Oxford

Abstract

Arriving in Oxford in 1874, Oscar Wilde had found it ‘full of an inexpressible, an incommunicable charm’; it was, he later told Frank Harris, ‘The capital of romance’.* (Wilde’s final year was Housman’s first; there seems to have been no contact between the flamboyant Irishman at Magdalen and the quiet boy at St John’s, but twenty years later Housman sent Wilde a copy of A Shropshire Lad after his release from Reading Gaol.) Father Gerard Manley Hopkins, on the other hand, who during Housman’s fourth term moved from the Jesuit church in Farm Street, Mayfair, to the new parish church of St Aloysius, Oxford, saw the hand of change at work in the university city, and for the worse. It was eleven and a half years since Hopkins had completed his time at Balliol, and his saddened awareness of the changes that had taken place is recorded in the sonnet ‘Duns Scotus’s Oxford’: the frame of ‘neighbour-nature’ in which was set the grey beauty of colleges and churches seemed to him now to be menaced by the ‘base and brickish skirt’ of suburban building. A modern historian of the City of Oxford confirms Hopkins’ point:

By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, it was scarcely possible ‘as the eye travels down to Oxford’s towers’ from any point of vantage to be unimpeded by a small suburban ring of red brick.*

Both views, that of Wilde and that of Hopkins, had some truth in them. By comparison with the modern city, in which dreaming spires fight a losing battle with chain stores and tourists, Housman’s Oxford was still enviably small and quiet and unspoilt. Undergraduate dress and the minor rituals of daily life retained a formality that makes the students of 1880 and the 1990s seem like different species. Sir Charles Oman, who went up to New College in 1878, recalled that ‘on Sunday no self-respecting man would have dreamed of appearing in anything but a black coat and tall hat’, and ‘whiskers were largely worn’, the favourite style being the mutton-chop. * In the extensive gardens of St John’s College, archery was very popular.

‘The great and real troubles of my early manhood ...’

(A. E. Housman)*