The Romance of the
Oxford Colleges

It has often been asserted, but it has never been proved, that University College was founded by Alfred the Great.

The principal evidence for the statement consists of a deed which is known to have been forged and a quotation in Camden’s “Britannia” from an alleged manuscript which cannot be found and probably never existed. On the strength of that testimony the Court of King’s Bench ruled, in 1726, that Alfred was the founder; but the judgment seems to have been based upon sentiment rather than evidence. “Religion,” it was argued by the Fellows, “would receive a great scandal” if the Court decided that “a succession of clergymen” had, for many generations, made the mistake of thanking the wrong benefactor for their endowments. The Court was moved by the plea and gave official sanction to the legend; but history, as distinguished from legend, recognises the founder in William of Durham, who, dying in 1249, bequeathed 310 marks to the University for the benefit of Masters of Arts studying theology. A house was built for the students to live in in 1253, and statutes for the governance of the community were first drawn up in 1280.

Fifty shillings a year was the stipend of a student in those days, and the bursar received a further five shillings a year for keeping the College accounts. As rooms could then be rented for 6s. 8d. a year, however, their condition was less penurious than the figures might seem to indicate. It was provided that they should converse in Latin and comport themselves “as becomes holy persons,” not interrupting one another’s studies by “noise or clamour,” and resisting the temptations of such light literature as “Ballads or Fables about Lovers”—with a good deal more, on the same severe disciplinary lines, which one need not trouble to recite.

The College, as Mr. Wells⁠[1] states, “has been famous in the history of Oxford rather for the careers of its sons than for any movements of which it has been the centre”; and he might have added that the most notable movement of which it has been the centre was a movement for the expulsion of the most illustrious of its sons.

Other interesting things, no doubt, have happened there. It was at University that the junior members of the college resented the conversion of their Master to Roman Catholicism by chanting, outside his door, the impertinent refrain:

a course of conduct which must have been very annoying to Obadiah Walker, and very compromising to his dignity, if persisted in for long.

It was to University, again, that Lord Herbert of Cherbury brought a bride in his second year of residence; “and now,” he writes in his Autobiography, “I followed my book more close than ever.” But this particular stimulus to diligence in study is one with which modern undergraduates must, as a rule, dispense.

University, furthermore, was the scene of Lord Eldon’s memorable examination in Hebrew. “What is the Hebrew for ‘the place of a skull’”? the examiner asked him. “Golgotha,” he answered, and they let him through, without even troubling him to translate “Eloi, eloi, lama sabacthani” into English.

At University, to continue, the Senior Proctor—the “Big Shaver” as men called him to distinguish him from his brother, the Bishop of Liverpool, who is of smaller stature—awoke one morning, some thirty years ago, to find himself “screwed up.” He cut a noble figure as he descended by a ladder into the High, amid the encouraging cheers of the populace; and the authors of the outrage were not discovered until after the Master—the late Dean Bradley, of Westminster—had sent the whole College down.

Every one of these stories has its merits, and some of them would be worth relating at greater length if space allowed; but they all seem trivial and local when set side by side with the story of the expulsion of Shelley.

Shelley is not the only poet of whom the College boasts. Father Faber, who believed too much to please his College, was, curiously enough, of the same household as Shelley, who believed too little. So was Sir Edwin Arnold, who is said to have found spiritual balm in Buddhism, and so is Mr. Saint John Lucas, whose conformity to the golden mean in matters of faith may perhaps be inferred from the fact that he was lately awarded a prize for a poem on a sacred subject. But Shelley was, of course, by far the greatest of the four, as well as the only one of them who set the dons deliberately at defiance.

His defiance of the dons, indeed, assumed more forms than one, and the publication of his notorious pamphlet, “The Necessity of Atheism,” was, as it were, a last straw breaking the back of a patience which had long been too severely tried. So, at all events, says Mr. Ridley, who was a junior Fellow at the time, and so also says a Miss Grant, who happened to be then on a visit to the Master.

“There were few, if any,” says Mr. Ridley, “who were not afraid of Shelley’s strange and fantastic pranks.”

“The ringleader,” says Miss Grant, “in every species of mischief within our grave walls was Mr. Shelley. He was very insubordinate, always breaking some rule, the breaking of which, he knew, could not be overlooked.... He was slovenly in his dress. When spoken to about these and other irregularities, he was in the habit of making such extraordinary gestures, expressive of humility under reproof, as to overset, first the gravity, and then the temper, of the lecturing tutor.”

The dons would have been more than human if they had liked an undergraduate who received their admonitions in that style, and they would have been in advance of their times if they had been conciliated by Shelley’s predilections for scientific study. His science was of the crude, experimental sort which has caused its devotees to be stigmatised as “Stinks Men.” He charged the knob of his door with electricity for the confusion of those who tried to open it, and he demonstrated his knowledge of chemistry by spilling a corrosive acid on the carpet of a tutor who reprimanded him. Naturally, therefore, authority was disposed to seize the first handle that he might give, and the first handle given was the perverse pamphlet above referred to.

The pamphlet was not, of course, Shelley’s maiden literary effort. While still at Eton, he had written a “penny dreadful,” and found a publisher willing to give him £40 for it; and he had cherished the naïve hope of achieving fame at a bound by the simple device of bribing the reviewers. Of the staff of the British Review in particular he had written that they were “venal villains” who might be relied upon, if well “pouched,” to lavish the praise which he desired; and he seems to have thought that £10, judiciously distributed, would suffice to corrupt the whole of Fleet Street.

Moreover, his literary ambitions were smiled upon by a blameless and unsuspecting father. Mr. Timothy Shelley, M.P., when he brought his son to Oxford, took him to the shop of Messrs. Munday and Slatter, booksellers, in the High Street, and introduced him to one of the partners.

“My boy here,” he said, pointing proudly to the long-haired, wild-eyed youth—“my boy here has a literary turn. He is already an author, and do pray indulge him in his printing freaks.”

Only a few months later, in that very shop—— But we must not anticipate, but must first present Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg, also an undergraduate of University.

Hogg was Shelley’s most intimate friend—and, indeed, practically his only friend—at Oxford, and his “Life of Shelley” is our principal authority for the incidents of Shelley’s Oxford career. Trelawny speaks of him as a hard-headed man of the world who looked upon literature with contempt, and he may have given that impression in later life, when he was a Revising Barrister and a Municipal Corporation Commissioner, whatever that may have been. Even then, however, he said that he regarded the Greek language as “a prime necessary of life,” and in 1810 he would have been remarked, not only as an ebullient but also as a romantic and chivalrous young man.

He and Shelley made each other’s acquaintance by sitting next to each other in hall, though Hogg assures us that “such familiarity was unusual”—an interesting precedent for the alleged rule that one Oxford man must not presume even to rescue another from drowning unless he has been introduced to him. They fell into conversation on the comparative value of German and Italian literature, and, after hall, they continued the discussion in Hogg’s rooms, and sat up nearly all night over it. On the following afternoon they met, by appointment, in Shelley’s rooms—the typical rooms of a prehistoric “Stinks Man,” furnished with “an electrical machine, an air-pump, a galvanic trough, a solar microscope, and large glass jars and receivers,” and pervaded with “an unpleasant and penetrating effluvium”; and after that they were inseparable.

Their Oxford, it must be remembered, was the early Oxford in which no games were played. There was no “tubbing” in those days, and no practising at the nets. Unless men haunted the prize ring and the rat pit, their one way of amusing themselves was to walk and talk, and no sporting “shop” could cast its monotonous shadow over their conversation. The question whether the college was more likely to bump or to be bumped did not arise, and no man burdened his brain with tables of “records” or “averages.” The talk was about literature, about philosophy, and, sometimes, about religion; and daring young thinkers hammered out for themselves a good many subjects in which they were not called upon to be examined.

Shelley, as we have seen, began with literature, but he soon got on to philosophy. In particular he was fascinated by the Platonic doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul—the doctrine popularised in Wordsworth’s famous “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”; and he proceeded, as one would expect a chemist to do, to try, as it were, to test the doctrine by experiment.

He snatched a baby, so Hogg tells us, out of its mother’s arms, on Magdalen Bridge, and while the mother clung desperately to its swaddling clothes, in an agony of terror lest it should be dropped into the Cherwell, he gravely questioned her.

“Can your baby tell us anything about pre-existence, madam?” he asked, in a piercing voice and with a wistful look.

“He cannot speak, sir,” answered the mother stolidly.

“Surely he can speak if he will,” Shelley insisted, “for he is only a few weeks old. He cannot have entirely forgotten the use of speech in so short a time.”

But the mother was as firm as the poet.

“It is not for me to argue with college gentlemen,” she rejoined, “but babies of that age never do speak as far as I know”; and with that she begged that her infant might be returned to her before harm befell it, and so the incident terminated.

The bearing of the baby story on the subject before us is only indirect, but there is a reason for telling it. It shows in what spirit Shelley, as an undergraduate, approached the profoundest problems of philosophy, and there is no reason to suppose that the spirit in which he approached the profoundest problems of religion was widely different. Just as he had got a “rise” out of the Oxford matron, so he proposed to get a “rise” out of the Oxford dons; and the dons being clergymen, atheism was the obvious card to play. A profession of atheism might fairly be expected to affect clergymen as a red rag affects a bull.

That he was not actually an atheist at this time is as nearly demonstrable as anything can ever be. The evidence is in his own letters—not in one letter only, but in several.

“It is impossible,” he wrote, “not to believe in the Soul of the Universe, the intelligent, and necessarily beneficent, actuating principle.”

“Can we suppose,” he asked in another letter, “that our nature itself could be without cause—‘First Cause’—a God?”

In these expressions, as they were not written for publication, we may presume that we see the real Shelley. But, on the other hand—

1. Shelley, though not an atheist, fell short of the contemporary standards of orthodoxy. He had been reading Hume, and felt that the current answers to Hume were insufficient.

2. Shelley had been conducting a philosophical correspondence with his cousin, Harriet Grove. The correspondence had been broken off because his philosophical opinions were unsatisfactory; and he was embittered, being in love with his cousin, and regarded himself as a persecuted martyr.

3. The temptation to exaggerate, and so “pull the legs” of grave and reverend seniors, was irresistible.

He began by writing, under an assumed name, to strangers—the most grave and reverend strangers whom he thought likely to reply to him—submitting brief abstracts of Hume’s arguments, and appealing for assistance in rebutting them. If the person to whom he wrote “took the bait,” says Hogg, Shelley “would fall upon the unwary disputant and break his bones.” Once, it is said, by pretending to be a woman, he lured a bishop into controversy, and handled him as the impertinent have delighted to handle the pompous from the beginning of the world. It was splendid fun, he thought, but it would be still better fun if he could “get a rise” out of the Vice-Chancellor, the Proctors, the Regius Professors, and the Heads of colleges and halls. So, Hogg agreeing, he and Hogg put their heads together, and “The Necessity of Atheism” was produced, and advertised in the Oxford Herald of February 9, 1811, and copies of it were posted to several of the dons, “with the compliments of Mr. Jeremiah Stukeley.”

Nor was that all. There was the off-chance that the dons, scenting a practical joke, might ignore the outrage, and Shelley, avid of publicity, was determined to compel them to take notice. So he came down, with a bundle of his pamphlets under his arm, to Messrs. Munday and Slatter’s shop—the very shop in which an indulgent parent had given out that his “printing freaks” were to be encouraged. He wished those pamphlets, he said, to be offered for sale at sixpence each; he wished them to be well displayed on the counter and in the window; in order that the window might be dressed properly, he proposed to dress it himself.

He did so with an obliging readiness which overwhelmed the amiable bookseller’s assistant. In a minute or two “The Necessity of Atheism” was displayed in Messrs. Munday and Slatter’s shop, much as the first number of a new magazine with a gaudy cover might be displayed on one of the railway bookstalls to-day.

It remained so displayed for about twenty minutes; and then the Rev. John Walker, a Fellow of New College, passed the shop, looked into the window to see what new publications had arrived, read the title of Shelley’s pamphlet, and, after being surprised and shocked, was moved to action. He walked into the shop, demanded the proprietors, and gave them peremptory instructions:

“Mr. Munday, and Mr. Slatter! What is the meaning of this?”

“We beg pardon, sir. We really didn’t know. We hadn’t examined the publication personally. But, of course, now that our attention is drawn to it——”

“Now that your attention is drawn to it, Mr. Munday and Mr. Slatter, you will be good enough to remove all the copies of it that lie on your counter and in your window, and to take them out into your back kitchen and there burn them.”

Such was the dialogue, as one can reconstruct it from Mr. Slatter’s recollections, contained in a letter addressed to Robert Montgomery, the poet.

Mr. Walker, of course, had no legal right to give the instructions which he gave. From the strictly legal point of view, he was ordering a man over whom he had no jurisdiction to destroy property which did not belong to him; he would never have presumed to give such orders in, say, Mr. Hatchard’s shop in Piccadilly. At Oxford, however, his foot was firmly planted on his native heath, and Messrs. Munday and Slatter knew it. He might speak to the Vice-Chancellor; and the Vice-Chancellor might forbid undergraduates to deal at their establishment. So they were all bows and smiles and obsequious anxiety to oblige.

“By all means, Mr. Walker. An admirable idea, sir! Just what we were ourselves on the point of suggesting. You may rely on us to carry out your wishes.”

“You will be good enough to carry them out in my presence. I will accompany you to your kitchen for that purpose.”

“That will be very good of you, Mr. Walker. It will be a great honour to our kitchen. Will you please walk this way, sir?”

So the holocaust was effected; and Messrs. Munday and Slatter begged Shelley to call on them, and told him what they had been obliged to do.

“We are really very sorry, Mr. Shelley. We really could not help ourselves. Mr. Walker was so very firm in the matter; and even in your own interest, you know——”

Et cetera. There was to be no further publicity for Shelley through the instrumentality of the booksellers; and as no one was likely to trouble about the authorship of an anonymous brochure which had been reduced to ashes, that would have been the end of the matter if Shelley had not circulated his pamphlet through the post. But then he had so circulated it, and the covering “compliments of Jeremiah Stukeley” were very obviously in his hand-writing; and the recipients of the presentation copies, who included every bishop on the bench, were saying that something really ought to be done; and the dons were not only willing but anxious, and not only anxious but eager, to lay hold of the handle which Shelley had given them.

He was a “Stinks Man,” and he was a rowdy man; he made malodorous chemical experiments, and he was impertinent when he was “ragged.” The Senior Common-room was not going to stand atheism or any other nonsense from such a man as that. So Shelley was sent for “with the Dean’s compliments”—those compliments of evil omen—and the rest of the story may best be told in the words of that Mr. Ridley already quoted, who is a less prejudiced witness than Hogg.

“It was announced one morning at a breakfast party towards the end of the Lent Term,” writes Mr. Ridley, “that Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had recently become a member of University College, was to be called before a meeting of the common-room for being the supposed author of a pamphlet called ‘The Necessity of Atheism.’ This anonymous work, consisting of not many pages, had been studiously sent to most of the dignitaries of the University and to others more or less connected with Oxford. The meeting took place the same day, and it was understood that the pamphlet, together with some notes sent with it, in which the supposed author’s hand-writing appeared identified with that of P. B. S., was placed before him. He was asked if he could or would deny the obnoxious production as his. No direct reply was given either in the affirmative or negative.

“Shelley having quitted the room, T. J. Hogg immediately appeared, voluntarily on his part, to state that, if Shelley had anything to do with it, he (Hogg) was equally implicated, and desired his share of the penalty, whatever was inflicted. It has always been supposed that Hogg wrote the Preface.

“Towards the afternoon a large paper bearing the College seal, and signed by the Master and Dean, was affixed to the hall door, declaring that the two offenders were publicly expelled from the college for contumacy in refusing to answer certain questions put to them. The aforesaid two had made themselves as conspicuous as possible by great singularity of dress, and by walking up and down the centre of the quadrangle, as if proud of their anticipated fate,”—and, in modern times, they would doubtless have driven to the station in triumph on the roofs of hansoms, escorted by a long procession of uproarious admirers, though, as it was, they went away quietly on the coach.

That is all; for the subsequent picture of Mr. Timothy Shelley, M.P., pursuing his peccant son to his London lodging, sending out for a bottle of port, and reading aloud extracts from Paley’s “Evidences of Christianity” while he drank it, belongs to Shelley’s Life, but not to Oxford history.

Robert Montgomery, of Lincoln, who tried to compensate by the piety of his sentiments for his lack of distinction as a poet, has recorded his opinion that the offenders thoroughly deserved their punishment. “Strange and unnatural as it may appear,” he writes, “there are many in Oxford who think that a University, based on the immortal truths of the Gospel, ought not to license or encourage blasphemy, however gilded by genius.”

No doubt there are many, not in Oxford only but elsewhere as well, who agree that this limitation of the functions of Universities is desirable. The general proposition, at any rate, shall not be disputed here. Jowett himself, an advanced thinker if the Church of England ever included one, appears to have endorsed it when circumstances brought him face to face with an undergraduate who declined to attend chapel on the ground that he did not believe in a God. “If you do not believe in a God by eight o’clock to-morrow morning, you will be sent down,” the Master of Balliol is said to have chirruped on that occasion; and it is difficult to applaud his keen sense of the necessity of discipline and condemn that of the Master of University.

It does not follow, however, that it is necessary to take the grave Robert Montgomery’s solemn view of Shelley’s offence. His case was not that of the conscientious and convinced blasphemer, but rather that of a practical joker who over-reached himself and accepted martyrdom rather than confess that he had been joking. And that, one concludes, was the view of those later dignitaries of the college who permitted the erection of a monument to Shelley within the college precincts—albeit in a dark corner of those precincts, only to be reached by way of an obscure passage which looks as if it led to a coal-hole wherein an unwary visitor would run a serious risk of being arrested and charged with loitering with intent to commit a felony.