Nation, Duty, Character and Confidence: History at Oxford, 1850–1914

Abstract

Modern history, introduced to Oxford in the 1850s, was a subject that was hardly ‘modern’. The governing bodies of the university, as well as its teachers, intended history to strengthen and perpetuate the traditional values of liberal education. Beginning with the fall of Rome and concluding in the eighteenth century, history was not an innovative or experimental study of recent, let alone contemporary, issues and events. Instead, the study of history began and continued as an epic illustration of the qualities required of England's governing elite. Within a rapidly changing society that found the future more compelling than the past, modern history organized history, politics, economics and law as testaments to the enduring qualities of individual character and national institutions. All the liberal disciplines at Oxford, as well as those at Cambridge and subsequently at the new civic universities, reflected a national consensus about moral progress and social order which was reinforced by the content of those disciplines. The general frame of mind and expectations could not be attributed uniquely to Oxford. But there can be little doubt about the powerful influence Oxford exercized upon those graduates who left the university to assume careers of considerable national importance. It may be argued that among the various disciplines, none made so earnest and sustained an attempt to produce the right kind of men, fit for any undertaking, as did the Honours School in Modern History.