Professional Documents
Culture Documents
ISBN 978-88-7433-852-8
ISSN 1128-2290
Direttore
Francesco Marroni
Comitato di Redazione
Mariaconcetta Costantini, Renzo D’Agnillo,
Anna Enrichetta Soccio
Comitato Scientifico
Ian Campbell (University of Edinburgh)
J.A.V. Chapple (University of Hull)
Allan C. Christensen (John Cabot University, Roma)
Pierre Coustillas (Université de Lille)
Cristina Giorcelli (Università di Roma III)
Jacob Korg (University of Washington)
Phillip Mallett (University of St. Andrews)
Franco Marucci (Università di Venezia)
Rosemarie Morgan (Yale University)
Norman Page (University of Nottingham)
Carlo Pagetti (Università di Milano)
David Paroissien (University of Buckingham)
Alan Shelston (University of Manchester)
Segreteria di Redazione
Francesca D’Alfonso, Tania Zulli
SAGGI
CONTRIBUTI
Fought out in the British press and public sphere from the
1830s, the impassioned debate about the gentleman deeply
affected the movement of reform that ran through the halls of
Victorian academia. The reorganization of the education system
lay at the root of the activity promoted by the “Royal Commission
for Enquiry” in 1850 and by the Clarendon parliamentary
commission, whose final report led to the passage of the Public
School Acts in 1868. Literature, in its turn, played a crucial role in
shaping the poles under discussion.
The present contribution intends to consider Cardinal
Newman’s Idea of a University (1858) as the ideological space
where these parallel discourses forcibly converge and conflate. As
a first step, the main points of the question on education and the
gentleman, highlighted in the seminal remarks of such “prophets”
as Mill and Ruskin, Arnold and Smiles, will be briefly discussed.
Within this cultural frame, the essay attempts to investigate to what
extent Newman’s discourses refashion contemporary notions in
order to link the ideal of manliness with the academic world. In
particular, the analysis will focus on Newman’s contribution to
the process that, beginning from the Eighties, turned university
education into the new standard for gentlemanliness, a property
that could now be “manufactured”. By the end of the century,
public schools and universities had grown into “factories for
gentlemen”, marking the very end of the debate. At the same time,
the stress Newman lays on the organic and dialectical relationship
between knowledge and religion accounts for both the originality
and the limit of his idea of a university, which will eventually
sustain the secularization of higher education.
1
Philip Mason, The English Gentleman. The Rise and Fall of an Ideal, London, André
Deutsch, 1982, p. 105.
2
David Castronovo, The English Gentleman. Images and Ideals in Literature and
Society, New York, Ungar, 1987, p. 15.
3
Samuel Smiles, Self-help, with Illustrations of Character, Conduct and Perseverance,
ed. Peter W. Sinnema, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 314, emphasis
added.
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J. H. Newman
between the plain self-made man and the true gentleman. Often
interpreted as a paean to social advancement, Smiles’s celebrated
book turns out to be the Victorian Bible of gentlemanliness. The
great emphasis placed on behaviour is apparent in every page
of Smiles’s volume, beginning from its epigraph drawn from
Mill: “The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the
individuals composing it”4. Refraining from giving a personal
version of the gentleman in any of his works, Mill’s sublimation
of the average man informs Smiles’s eulogy of self-improvement,
showing how deeply the very idea of the Victorian gentleman is
ingrained in the humanist individualism championed by Mill.
Character and individuality are the key-concepts linking
the Victorian gentleman with the debate over the function of
university addressed by Newman, for the surfacing of a new
model of masculinity entailed a concurrent rethinking of the
educational system. Although very ancient, only during the
first decades of the nineteenth-century did the English public
school become a national institution, perceived as the proper
proving ground for an expandable governing class. If the several
reforms brought about in the second half of the century left the
primacy given to gentlemanliness and to a traditional syllabus
based on the Bible and on the classics almost unchallenged,
formal education was entrusted with the new responsibility of
moulding the character of England’s young citizens in the shape
of Christian gentlemen. The Victorian distinction between moral
education and intellectual training implied a hierarchical order
that subordinated school performance to the formation of what
Raymond Williams calls a “social character”. In the words of
Thomas Arnold, the prophet of the public school ethos, the aims
of higher education were to instil: “first, religious and moral
principle; secondly, gentlemanly conduct; thirdly, intellectual
ability”5. Dr Arnold’s headmastership at Rugby from 1828 to
1841 provided a new model of education which was popularized
through the publication of two renowned testimonials: Dean
4
Ibid., p. 17.
5
Arthur Stanley, The Life and Corrispondence of Thomas Arnold, D. D., London,
Murray, 1887, vol. I, p. 107, emphasis added.
71
Raffaella Antinucci
6
Rowland Prothero, The Life and Correspondence of Dean Stanley, 2 vols, London,
Murray, 1893, I, p. 47.
7
J. H. Newman, The Idea of a University, ed. Frank M. Turner, New Haven &
London, Yale University Press, 1996, p. 3. Further references to this edition are
given after quotations in the text together with page number.
72
J. H. Newman
8
See Keih Vernon, “Civic Collages and the Idea of the University”, in Martin
Hewitt (ed.), Scholarship in Victorian Britain, vol. 1, Leeds,Trinity and All Saints/
Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, 1998, pp. 41-52.
9
See M. Sanderson, The Universities in the Nineteenth Century, London, Routledge,
1975.
10
On Newman’s use of the images of the circle, see Ian Ker, “Theology at the Cen-
ter or the Margin?”, in Newman’s Idea of a University. The American Response, ed.
M. J. Stravinskas and Patrick J. Reilly, Falls Church, VA, Newman House Press,
2002, pp. 11-20.
73
Raffaella Antinucci
11
E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), The Works of John Ruskin: Library
Edition, London, George Allen, 1903-12, XVIII, p. 55.
12
Ibid., XX, p. 18, emphasis added.
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J. H. Newman
genetic and innate quality, linked to birth and breeding13 that can
neither be produced nor bought, but only developed through
formal education and self-learning. Conversely, a “man” in
Newman’s sense is made by the acquisition of that mental habit
which is the point of a liberal education. Natural bents and
mental endowments are counted among the several factors that,
although favouring the gentleman’s path towards refinement,
may prove fruitless without the harmonizing action of teaching
and social training:
13
See Elizabeth Hale, “Turning Away from Formal Education: John Ruskin and
the Scholar Within”, in Hewitt (ed.), op. cit., p. 116.
75
Raffaella Antinucci
14
Ian Ker, John Henry Newman. A Biography, Oxford and New York, Oxford Univer-
sity Press, p. 388, emphasis in the text.
76
J. H. Newman
15
See A. Dwight Culler, The Imperial Intellect: A Study of Newman’s Educational Ideal,
New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1955, p. 239.
16
Francis Lieber, The Character of a Gentleman, Cincinnati, J. A. James, 1846, p. 6.
77
Raffaella Antinucci
17
Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho!, London and New York, Macmillan, 1906, p. 9,
emphasis added.
18
Robert Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel, London, Allen &
Unwin, 1981, p. 92.
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J. H. Newman
19
In a letter to Newman, Arnold wrote that he had especially learnt from him
“habits, methods, ruling ideas, which are constantly with me” (Unpublished Let-
ters of Matthew Arnold, ed. Arnold Whitridge, New Haven, Yale University Press,
1923, pp. 65-66). On the relationship between Newman and Arnold, see Henry
Tristram, “Newman and Matthew Arnold”, The Cornhill, n.s., LX (March 1926),
pp. 309-319; David J. DeLaura, “Arnold and Newman: Humanism and the Ox-
ford Tradition”, in Hebrew and Hellene, Austin and London, University of Texas
Press, 1969, pp. 5-80; and, more recently, James C. Livingstone, “Christiany and
Culture in Newman’s Idea of a University”, in Gerard Magill (ed.), Discourse and
Context. An Interdisciplinary Study of John Henry Newman, Carbondale and Ed-
wardsville, Southern Illinois University Press, 1993, pp. 95-108.
79
Raffaella Antinucci
social life, and its end is fitness for the world” (Idea, p. 5). This
facet of the question is the key to understanding why Newman
thought literature, and Greek literature in particular, should be
the core of university education and of the life of the mind20. In
the ninth discourse he distinguishes literature from both religion
and science on the basis of their different subjects, namely God
and nature. Literature, instead, is defined as “the book of man”
(Idea, p. 152). But, then, how can the sinful literature of sinful
man be at the centre of University teaching? Newman’s answer
appeals to the essential goal of university, that of preparing men
for this world. Given that university is neither a convent, nor
a seminary, but “a place to fit men of the world for the world”
(Idea, p. 160), the “pagan” food of civilization represented by the
classics seems to provide the best guide for the gentleman to
make his way on earth among his fellow mortals.
Concomitantly, the recurrence of Darwinian terms like “fit”
and “fitting” speaks of what I would call the “evolutionist
dialectics” that informs Newman’s view of culture and religion,
considered both in their mutual relationship, as well as in
themselves21. As the publication of An Essay on the Development of
Christian Doctrine (1845) testifies, Newman shared the evolutional
principle apparent in nature, applying it first to religion and
later to human knowledge. Since education means a progressive
coming to know, Newman’s gentleman is anything but a finished
product.
Inscribed in Newman’s style and narrative texture are the
lasting fascination and the multi-sided legacy of The Idea. On a
linguistic level, the industrial terminology Newman adopts to
define the gentleman — including expressions like “acquired”,
“fitting”, “product” — contributed toward the process of
“serialization” undergone by the Victorian gentleman, who,
20
See Joseph Walsh, “Newman’s Idea of a Classical University”, Renascence, 56
(Fall 2003), 1, pp. 21-41.
21
See Edward Jeremy Miller, “Newman’s Idea of a University: Is It Viable Today?”,
in Magill (ed.), op. cit., pp. 109-125, and Brian Martin, “Literature and Religion”,
in John Henry Newman. His Life & Work, New York and Mahwah, NS, Paulist
Press, 1990, pp. 142-157.
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J. H. Newman
81