Saving Civilisation

‘The “teaching of literature” has planted a terrible fixed foot in our schools and colleges.’ – George Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold (1899)

In a December 2022 issue of the London Review of Books, Stefan Collini began an admiring review of John Guillory’s Professing Criticism with the admission that when he explained his own work-in-progress, the idea ‘seems to strike many people as at once unrealistically ambitious and largely pointless’. When he further explained that it was not a history of criticism but an institutional history, ‘the bafflement turns to boredom and the silent reflection that it takes all sorts’. Now we have Literature and Learning, the result of his perceived need (and ten years of study): an excellent and comprehensive treatment of the history of Literature in mainstream education in Britain from the 1860s to the 1960s.

Collini is Emeritus Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge University and one of our best writers: a meticulous and stylish authority on nineteenth and twentieth-century ideas. Latterly he has also emerged as a highly regarded polemicist in defence of British universities. When asked about his What Are Universities For? (2012), he said in interview that ‘one of the most pressing immediate needs seemed to me to be to help academics maintain a bit of self-belief’ in the face of political and media criticism. And in Speaking of Universities (2017), he defended these institutions against perceived public indifference and the rampant market values swallowing academic ones, within a great ‘financialization’ of higher education.

In Literature and Learning what has really interested ...