College Parochialism

To a secular literary history, the academic novel is a pleasurable but critically unproductive curiosity. More than other minor genres, it has been faulted for a certain parochialism – an overinvestment in the academic figures and institutions that it represents. Earliest nineteenth-century versions such as Reginald Dalton and Verdant Green and modern iterations such as Lucky Jim, Changing Places, and On Beauty dwell too long in the sleepy quadrangles, departmental meetings, and toothless rivalries of university life in a fashion, novelist David Lodge writes, “safely insulated from the real world and its sombre concerns” (263). Heated squabbles over faculty appointments and scholarly territory often appear “comically disproportionate to the passions they arouse,” if not, as critic Gore Vidal has suggested, as “activities marginal (to put it tactfully) to civilization” (180). Its plots are at once “too sensational and apocalyptic,” as Elaine Showalter puts it, and utterly quotidian (121). What accounts for the persistent appeal of the academic novel? Partly, we might say, it results from the circularity between these novels and their audience. Many readers are academics themselves, and so its readership is largely also parochial: an enthusiastic professorate keeps the work of C.P. Snow and Kingsley Amis alive for their students, mutually ratifying the romance of college. “The daily life of a professor,” Showalter concedes, “is not good narrative material,” but where else might we indulge with relish the struggles of academics and their liturgies of classes and conferences with equal parts reverence, affection, and taste for minor celebrity (121)? This essay not only proposes that our “parochial” love for university life and literature has an affective history dating from the nineteenth century, but also that in returning there we might understand our attachment to its figures – the avuncular don, the bumbling warden – as a form of religious devotion with roots in the parish itself. The majority of scholars in nineteenth-century Britain were Anglican clergymen. The English don, whom Sheldon Rothblatt observes was “a clergyman in the first instance, not an academic,” adopted the life and concerns of the former (454). “The typical Oxbridge fellow,” writes William Clark, “unless a hopeless slacker or hardcore academic, was headed one day for a vicarage or