Nostalgia and the Victorian Varsity Novel

This dissertation begins by recognizing a certain tension between the Victorian knowledge industry and Victorian Oxbridge: a confrontation between the multidirectional industry of knowledge production, commodification, dissemination, and consumption that sought to expand knowledge and learning outward to the masses, and the nation’s most revered universities, Oxford and Cambridge, which had, for centuries, held knowledge for the privileged few. This dissertation situates its argument and its focussed texts at this juncture of confrontation. It argues that, through the discourse of university nostalgia—to which Matthew Arnold contributed most famously with his “dreaming spires” and “whispering” towers of Middle Age enchantment—Oxbridge participates, with strategic self-defensive reserve, in the knowledge industry and its various engines of progress. From a textual standpoint, it argues that Victorian varsity novels, a genre of youth fiction following the struggles and adventures of Oxbridge undergraduates, are important contributors to this strategic cultural discourse of university nostalgia, and, by extension, university power. This project is a study of five Victorian varsity novels—the Verdant Green series (1857), Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), Wilton of Cuthbert’s: A Tale of Undergraduate Life Thirty Years Ago (1878), A Sweet Girl Graduate (1891), and The Master of St. Benedict’s (1893)—plus two unconventional varsity novels—Jude the Obscure (1895) and Zuleika Dobson (1911)—each of which evokes nostalgic longing for the idea of a (traditional) university, for the idea of Oxbridge, within its pages. Each chapter focusses on a particular engine of the knowledge industry—university tourism, the civic college movement, the women’s college movement, and the extension movement—and identifies a particular variant of Oxbridge nostalgia strategically counter-positioned as both a force of resistance and participation. Each chapter demonstrates the ways in which Victorian varsity novels, alongside other relevant university texts (such as tourist guidebooks, periodical fiction, exposés, and visitor testimonials), contribute to these nostalgic variants. In so doing, these novels play an important part in fortifying the role of an “ancient” university in a modern knowledge market, by maintaining its currency as a space of longing in the Victorian cultural imagination.