The Ritual Culture of Victorian Professionals

Competing for Ceremonial Status, 1838-1877

Albert D. Pionke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138271975
• eBook ISBN: 9781317017370
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Focusing on the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Albert D. Pionke's book historicizes the relationship of ritual, class, and public status in Victorian England. His analysis of various discourses related to professionalization suggests that public ritual flourished during the period, especially among the burgeoning ranks of Victorian professions. As Pionke shows, magazines, court cases, law books, manuals, and works by authors that include William Makepeace Thackeray, Thomas Hughes, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning demonstrate the importance of ritual in numerous professional settings. Individual chapters reconstruct the ritual cultures of pre-professionalism provided to Oxbridge undergraduates; of oath-taking in a wide range of professional creation and promotion ceremonies; of the education, promotion, and public practice of Victorian barristers; and of Victorian Parliamentary elections. A final chapter considers the consequences of rituals that fail through the lens of the Eglinton tournament. The uneasy place of Victorian writers, who were both promoters of and competitors with more established professionals, is considered throughout. Pionke's book excavates Victorian professionals' vital ritual culture, at the same time that its engagement with literary representations of the professions reconstructs writers' unique place in the zero-sum contest for professional status.

Chapter 1
Education as a Rite of Privilege: Oxbridge Preprofessionalism

Although during the visit that would eventually give rise to his Notes on England (1872), Hippolyte Taine did stop in both Oxford and Cambridge—witnessing a portion of the Encaenia at the former and a Trinity College high table at the latter—in his tenth chapter, “Life at the University,” he pronounces himself insufficiently experienced to answer the key question, “How do these young men live, and what do they love? In order to reply, it would be necessary to reside six months here” (141). Fortunately, a timesaving alternative presents itself: “in default of personal experience the following pictures of manners are said by friends to be correct: ‘Pendennis,’ by Thackeray; ‘Tom Brown at Oxford,’ and a rather lively little romance, illustrated by the author, ‘Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green’” (141). On the strength of this recommendation, Taine thus avails himself of and makes available to his readers a portrait of England’s preeminent universities derived in large measure from novels. An unusual methodological decision for France’s leading historical positivist—since by following his friends’ advice he blurs the distinction between accurate sociological observation and literary inventiveness in his own national travel narrative—Taine’s narrow range of evidence is doubly surprising given the wealth of other materials from which he might have chosen: Mortimer Proctor’s bibliography of English novels set at least in part in Oxford or Cambridge includes 63 works published through the end of the 1860s (217–22); moreover, the repeated calls for university reform made in the first half of the nineteenth century had generated an impressive quantity of nonfiction works, from the hundreds of articles about university education included in weeklies like the Athenaeum and in higher journals like the Edinburgh Review, to the reports of the midcentury university commissions and resulting parliamentary acts of 1854 and 1856, to the statutes, both ancient and revised, of the individual colleges at each university.1 What Taine’s reliance on these recommended fictions does confirm, however, is the growing credibility of novels to represent the protoprofessional experience of the university as reality, and of select novelists as possessors of professional authority in potentia on the basis of insider knowledge about, among other matters, life at Oxford and Cambridge.

The novelists Taine relies upon for his “pictures of manners” were all university men who published their novels during the debates over reform and its consequences: William Makepeace Thackeray’s History of Pendennis appeared in 1848–50, Edward Bradley (pseudonymously Cuthbert Bede) published The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green in 1853–57, and Thomas Hughes brought out Tom Brown at Oxford in 1861. Since they are at least semiautobiographical, however, their texts are set between ten and thirty years earlier, leaving the universities that they represent undisturbed by parliamentary inquiry. This coincidence of reform-era novels set in unreformed Oxford and Cambridge may have led Taine to his rather sanguine conclusion, “Here the generation following does not break with preceding ones; reforms are superimposed on institutions, and the present, based upon the past, perpetuates it” (152). Certainly all three novels remain acutely aware of the force of the past, emblematized by their university settings, which exercise a determining influence over the development of their works’ eponymous characters. This power of the past to “make a man” of Verdant Green, Tom Brown, and to an extent Arthur Pendennis, manifests itself most strongly in the texts, despite their other considerable differences of content and approach, in their shared sense of the ubiquity of ritual forms shaping the collective life of Oxbridge undergraduates. Along with a Classical education and the forging of worldly connections, in fact, practice in ritual is proffered as one of the primary benefits of university attendance—even the experience of vice, a necessary part of the collegiate experience, appears in certain predictable forms—and attendance, according to these novels, serves as at least a precondition for the cultivation of a protoprofessional ideal of disinterestedness.2

These novels thus represent their protagonists’ pursuit of an advanced academic degree, a BA, as, at the same time, a process by which to acquire a “Higher degree,” conceived in ethical or characterological terms. Grounded in collective ritual and resulting in cultural and social authority, this second, less tangible acquisition is amenable to interpretation using the sociological theories of Georg Simmel. Many of Simmel’s comments on social structures manifest an awareness of and an attempt to explain the economy of scarcity surrounding authority. Something of an outsider himself, he wryly observes that

there are always more persons qualified for superior positions than there are superior positions. … Let us only remember the often grotesque accidents by which men in all spheres attain their positions. Is it not an incomprehensible miracle that there should not be an incomprehensively greater amount of incompetence than there actually is? No—precisely because we must assume that competence is actually very widely diffused. … The axiom, “Many are called but few are chosen,” also applies to social structures. The antinomy is met by a priori limiting the number of persons who are considered “qualified” to occupy leading positions. (Sociology 76–7)

Faced with the undeniable continuance of human society despite its apparently haphazard distribution of positions, Simmel focuses upon the means for discriminating the “qualified” from among those with sufficient aptitude for leadership. Although prepared to acknowledge that there are those individuals possessed of “superior significance or strength” which may be “transformed into a new quality; it assumes for his environment the physical state—metaphorically speaking—of objectivity” (Sociology 183), Simmel cautions that such personality-driven authority risks becoming mere “prestige,” which “lacks the element of super-subjective significance” (Sociology 184). In other words, “Leadership by means of prestige is determined entirely by the strength of the individual,” and therefore lacks objective authority and likely terminates with the disappearance of the “superior” individual leader (Sociology 184). Alternatively, relatively ordinary individuals may also qualify for authoritative positions by virtue of institutional affiliation: “A super-individual power—state, church, school, family or military organization—clothes a person with a reputation, a dignity, a power of ultimate decision, which would never flow from his individuality” (Sociology 183).3 Such super-individually guaranteed leaders borrow their authority from both their qualifying institutions and the already-extant dignity of their new positions; hence, the standards of objectivity that they enforce by virtue of their positions extend beyond them as individuals, and will likely continue beyond their individual tenures of office.

Since individuals in this second category of institutionally qualified authority figures may lack the tangible superiority and raw charisma of Simmel’s first group of exceptional leaders, they require perceptible mechanisms—in this context, rituals—for the transfer of power from their organizations and their new positions to themselves. Simmel’s most prescient comments on ritual come in his essay on secrecy and secret societies, but his insights are readily applicable to a wide range of ritualized constituencies and ritual forms. According to Simmel, secret societies, like military organizations and religious communities, and, one might add, the professions, create “a species of life-totality” for their members through “a structure of formulas,” or a process of “schematism, the body of forms, the fixation of behavior” (“Sociology of Secrecy” 481). Such groups deploy these forms in order to claim “the whole man; that is, each of them projects the whole life upon a special plane; each composes a variety of energies and interests, from a particular point of view, into a correlated unity” (“Sociology of Secrecy” 481).4 The effect of this process of the ritual unification of the members, even “when the society in its substance is a purely utilitarian combination,” is to elevate “the whole man in a Higher degree, it combines the personalities more in their whole compass with each other, and commits them more to reciprocal obligations” (“Sociology of Secrecy” 481). The forms differentiate members from nonmembers, thereby “qualifying” them to leadership positions within the institution, and, if the institution possesses sufficient cultural and political capital, within the larger society of which the institution is a part.

Particularly applicable to the university setting, infamous for its town-and-gown conflicts, material profligacy, and sexual experimentalism, are Simmel’s comments on the “motive for the sociology of the ritual in secret societies. Every such society contains a measure of freedom, which is not really provided for in the structure of the surrounding society” (“Sociology of Secrecy” 482). In what might just as readily have been an evaluation of undergraduate life at Oxford or Cambridge, as represented in novels and hostile Edinburgh Review essays dating back to the beginning of the nineteenth century and beyond, Simmel writes, the “nature of the secret society as such is autonomy. It is, however, of a sort which approaches anarchy. … The fixedness and detail of the ritual serve in part to counterbalance this deficit” of order (“Sociology of Secrecy” 482). Practice in ritual is thus a form of socialization that confirms the participants’ possession of self-restraint and capacity for self-regulation, even as it “proves a freedom and enfranchisement in principle” (“Sociology of Secrecy” 483), because such rituals occur within closed societies set apart from the regulation of the general public. Unreformed Oxford and Cambridge enjoyed just such autonomy from the towns in which they resided, enforcing their own rules of acceptable undergraduate conduct through the highly ritualized authority of proctors, tutors, deans, councils, vice-chancellors, and others. The novels chosen by Taine for their accurate representation of undergraduate life at England’s great universities demonstrate how this life is built upon practice in rituals designed to qualify prospective graduates for the finite number of leadership and professional positions available in Victorian England.

In thus relying primarily upon Simmel to respond to Taine’s recommendation that life at Oxford and Cambridge is best understood through fiction, this chapter adopts an unconventional approach to both university history and the university novel. Most often concerned with institutional continuity and reform as evidenced by administrative archives and parliamentary reports, the former rarely focuses on how Oxbridge would have been experienced by students and often assumes a level of familiarity with the institutions that, intentionally or not, tends to exclude outsiders.5 Although it does sometimes make use of the meticulously detailed and undeniably compelling work produced by this tradition of historical scholarship, this chapter looks first to the novels to find which aspects of university life and ritual merit inclusion in imaginative literature intended for a more-or-less general Victorian reader, and to interpret how these elements of the university’s ritual culture are invested with fictional meaning in the development of the stories’ protagonists. Although one of these novels—Thackeray’s History of Pendennis—has been the subject of sustained, if not overabundant, modern critical attention, the university novel as a genre has rarely been taken seriously, instead tending to inspire nostalgic delight and genial summary in place of more rigorous analysis. This chapter, however, critically reexamines all three texts as significant points of entry into the process of professionalization actually at work in Victorian Oxford and Cambridge, and the public perception and approbation of this elevation of a heavily ritualized professional disinterestedness as a central component of normative Victorian values. The chapter begins with an extended reading of The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, which offers readers both the most capacious survey of university ritual, and the least ironic approach to either university ritual or the broader qualifying power of the institution itself. Somewhat more complex in terms of both narrative structure and attitude towards university life, although still committed overall to the ameliorative effects of university ritual, Tom Brown at Oxford serves as the subject of the second main section. The third and final main section reconsiders Thackeray’s heavily satirical and in many respects rather atypical History of Pendennis, which, in addition to articulating a vociferous skepticism about the moral and professional authority of the university, also hints at the very professional trajectory—from university man, to lawyer, to politician, to novelist—that structures this book, thereby offering a convenient point of departure for the chapters that follow.

A Verdant Background in Oxford Ritual for Green Readers

Although the three volumes of Rev. Edward Bradley’s “rather lively little romance,” The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green: An Oxford Undergraduate, appeared at the height of university reform, the novel remains the least serious, from both a social and literary perspective, of the three works mentioned in Taine’s Notes. In place of earnest, fully developed, highly individualized characters debating the merits of university curriculum, governance, finance, and religious commitments, the novel features an entertaining array of types—the eponymous naïve freshman, the initially fast but ultimately prize-winning Charles Larkyns, and the worldly and soon-to-be-plucked Mr. Bouncer—experiencing a carefree series of idealized undergraduate incidents. Even Dr. Portman, the venerable and unreformed dean of Brazenface College, is “honoured and respected,” and dons, generally and sympathetically, “are mortals, and have been undergraduates once” (I.4.31). Unapologetically light literature, eminently suited to its original publication as a railway library paperback, Verdant Green ostensibly presents itself to readers as a farcical guidebook to college life, one offering a capacious and genial survey of Oxford ritual.6 Beneath its veneer of fun, however, Bradley’s novel reveals the degree to which the university’s rituals exercise an overdetermining influence upon the character of its naïve protagonist, who grows from a youth distinctly lacking in upper-middle-class masculinity to a young man possessed of sufficient bravery and disinterestedness to qualify himself for marriage and an Oxford BA.

From Verdant’s arrival in Oxford in the company of his father, it is evident that the university represents an altogether unfamiliar “species of life-totality” for the Greens. They are instructed in some of its particulars by a servant and a tradesman, whose familiarity with the local ritual forms allows them to assert superiority over father and son despite the ordinary expectations of class deference. Verdant’s scout, Mr. Filcher, initiates them into “the properties and capabilities of the rooms” (I.4.37), formally occupied by Mr. Smalls. These include the appropriately Oxonian terminology for closing the outer door, or “sporting the oak,” behind which impressive figuration an undergraduate is safe to read, or, more likely, to evade his creditors. When Verdant interrupts to express his concern about the size of the bedroom—rendered in the text only indirectly by Mr. Filcher—his scout, who “thoroughly understood the science of ‘flooring’ a freshman” (I.4.37), adopts the first-person plural in order to reply on behalf of the college itself, “‘Oh, no, sir; not by no means! We thinks that in college reether a biggish bed-room, sir. Mr. Smalls thought so, sir, and he’s in his second year, he is’” (I.4.37). Verdant and his father next proceed to a local tailor’s shop in order to purchase the academic attire required of all undergraduates while on the university’s side of Magdalen Bridge. Mistakenly ordering a scholar’s gown, the Greens are informed of their error by the tailor, who, like Mr. Filcher, assumes an air of superiority over them by virtue of his familiarity with what Simmel might label the university’s “schematism, the body of forms, the fixation of behavior”:

“Then I think, sir,” said the robe-maker, with redoubled smirks—“I think, sir, there is a leetle mistake here. The gentleman will be hinfringing the University statutes, if he wears a scholar’s gown and hasn’t got a scholarship; and these robes’ll be of no use to the gentleman, yet awhile at least. It will be an undergraduate’s gown that he requires, sir.” (I.5.44)

Of course, this warning comes after Mr. Green has already paid for the cap and gown, which is judiciously set aside in favor of a commoner’s robe by the tailor as he mutters to himself, “‘I don’t know which is the freshest, the freshman or his guv’nor’” (I.5.45). “Qualified,” in Simmel’s sense, by their superior knowledge of the rituals governing life at Oxford, Mr. Filcher and the smirking robe maker usurp conventional class distinctions to pass judgment, whether prescriptive or pejorative, on the Misters Green.

Verdant’s freshman misapprehension at the robe maker’s shop is a necessary precondition for his formal entry into the university through “the edifying and imposing spectacle of Matriculation” (I.5.45). Performed in academic dress before the vice-chancellor, first mandated by royal statute in 1420, and subsequently codified and scripted by university statutes in 1552, 1565, and 1581, as well as the Laudian Code of 1636, matriculation not ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Citations
• Introduction
• 1 Education as a Rite of Privilege: Oxbridge Preprofessionalism
• 2 Swearing Your Way to Sacred Status: Oath Taking in Professional Creation Ceremonies
• 3 Litigious Prestige: Rituals of Law as Fact and Fiction
• 4 Rituals of Election: Contesting Parliamentary Authority
• 5 A Ritual Failure: The Eglinton Tournament in Context
• Epilogue: Learning Professionalism for Today
• Bibliography
• Index