‘sublime’, of course, but a rather nasty put-down that Jackson Knight applauds here – that social violence that Bourdieu (too dramatically) calls ‘terrorism’. And crucially, such judgement of the viewer (or reader) is so integral to the consumption of certain kinds of art that it more or less defines the notion of canonicity. Implicitly, in the cultural encounter with a canonical work, the viewer’s or reader’s pleasure is derived as much from their capacity to express correct judgement as it is from their experience of the work of art itself. It is somewhat surprising to learn, then, that the Romans from whom nineteenth-century Britons so consistently drew their model of empire as improvement could display the kind of anxiety we might associate with the colonial. As Cicero testily commented, ‘We Romans have gone to school in Greece; we read their poets and learn them by heart, and then we think ourselves scholars and men of culture’ (quoted in Gwynn, 95).

Hulme’s argument suggests that the teaching of classics leaves room for cultural values to inform teaching and testing. Put another way, there is little intrinsic to the teaching of Latin and Greek which precludes a pedagogy which emphasises lessons about morality or aesthetics. This was certainly the view of mid-nineteenth-century reformers of the classics curriculum at Oxford, like Benjamin Jowett. Jowett and his sympathisers believed that the moral lessons of classical texts were more important than details of grammar, and that an inspiring pedagogy should seek to instil a love of these books in the young men who studied literature. Thus teaching and testing might include not 35just translation and comprehension, but commentary on the meaning and significance of the text. This pedagogy was based on the belief that education could be used to form not only the mind but the character, a view characteristically associated with the study of literature as opposed to language. Such beliefs would be central to later critical movements in English studies, notably Leavisite criticism, but they are also pejoratively associated with an intellectual ‘softening’ of the discipline. This might in part explain why both Jowett’s and Leavis’ teaching were associated with an emphatically revivified masculinity, a point I will return to.

This philosophy of literary education, which emphasises teaching over scholarship, and implies training students to serve the public good rather than private interests, is more instrumental than it might at first seem: what is presented as being for the public good is also about training students to make good in their careers. This is perhaps why arguments for the teaching of classics made in England during the nineteenth century meshed so well with the needs of an emerging middle class, and dreams of making good on the imperial stage. Perhaps the most outstanding example of this inspiriting reform occurred at Rugby school under Thomas Arnold during the 1830s. Arnold’s goal has been described by a sympathetic commentator as being ‘to train the sons of self-made men in the manners and outlook of the ruling class, and to change that class itself by teaching the duties of hard work and leadership’.3 They were ideas and ideals that were to reach around the empire, branded and paradoxically universalised as ‘the English public school’.

The most significant means by which Arnold’s reforms were monumentalised was not through policy, nor the impact of his pupils, nor changes to curriculum, but through a work of popular literature: the novel Tom Brown’s School Days (An Old Boy). Published at a time when the need to believe in English pluck and decency was under desperate pressure (1857), the book is a classic for its depiction of emerging middle-class morality, encapsulated as something that might be called ‘tone’.4 The influence of Tom Brown continues to the present day, having

36been refreshed throughout the twentieth century and beyond by mass-market republication, as well as film and television versions (including parody in the Tompkinson’s Schooldays episode of Ripping Yarns). Hughes’ novel elevates Thomas Arnold, who appears as a character, to the status of a hero, overseer of a world in which determination and good manners overcome cowardice, bullying, and other perils of the boarding school. Much more self-consciously than we might expect – the narrator breaks in to comment on these matters – the novel sets out and explains Arnold’s approach to inculcating goodness in the lads under his charge.5 The novel ends with a badly unnerved protagonist, transformed from sportsman to reader, returning to the school chapel to mourn Arnold’s death.6 He sits first in the seat he had last occupied as the school’s leading pupil, then in the one he occupied during his first nervous days at Rugby, a move emblematic of the humility instilled in him by Arnold. Those aims, of course, were satirised by later generations, leading a laconic AC Bradley to note that ‘The mid-Victorian’ was ‘a figure amply proving the creative energy of Georgian imagination’ (3).

What satire overlooks is that improvement was urgently needed in some institutions in nineteenth-century England. Oxford had declined in substance and standard as a place of higher learning, as we see in Hughes’ sequel to Tom Brown’s School Days, Tom Brown at Oxford. Tom, hard working but no genius, is disappointed that the university demands less of its students than did fifth form at Rugby, but worse is the inequality between students, and the ‘low living’ that characterises college life. Disgusted by the perfunctory nature of study, faith and friendship, he comes to see that his college, ‘St Ambrose’, values wealth above all else. Hughes emphasises and historians confirm that aristocratic and ecclesiastical privilege were everywhere in evidence at Oxford at this time: members of the nobility were distinguished by gold tassels in their caps, while the poorest students, called servitors, worked

37in return for a place (Richter, 50, 59). One of the latter, shabby and housed in squalor, becomes Tom’s mentor; he explains that the ideals instilled by Thomas Arnold have no meaning at the university. And it is fair to say that, until the middle of the nineteenth century at least, the academic reputation of Oxford rested more on consensus about status than on the uniform quality of students or teachers.

Calls for moral and intellectual improvement at the university came from various sources, advocacy of change and opposition to it given force by religious sensibilities. Mid-century reforms to the literature curriculum came amidst wider demands for the institution to pay some attention to merit, demands enforced by a parliamentary inquiry in 1850 and legislative change in 1854. It is perhaps worth noting that AP Stanley, who was secretary to the commission investigating Oxford and gave the inquiry its name, was a product of Rugby and the biographer of Thomas Arnold (Hinchliff, 31, 27). Stanley himself had not long before called for reform, in a pamphlet written with Benjamin Jowett, who was the leader of those academic staff pushing for change (Anon, Suggestions for an Improvement). During the 1850s, in particular, a culture of sinecure was challenged and, in some colleges, changed, from a time when fewer than one in twenty-five fellowships were awarded by examination (AC Bradley, 3). This modernising spirit, sometimes strongly pragmatic, sometimes idealistic, often both, was central to the way in which Victorian Britons understood their place in society and Britain’s place in the world: as embodying principled and ‘modern’ ideals. Significantly for Australia, John Woolley, professor of classics and the first principal of Sydney University, was in touch with Stanley throughout the conduct of the commission, and drew heavily on Stanley’s report for the reorganisation of governance he carried out at Sydney soon after his arrival (see next chapter) (Gardner). But tradition and resistance to change were also a central part of English identity, and so while the legislation aimed to challenge Oxford’s exclusivity it was decided that the colleges – the heart of the institution – should be permitted to negotiate the terms of their reform. Change would only occur at a pace and in a form that each college found acceptable. 38

Those who advocated change at Oxford were generally theological liberals who saw themselves as ready to embrace the challenges presented by new discoveries in science and in the humanities. They were influenced, in particular, by the philosophy, theology and literature of Germany. It is not coincidental that Stanley and Jowett had spent time in Germany together in the late 1840s, nor that Jowett was to become a leading polemicist in debates about theology. The key movement for Humanities was ‘higher criticism’, an approach to study of the Bible which meant understanding it as a historical document rather than as a sacred text, the forms and meanings of which were given. In the mid century, it seems that many of the most principled and lively students at Oxford began to debate intellectual problems in informed groups. Thus Tom Brown’s general unhappiness is partially relieved by the start of his third year, when he joins a society of liberals committed to discuss ‘the highest and deepest questions of morals and politics and metaphysics’ (Hughes, 299). The kinds of social and intellectual transformations depicted in Tom Brown’s School Days would deeply influence pedagogies in English studies for at least a century, and played an important role in legitimating literary studies. It is a point not often appreciated that literary texts themselves are vital tools by which the value of literary study is demonstrated.

Changes were made at Oxford, though they were not universally welcomed, nor were they always effective. Classics remained the privileged discipline, but the sheer difficulty of the languages meant that original texts were not well known except by a small group of specialists among the scholars, and their most outstanding students. For the majority of even that elite,

In Civilisation, Lord Clark comments that ‘One mustn’t overrate the culture of what used to be called “top people” before the wars. They 39had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans’.7 In the late nineteenth century, one outstanding student refused even to attend the lectures on Greek being delivered by Jowett because he felt they were so riddled with errors as to be a waste of his time.

TG Tucker at Melbourne

Because of the domination, by classics, of both prestige and practice in British and European universities, it was more or less inevitable that the first generations of those appointed to teach English literature would be trained in that discipline rather than their own, which is to say, that they were graduates of older rather than newer universities. One of the most dominant figures in academic and literary culture in the late colonial period and after federation was TG Tucker, long-time professor of classics at Melbourne.

Thomas George Tucker was born in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, in 1859. After sharing the Chancellor’s medal and coming first among those with first-class honours in classics from Cambridge in 1882, Tucker was appointed to a chair at Auckland when he was just 23. He became professor of classical and comparative philology at Melbourne in 1885, but was briefly an honorary lecturer in English (1902–03) and published on topics related to English literature and criticism. He translated numerous works from Greek, particularly those of Æschylus, wrote primers, grammars and dictionaries of Latin and English, histories of life in ancient Greece and Rome, and a monumental introduction to philology, the comparative history of languages. At the beginning of the 1890s, one reviewer commented that ‘one cannot be a day in Melbourne among educated people without hearing Professor Tucker spoken of with admiration, and his opinions quoted as law on all literary subjects’.8 One wonders whether there is a hint of satire here, of Melbourne, or of Tucker.

Tucker’s scholarly work focused on language rather than literary study, which is to say translation and grammar rather than interpretation and commentary, but he reached a broader reading public with regular

40essays in the Saturday issues of The Argus in the 1890s, was general editor of the journal Australasian Critic, and a collaborator for the Australian Encyclopedia. His essay Australia as a Home was published by the Commonwealth Immigration Office to encourage British settlement; under the heading ‘The People of Australia’ he provided reassuring information:

Even given the publishing venue, this intolerance is surprising. However, modern scholars have contended that philology, the study of language, with its historical grounding in comparative ethnography, is founded on the beliefs about race and hierarchy evident here. Robert Young, for example, closely following the arguments of Martin Bernal, puts the case that historians of language and culture sought to describe their objects of study in ways that gave intellectual legitimacy to racism. As the nineteenth century ‘progressed’, not only the study of language but ‘ethnology, the science of races … described physical and linguistic differences between different races [and] investigated their intellectual and cultural differences so as to provide the political principles of social and national life’ (Young, 67).9

Given his views on Indigenous peoples, and given Young’s and Bernal’s arguments about philology as a discipline, we would expect to find Tucker’s monumental Introduction to the Natural History of Language premised on a set of assumptions about the intrinsic superiority of the classical languages and the British race. This is not the case. Cultural prejudice underpins Tucker’s claim that ‘to the student of language the facts of Aboriginal Australian or Eskimo are as important as those of Greek or French’ (3), but Tucker’s point is that the student of language is neither equipped for nor interested in making judgements

41about the relative value of culture. In a work written for popular readers – Tucker might have been optimistic about his audience in presenting 465 pages – he is clearly anxious to demonstrate that all languages are intellectually challenging. In the sentence quoted he uses a parallel with botanists, for whom, he declares, ‘the facts of docks are as important as the facts of roses’; in two chapters on ‘Race and Language’ he is again at pains to put the case that the growth or decline of languages is related ‘to political and social relations’ rather than an intrinsic complexity or value (as we might expect him to do) (228). This leads Tucker to a position where he is critical of the reliance, in ethnology, on the use of evidence from language study to make judgements about people from different cultures. In his view, languages ‘display the most complicated resemblances and divergences in respect of both sounds and morphology [structure of words] and in no way admit of such classification as to make them correspond with any arrangement of race’ (234). Nevertheless, these views do not lead Tucker to a position where he is prepared to do away with racial classifications – indeed, he uses such categories, with precisely that lack of attention to detail he is so critical of in linguistic studies, to prove his claim that the classification of language owes nothing to the physical appearance of speakers. In some respects, then, the language study operates according to rigorous rules of evidence, whilst at the same time the premises for the ‘scholarly’ discussion of linguistics are underpinned by culturally based ideas about ‘race’.

Tucker occupied an influential position as a reader for the publisher Angus and Robertson after his retirement, a demonstration of the fact that whereas one’s ideas can come to seem outmoded by colleagues or students, influence in public life often increases in the later stages of a career and during retirement. University of Sydney librarian HM Green, in particular, was incensed by Tucker’s editorial interventions in his Outline of Australian Literature, alleging that Tucker was biased about and ignorant of the book’s subject. The quarrel led Angus and Robertson to refuse to publish Green’s book, even though the final typing had been completed by their staff (Barker, 149). But in spite of Tucker’s apparently conservative tastes in literature and obvious self-confidence, it was 42almost certainly he who was Nettie Palmer’s ‘Professor X’, whom she described as an outstanding classics teacher, who confessed to her years later that his favourite modern author was Agatha Christie (63, 64)!

The Jury Chair at Adelaide

Of all Australian universities, it is Adelaide in which the influence of classical study persisted longest and in the most interesting ways, specifically in terms of its influence on English studies. In stark contrast to other colonies, South Australia founded its university on a firm financial footing, receiving a bequest of nearly £100 000 from Thomas Elder. A separate bequest from William Watson Hughes funded several foundation chairs, but this was to generate controversy as Hughes took the enthusiastic step of naming their occupants, perhaps reflecting the Scottish practice of appointing professors by election.10 Adelaide was the third of the Australian universities to be founded, in the early 1870s, and would have been one of the first in the world to open its doors to women had Queen Victoria not refused the original application for Letters Patent, on the grounds that the university planned to accept women students.

No such objection was made to the study of English literature, and so Adelaide was the first university in Australia to offer a foundation chair with a title that included English: the Hughes Professor of English Literature and Language and Mental and Moral Philosophy. The title might be taken as a signal of the close connection between philosophy and literature as they were then understood, or perhaps the habits of Scottish education (where English had long been studied) – or perhaps just the views of Hughes. The first holder of the position was Presbyterian Minister John Davidson, who had attended university in Scotland but not taken a degree. Questions were asked in the colonial legislature about the employment of a professor who was ‘not a University man … not a man of any great culture … not even a third-rate man’ (Debates [1874], 2063a). While some defended the appointees another remarked that ‘whilst he did not sympathise with the attacks that had been made

43on the Professors, and whilst he admitted that they were learned and scholarly men, yet they were not men of high European reputation in the chairs of learning that they were nominated to fill’ (Debates [1874], 2159). During Davidson’s tenure, numbers of students remained low; it was realised that education for matriculation would have to be addressed, a besetting problem across the Australian colonies which had moved relatively quickly to establish universities but did not have a schooling system sufficiently robust to produce potential students.

After Davidson’s death in the middle of 1881 the chair was offered to EE Morris, then the headmaster of Melbourne Grammar, but it was ultimately taken up by a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin. Edward Vaughan Boulger was a classics graduate of particular distinction, though had been ranked third on the list of applicants. He had been professor of Greek at Queen’s College Cork from 1875 to 1883, and had taught at the Queen’s Institute in Dublin for several years, being proficient in English, Greek, Latin, French, German and Sanscrit. Testimonials for Boulger’s applications for chairs at Adelaide and Sydney from JP Mahaffy and fellow students reiterate the view that Boulger is the outstanding scholar of the writer’s acquaintance.11 This is significant because Trinity College had a fine reputation for classics from the late 1860s, just before Boulger was a student there (McDowell and Webb, 67; Dillon, 243).12

Early in 1894 Boulger took over teaching in classics after the death of David Kelly, an Irish colleague who had encouraged him to apply for Adelaide initially. He continued to do the work of the English professor for half salary, but subsequently complained of overwork. Apart from this, Boulger was engaged in a long-running dispute over his terms of employment, the main objection being that he was subject to dismissal upon six months’ notice. This dispute spread to the senate and the council of the university, then to the press, where it received considerable attention and where the more popular view seems to have been that it was not appropriate to make tenure contingent on

44good behaviour. But Boulger eventually resigned in December 1894 after having been ‘accused of being unable to attend to his duties’ in the annual examination (Duncan and Leonard, 22). While he himself attributed this to overwork, the vice-chancellor alleged that Boulger was using alcohol or narcotics. (I have not been able to find any records that explain what happened to the students. Did they take their exams – and if they did, did they receive their results?) Boulger’s death in Adelaide in 1910 is recorded in the Chronicle, but the fact that it is not mentioned in university sources suggests that he had lost touch with the institution (Obituary). As with Davidson, this lack of documentation makes it difficult to gain a sense of Boulger’s contribution to academic life. Certainly he was a committed idealist, a point evident in the only extant piece of his criticism (Boulger).

Boulger’s replacement was a Scottish philosopher, William Mitchell, whom one modern critic identifies as an idealist with whom we can associate Edward Caird and WP Ker (see next chapter).13 Although a colleague later claimed that Mitchell did his preparation for his teaching of English by reading an Anglo-Saxon primer on the boat, the new philosopher was effectively in control of senior appointments in the discipline of English at Adelaide for the next half century at least. Although his own chair was divided to create a separate position in English and history, Mitchell remained as the professor of philosophy from 1899 to 1926. In 1916 he took over the duties of vice-chancellor, in which role he continued until 1942. His marriage to the daughter of one of Adelaide’s benefactors perhaps strengthened his position within the university and the community, and he himself made a number of generous bequests, among which was the endowing of a chair of biochemistry. Unfortunately the first appointee to the new chair of Modern History and English Language and Literature made as troubled an exit from Adelaide as had his Irish predecessor. Robert Langton Douglas, a historian and curator of art, held the position only from 1900 to 1902. Like Boulger he was forced to resign rather than being dismissed, but his disgrace came after his divorce notice was listed in

45The Times on 6 June 1901 (on which, see Kwan). This does not seem to have dampened Douglas’ spirits:

The fact that Douglas had also been attracted by socialism probably did not help his cause, but the case also demonstrates that in certain circumstances academic staff could be held accountable for lapses in behaviour that were tolerated in others. In that sense, one wonders whether it was Douglas’ divorce or its publication, Boulger’s use of opium and/or alcohol or the public claim that he did, that ultimately forced each to leave their university position.

Adelaide, the first university in Australia to establish and maintain English as a subject, was able to create an independent chair in 1921. On 18 April of that year Mrs Elizabeth Jury offered £12 000 to endow a chair in English literature in honour of her husband; shortly after, following an interview between Mitchell and Charles Rischbieth Jury (son of the benefactor), it was resolved to offer Jury the chair for a period of five years. The offer was refused but Jury taught in the English department for a year in 1933, and took up a third and insistent offer of the chair after the Second World War. (This was not the only case at Adelaide of parents endowing a chair that would be filled by one of their children.) Barbara Wall’s 1966 essay ‘Charles Rischbieth Jury: Poet of Adelaide’ is the only substantial study of Jury’s life and work; it describes both the initial offer and the refusal of the chair in some detail, and the following portrait of Jury draws heavily from this source.

A significant figure in South Australia’s cultural and intellectual life, Charles Jury was born in 1893. He attended St Peter’s College, where he became ‘a School Prefect, secretary of the Rowing Club Committee, a member of the Second Crew, and on the Library, Magazine, and Literary and Debating Committees’ (Wall, 85). In 1913 Jury sailed to England, 46enrolling in classics at Oxford, but was there for just one year before enlisting in the British Expeditionary Force. He was invalided out of the army after being wounded at Ypres, where his brother was killed; many other university friends died on the Western Front. After completing his studies, Jury spent the next decade travelling between Europe and Australia, his parents having provided him with an income to enable a life devoted to writing. He had published his first book, Spring is Coming and Other Poems, when he was twelve, and a small number of other works appeared during his lifetime. In 1993 A Dweller on Delos: Selected Poems and Prose was published, edited by Wall and DC Muecke.

Jury published little criticism, apart from an essay on TS Eliot’s The Wasteland, but his notes for lectures show detailed, judicious and generous scholarship. He did not find the university environment a pleasant one and at the end of his first year teaching at Adelaide, 1933, he wrote to his friend Warren Derry that

The nastiness referred to here is the refusal of Mitchell to consider a young Australian, RC Bald, who was a lecturer at the university, for the chair of English. Wall notes that Jury was disappointed by the decision, for he greatly admired Bald’s scholarship. But worse was to come for Jury, after he took up the chair again at the end of the Second World War.

When he returned to teaching in 1946 Jury did so in the belief that he was giving a junior Australian colleague, who had postponed his study in order to enlist (as Jury himself had done more than two decades earlier), time to gain qualifications at Oxford which would make him likely to succeed in an eventual application for the chair. In Wall’s words,

47

The person concerned took a second-class degree from Oxford, not the first that had been expected, and so it was argued by the new vice-chancellor that the agreement could not be upheld. (Wall’s account hints at other factors being in play.) A controversy developed which involved Jury, the vice-chancellor, members of the council, and a senior member of the legal profession. Jury again left the university bitter about his experiences of administrators, especially their lack of commitment to ex-servicemen, views in evidence in his play The Sun in Servitude, set in ‘Saddlebourne University’. But the play includes among its characters a figure important for this history: the very first holder of a chair of Australian literature, professor Dave Oswy.

Although chronologically not congruent with the period in which classics enjoyed almost complete dominance in Australian universities, Jury’s life and work place him among his nineteenth-century predecessors who valued ancient Greek and Roman literatures and cultures over any other, as well as showing that continuing trace of influences and ideas noted in the introduction. Both Wall and Muecke conclude that, notwithstanding the importance of Shakespeare and of Romanticism, the major influence on Jury’s own writing was the literature of classical Greece. Muecke, in his introduction to The Sun in Servitude, contends that Jury ‘believed not only that Greece had created beauty at a higher imaginative and artistic level than any other European civilisation, but also that what Greece had achieved was still valid for us’ (x). Thus, that literature remained a kind of compass for Jury’s life and creative work in the manner of an earlier generation of writer scholars such as Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, and perhaps even Oscar Wilde. It was a literature which could authorise the 48presence of men who identified as homosexual at the very centre of some of the most powerful institutions in English culture. On the other hand, Jury’s typescript lectures and published criticism also indicate familiarity with modern commentators and with modernist literature, something unusual for Australian academics at the time. This might reflect his greater time for reading and travel, which in turn enabled direct contact with contemporary western European and British literary culture; he became a conduit for the ferment of modernism in Adelaide (see Miles).

As Linda Dowling has persuasively argued, changes at Oxford in the mid-nineteenth century meant that it became possible for scholars and students to find in their university studies inspiring exemplars of homosexual behaviour. Classical texts could offer students and writers like Jury a series of authoritative stories through which to understand and to rehearse narratives which resonated with their own experiences and values as homosexuals, as students of literature, and as active participants in England’s wars. A classical education enabled a particular class of male reader to have direct access to the texts that presented stories of generals, philosophers and emperors who loved other men. These texts were usually bowdlerised in translation or perhaps misunderstood by less adept or imaginative readers, but

Even those scholars who did not approve of homosexuality were obliged to acknowledge it had existed. As Mahaffy suggested, some social dilemmas ‘were solved in strange violation of our notions of morals and good taste; and when such a people as the Greeks stand opposed to us, even in vital principles, we cannot reject their verdict without weighing their reasons’ (quoted in Turner, 10–11). 49

Dowling argues that Jowett’s pedagogy and pedagogically driven academic culture heightened this mood. A specific, we might guess coterie-driven, Oxford Hellenism intensified the already intense relationship between tutor and student that was foundational to teaching at Oxford. Thus Dowling argues for the significance of the practices developed by Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek and tutor of two of the more famous representatives of what is often euphemised as ‘Aestheticism’, Pater, later also a tutor at Balliol, and Symonds. At the same time, the intensely homosocial environment of Oxford and perhaps that institution’s strong sense of its own historical significance seems to have encouraged passionate intellectual friendships between men. Pater and Symonds, for example, joined with Algernon Swinburne and others in a select group of students, called ‘Old Mortality’, to discuss literary, philosophical and theological questions, very much in the manner described in Thomas Hughes’ novel.

Dowling suggests that the homosocial behaviours legitimised by Oxford Hellenism were normative particularly in the thirty years after the major reforms in the 1850s but before the abolition of the celibacy requirement which took effect in 1884. Although male homosexuality was demonised and debilitated during the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895, it remained an important aspect of life in the universities long after. H Montgomery Hyde contends, in The Other Love, that by the 1920s and 1930s it had become ‘among [Oxbridge] undergraduates and dons with pretensions to culture and a taste for the arts, at once a fashion, a doctrine and a way of life’ (quoted in Sinfield, Literature, 65; see also 79). Jury’s period of study occurred before and after the First World War, but the uses he seems to have made of classical writing suggest there are similarities between him and these earlier, and later, generations. Although neither the texts nor the communities necessarily translated easily to Adelaide, one senses that Jury was the centre of or mentor to an energetic circle of young artists and writers. However when he took the bolder step of representing male homosexual desire in his play Icarius, the work was received in a hostile way by at least one influential Australian reviewer (see Hope). On the other hand Icarius did have defenders, including Jury’s former colleague at Adelaide, Herbert Piper. 50Piper, an ex-serviceman with an Oxford degree who had only recently taken up a chair at the University of New England in Armidale, had the courage to criticise publicly AD Hope’s homophobia (see Piper, ‘Hope Interred’).

The deference towards classical study and to Oxford remained strong at Adelaide: in the period of the chair’s operation until the early twenty-first century (it seems now to have lapsed), every holder was a graduate of the English university. After Jury himself left, the chair was awarded to AN Jeffares, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, where he had taken four degrees (including a PhD in English), plus an MA and PhD in English from Oxford. Although he was in Australia for a relatively short period (1952 to 1956), moving from Adelaide to Leeds, Jeffares had an ongoing influence in the country. At Leeds his name was associated with that institution’s reputation for Commonwealth (now more usually ‘postcolonial’) literature, although at the same time he remained (hyper)active in literary studies more generally. In his inaugural lecture at the northern English university, he began by claiming that he was ‘a classics man brought up in the classical traditions of Trinity College Dublin’ and his lecture began with a discussion of Homer.15

More complicatedly, Jeffares was part of a network that linked Australia to Ireland and to Leeds: Gustav Cross, who like Jeffares was a graduate of Trinity, lectured at Adelaide in the mid-fifties and was visiting professor in Commonwealth literature at Leeds with Jeffares in 1963. There he taught a postgraduate course in Australian literature before returning to Australia, taking up a chair at the newly founded university at Newcastle. Jeffares continued to act as a referee for candidates for chairs in Australia. A measure of the pervasiveness of his influence is that of seven applicants for the Challis chair at Sydney in 1962, three had Jeffares listed as referee; no other person is listed more than once. Notwithstanding these links with Ireland and Leeds, it was the Oxford connection that remained paramount at Adelaide.

51When a second chair was created in 1964 it was awarded to Oxford graduate John Colmer, who subsequently held the Jury Chair from 1979 until his retirement in 1986. Colmer followed the pattern of developing an interest in Australian literature, after having focused early in his career on the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He published widely on Australian autobiography and on Patrick White, and entered debates on reviewing and newspaper commentary. Another influential graduate of Oxford was Colin J Horne, also a graduate of Melbourne, who lectured for extended periods in Belfast and Leicester before moving to Adelaide. Like his colleagues Cross and Jeffares, he had research interests in Irish literature and Australian literature, and reviewed widely in the latter area. In an important and still pertinent essay, he drew attention to the lack of interest in Australian literature in England, a fact that was reflected by poor library holdings (‘Book Reviewing’).

On the face of it we might identify TG Tucker as the most purely ‘scholarly’ of the early teachers of English, confirmed by the fact that he took a LittD from Cambridge by thesis and received an honorary doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin. And there is a weight of evidence that Tucker’s tastes, as he expressed them in public, were almost relentlessly elitist. But in private, it seems, he permitted himself to feel that literature might be enjoyed, the puzzles of parsing replaced by those of plot. In his work on the history of language, we can see a meticulous scholar sliding to the edge of his own specialism in ways which left him dependent on precisely those ethnologies whose crudity of method he deplored. Within his career, then, it is difficult to separate literary and language study or, perhaps more accurately, to assess the influence of a ‘scientific’ method supposedly removed from cultural value, and those cultural values themselves. The implication of the cases discussed in this chapter, then, is that the study of classics at institutions like Rugby (where, under Arnold, it remained central to the curriculum) and at Oxford (through major revisions to the curriculum in 1850) did not necessarily reflect the dominance of ‘language’ over ‘literary’ study. Indeed, that dominance might even reflect the opposite. 52

The ideals of education advanced by Arnold and, in a different way, Jowett, in a sense subordinated intellectual development to the cultivation of character; although study of the classics was a useful tool in this mission, it was less significant than the influence of the teacher. Jowett, the best known (if not the most respected) classicist of his age, gave less attention to rigour than we might expect, a point pursued in the next chapter. Tucker’s career in Australia is in some respects equally complicated, showing a mix of public and academic writing, and perhaps less trace of the influence of idealism than we might expect. For Charles Rischbieth Jury, on the other hand, classical literatures offered a powerful set of stories for his own life. He was able to immerse himself in both the classics and the ferments of modernism, and respond to both through his critical and creative writing, working more or less beyond the university’s bounds. As these examples show, the various effects of educational reform and of the study of classical literature leave a complex and sometimes contradictory legacy in the tertiary study of literature and in the lives of those who were influential teachers.