In the middle of his 1866 Oxford novel The Mysteries of Isis: or, The College Life of Paul Romaine – having devoted several chapters to the university’s extracurricular distractions, including boat-races, drunken pranks, and visits from college mates’ pretty sisters – author Harry John Wilmot Buxton and his student characters get serious and dedicate themselves to the real business of Oxford life: studying for examinations. “People who have never been to Oxford,” Buxton declares,

By insisting that intellectual study was legitimate work – implicitly equivalent to manual labor – Buxton aligns himself with a great many nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century novelists and nonfiction writers who championed the academic endeavors and manhood of Britain’s university men. The more than 160 novels set in Oxford and Cambridge universities – together known as “Oxbridge” – published in Britain between 1837 and 1910 serve as a vital record revealing how the university experience and undergraduate masculinity were presented to, and understood by, a popular audience during the Victorian and Edwardian eras.@ For lists of Oxbridge novels, see Proctor (217-22), Batson (167-71), and Chainey (254-5). Scholar Mortimer Proctor’s 1957 study of Oxbridge fiction contends that most university novelists rarely addressed academics – preferring instead to focus on the extracurriculars of boat-races, romance, and wine-suppers – because studying and exam-taking lacked the proper dramatic force to hold readers’ attention (191-2). However, this paper briefly argues that a surprising number of Oxbridge novels generate genuine drama out of their protagonists’ academic progress. Responding to significant university reforms throughout he nineteenth century, Oxbridge fiction shifted away from satiric caricatures of inept tutors and cheating students to inspiring portrayals of serious-minded undergraduates committed to their studies. Clearly aware of their largely middle-class reading audience, university novelists constructed aspirational, moralistic narratives in which the rigors of studying were rewarded with high marks, honors, degrees, and – ultimately – successful careers.

While Britain’s ancient universities had long been infamously renowned as playgrounds for the debauched sons of the idle rich who enjoyed gaming, drinking, and minimal academic requirements (Mangan 123), a series of radical reforms during the mid-nineteenth century transformed Oxford and Cambridge into modern institutions of higher learning (Rothblatt “Idea” 21). Academic curricula were secularized, science and practical knowledge were emphasized, undergraduate life was democratized, and the examination process was made far more rigorous (Deslandes 126). No longer could professors avoid lecturing by over-relying on tutors or students earn degrees without taking exams (Proctor, 54-5; Weber 43). Moreover, these formerly elite institutions began opening their doors to “a great tide of students from the new middle classes” who arrived at Oxbridge not seeking gentlemanly polish, but rather substantive training for their professional ambitions (Stone 67). A strong examination performance grew vital for the attainment of prestigious careers after university (Rothblatt “Student” 282-3). According to historian Paul Deslandes, exams became “training exercises for a range of possible careers. Success in the degree examinations, which came to function after the 1860s as ‘professional testimonials,’ could assist the ambitious in acquiring a position in the church, education, law, medicine, or the civil service” (144). Test scores increasingly determined government grants, salaries, and professional appointments (Shuman 13).

Consequently, a growing number of undergraduates regarded examinations as “the true business of Oxbridge life, and considered self-denial and the ability to know when leisure was permissible and when work was required distinguishing hallmarks of university manhood” (Deslandes 143). This commitment to self-discipline and self-denial was widely reflected in Oxbridge fiction. While the early chapters of many university novels observe the predictable, entertaining campus tropes of team sports, wine-soaked parties, and town-and-gown rows, the narratives often mark an important shift when the protagonist gets serious about his studies. In Lionel Portman’s 1907 novel The Progress of Hugh Rendal: A ’Varsity Story, the titular hero’s nagging anxieties over the debts that he accumulated during his first year at Oxford prompt him to buckle down:

Similarly, after his comically misspent early years at Oxford, the protagonist of Rev. Edward Bradley’s highly popular The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green (1853-4) resolves to commit himself to “reading for his degree; and, at various times, and in various odd ways, he crammed himself for his forthcoming examination” (III.88). And Frank Ross of Frederick Edward Weatherly’s 1879 novel Oxford Days: or, How Ross Got His Degree reduces his socializing and devotes five hours a day to reading during the long vacation (120-1).

In Oxbridge fiction, the true sign that an undergraduate has dedicated himself fully to academics occurs when he abandons the sports that he had so passionately embraced during his early university career. The title character of Bracebridge Hemyng’s 1898 novel Jack Harkaway’s Strange Adventures at Oxford gives up rowing in his second year to commit himself more fully to studying for exams: “Tom Carden wanted him to row again in the eight at Putney, but this Jack refused, as he wanted to read hard, and come out well in the schools. Rowing was all very well. He liked the honour and the exercise, but two years of it running would take up too much time” (34). Similarly, in The Progress of Hugh Rendal, the hero quits his college’s rowing team when he begins “cramming” to win one of the first dozen places on the exam list to expedite graduation (Portman 246). The protagonist of Thomas Hughes’s 1861 novel Tom Brown at Oxford drops rowing after his freshman year, despite the author’s enthusiastic depictions of boat-races earlier in the narrative. The act of prioritizing academics over sports provided a means for Oxbridge novelists to demonstrate concretely the hero’s maturity – to mark his crossing the threshold from a life of boyhood leisure to the adult responsibility and real work of academic study.

As Oxbridge’s examination process became more rigorous throughout the nineteenth century, hard study became more common and even admirable. Higher education scholar Sheldon Rothblatt contends that undergraduates readily “accepted the new and different discipline of the examinations. An increasing number took their studies seriously and prepared earnestly” (“Student” 298). The phrase “sporting one’s oak” – in reference to shutting the outermost of the double doors that sealed a student’s college rooms off to visitors – came to signify that one was hard at work and didn’t wish to be disturbed (Bickerton 73). In the 1853 undergraduate manual Advice to Oxford Freshmen, author Edward Berens recommends spending seven to nine hours to “steady reading” each day (44). “Make a point of devoting [your time] to real study, to real strenuous exertion,” Berens urges,

At least some undergraduates took this advice to heart: British diplomat, businessman, and writer Sir Andrew McFadyean, who matriculated Oxford in 1905, later recalled that during his first five terms he “worked on an average seven hours a day in term and did a good stint in the vacations” (37). The heroes of Oxbridge fiction likewise earnestly devote themselves to their studies. In James Rice’s 1871 novel The Cambridge Freshman: or, Memoirs of Mr. Golightly, the hero Samuel finds himself so immersed in studying that his fifth-term exams begin to occupy his every thought, while his family sends him care packages of food, money, and encouraging words (338, 341). Frederic William Farrar’s tediously moralistic 1859 novel Julian Home: A Tale of College Life details at length the eponymous protagonist’s fastidious habit of going over his readings repeatedly until he has achieved “the glow and enthusiasm of a perfect comprehension” (99). In Arthur Hamilton Gibbs’s episodic 1911 novel The Compleat Oxford Man, classmates Jack Felthropp and Crows

The repeated emphasis in Oxbridge literature on “hardship,” sacrifice, and “strenuous exertion” characterized academic study as the true test of an undergraduate’s self-discipline, sense of duty, and mental and physical fortitude – key components of Victorian ideals of manhood that greatly appealed to Oxbridge fiction’s primarily middle-class readers. Cognizant of both the long-standing skepticism of the university as a playground for idle gentlemen and of the mid-Victorian “shame…associated with work that doesn’t, somehow, show” (Shuman 24), many university writers insist quite aggressively that the mental work undertaken by undergraduates during their university years was legitimate labor. Studying demonstrated the young male student’s ability to put aside “things of enjoyment and interest” and to work assiduously and delay gratification to achieve ultimately more fulfilling long-term goals. “It was not only the years of hard study that tested the mettle of ambitious students,” university scholar Andrew Warwick suggests, “The examinations themselves were intended partly as tests of endurance, taking place on consecutive mornings and afternoons for four or five days together” (299).

Certainly, the stress and workload confronted by undergraduates preparing for examinations were daunting. Warwick notes that the exam process at Cambridge in the nineteenth century “clearly worked ambitious undergraduates to the limits of their emotional and intellectual tolerance” (300). In “an era when manhood was constructed as a hard-won honor” (Deslandes 137), preparing for, and taking, exams was regularly portrayed as an overwhelming, exhausting, tortuous process. In his study of undergraduate periodicals, Deslandes notes that real-life Oxbridge students regularly characterized exams as tests of “manly undergraduate mettle” by describing the process in terms of misery, illness, imprisonment, and torture; by “elevating the significance of examinations to nearly absurd proportions,” the undergraduate emphasized his “ability to surmount obstacles of this sort in an admirable display of masculine strength and character” (141). This heightened language appears in fictional accounts of examinations as well. Rice’s novel The Cambridge Freshman reports that during protagonist Samuel’s oral exam – known as the vivâ voce – “[o]ur hero trembled; his cheeks flushed, and his tongue became dry,” while his “cadaverous and wholly unsympathetic” examiner “positively leered with diabolical malice” (345). During her three-week campus visit, the title character of the 1907 epistolary novel Barbara Goes to Oxford attends an oral examination and records the agonizing scene:

Accounts of the extreme physical toll of studying for exams in Oxbridge fiction weren’t always hyperbole. In his study of the examination process at Cambridge, Warwick relays multiple harrowing personal remembrances and eyewitness accounts of students driven to mental and physical breakdowns due to overwork, insomnia, and anxiety related to studying for exams (296-300), and education historian Cathy Shuman asserts that “Victorians often worried quite seriously about the effect of cramming for exams on mental and physical health…and the candidate eliminated from the lists by ‘brain fever’ became a stock comic – or tragic – figure” (4). In The Cambridge Freshman, Samuel studies obsessively for his mathematical examination to the detriment of his health. During the last two weeks before his exam,

he shut himself up like an anchorite, and worked at his sums with the regularity of one of Mr. Babbage’s calculating machines.…. His mind became an arithmetical chaos, in which vulgar and decimal fractions, compound practice, and double rule of three heaved and tossed in volcanic eruption.… It was only too plain that his health was giving way. (Rice 340)

Concerned over his weakened state, Samuel urges his classmate cousin George “to write, in his next letter home, a hint of his state of health; so that, in case of a breakdown, he might at least have that excuse” (339-40). Such a breakdown indeed occurs in the anonymous 1870 novel College Debts. Earnest and studious undergraduate Walter Lockwood’s health is “so severely undermined by study” in preparation for his vivâ voce that when he enters the examination room, “you could have seen that his anxiety during the last few days had told upon his health. He was thinner than before, had a hollow-eyed, cadaverous expression upon his countenance” (176-7, 176). Soon after his exam, Lockwood collapses in a fever and is rushed to his family home, where he grows “still thinner and paler” in a protracted state of delirium before eventually rallying (179).

The physical and mental demands of the examination process could prove even fatal in some university novels. In Oxford Days, the narrator briefly notes the “suicide of a studious undergraduate,” presumably overwhelmed by his academic workload (Weatherly 135). “Mind, I don’t say this sort of thing is the rule at Oxford;” author Buxton concedes in The Mysteries of Isis, “but there are men who struggle through the thorny paths of ambition, reading even to the death” (212-3). The novel’s hero Paul notes that his classmate Frank Challoner – “determined to go in for classical honours as early as his standing permitted” – studies “night and day with little cessation” (212). Exhausted from overwork, “Frank looked more worn and fagged every day; he complained, too, of violent headache, and at one time said he should never be able to go through with the work” (215). When the day of his vivâ voce arrives, Frank abruptly leaves the examination room, and is discovered “lying insensible, stricken with brain fever” (216). Frank remains “dangerously ill” in feverish unconsciousness, and dies soon after his parents arrive (216, 219).

Oxbridge fiction’s regular portrayal of studying as both admirable and perilous served several purposes. First, it helped rehabilitate the long-sullied reputation of the Oxbridge student, replacing the familiar figure of the debauched idler with the earnest, hard-reading scholar. Second, the depiction of the rigors of studying and examinations “calls attention to the intellectual laborer’s work as work, and makes this identification self-evident, staringly obvious, for all to see” (Shuman 24). University novels insisted to the general public that undergraduates were engaged in a legitimate form of labor that translated to professional productivity during adulthood. Third, the often moralistic nature of the depiction of examinations – in which intellectually minded and committed undergraduates are rewarded with high passes, while lazy and procrastinating students are “plucked” (in Oxbridge parlance) – directly appealed to, and confirmed, the middle-class values of duty, self-discipline, and industry. In The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, the colorful and dissolute undergraduate Mr. Bouncer fails his exams, in spite of his many elaborate cheating stratagems, and departs Oxford without a degree (Bradley III.100-1). The novel Julian Home likewise illustrates the “fruits of folly and idleness” when the vain Vyvyan Bruce, the corrupted Jedidiah Hazlet, and the cheating Edward Kennedy all fail their exams and face dashed futures (Farrar 339). These cautionary examples of unserious, scheming students who return home in dishonor and humiliation are contrasted against the well-earned triumphs of the studious and hard-working. The earnest Paul Romaine of The Mysteries of Isis passes his exams with a First; the industrious Frank Ross of Oxford Days, who faithfully studied five hours a day, aces the Bar Examination; and, after months of tireless cramming, Verdant Green passes his vivâ voce “with flying colours” and is awarded his degree (Buxton 301, Weatherly 143-4, Bradley III.102). In these ways, the popular and long-lived genre of Oxbridge fiction created compelling drama out of the work of academic study by portraying the examination process as a rigorous test of character and masculinity survived by only the most studious and hardiest of Britain’s young men.

Ball, Mrs. Oona H. [Barbara Burke, pseudo.] Barbara Goes to Oxford. London: Methuen, 1907.