In 1962, I was studying A Level English Literature and my schoolmaster was an ardent Leavisite for whom English Literature was Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herbert through to Austen, G. Eliot, Conrad, James, Lawrence and T. S. Eliot.
The Brontës? The Brownings? Carlyle? Macaulay? Ruskin? Morris? Hardy? Not in my welkin, sirrah! However, help was at hand. My mother was close friends with the Browns, a childless Methodist couple, who were taking a great interest in my education. When they discovered that I was off to Cambridge to read English they presented me with his father’s library: Tennyson, Browning, Macaulay, Carlyle, Morris, and Ruskin, among others.
The titles which grabbed my interest immediately were, as you can imagine when you consider that I was also studying Latin and Ancient History, were= Munera Pulveris, Fors Clavigera, Cestus of Aglaia, Aratra Pentelici, Deucalion, - and then it was on to Unto This Last and The Stones of Venice.
My interest in this different canon which I had discovered did not impress my Leavisite teacher, but my Director of Studies at Jesus College, Cambridge was the late Raymond Williams and he was impressed to come across an undergraduate who had read some of the writers featured in his Culture and Society.
One footnote. In the library which the Browns gave me there was one novel. The semi-autobiographical Revolution in Tanner’s Lane by Mark Rutherford (aka William Hale White). White was a friend of the Thomas Brown whose library I now owned, and the copy of the book has a grubby little piece of paper acting as a bookmark and scrawled on it is a much faded message: “To Thomas, my brother in Christ, William.”
Last modified 15 March 2019