In the opening passage of A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf catches herself, and is subsequently caught out, in a moment of reflection on the banks of a river, within the grounds of a barely fictionalised “Oxbridge University”:

In this fictional account of her trespass on university property, Woolf forges a close association between the environment in which she does her thinking and what she thinks, so that body, mind, and text are shown to be engaged in the same work. Her thoughts, she suggests, have a physical weight: they bow her head to the ground. The landscape bows with her so that a momentarily surreal vista of flaming leaves and long-haired trees is at once the place she is sitting and the space of her imagination, and the “reflections” through which the undergraduate oars take on a double meaning as the boat floats through her consciousness and back out again. The interruption of the beadle causes her to lose her train of thought: it is a fish that jumps and then disappears back into the river. This reverie, which rehearses the lecture's central argument concerning the material conditions required for gender equality, identifies the university as a case in point. Oxbridge is experienced by Woolf's fictional avatar as a place where intellectual freedom is achieved within a series of carefully regulated spaces, and her essay balances the attraction and acknowledged value of these exclusive spaces against the experience of her own exclusion. As so often in her work, the geography of Woolf's prose is haunted by the Victorians, whose lyric voices she can only half hear as she sits at a college window. Her essay therefore invites a return to nineteenth-century accounts of university life that pay attention to the material, or formal, delineations of the university.

Responding to Woolf's invitation, this article seeks to trace the inherent materialism of liberal education through the literature of the Victorian university. Beginning with a survey of some of the accounts, definitions, and defences of the liberal university published during the nineteenth century, it will go on to consider literary accounts of university life, concluding with a reading of Arthur Hugh Clough's The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) and Tennyson's The Princess (1847), two poems that explore the liminal spaces of the summer vacation. David Wayne Thomas, one of a number of critics to propose a reassessment of Victorian liberalism, offers a “measured affirmation” of what he terms “regulative liberalism,” defending it against the charge of “empty formalism” by making a powerful claim for the aesthetic function of liberalism's forms/laws, which acts in productive and vital relation to both the individual self and the community (15).Footnote ¹ Accepting the productive regulation of liberalism described by Thomas, I seek to reassert the material contingencies out of which the conditions of liberalism are constructed, exploring the ways in which the liberal university encloses or excludes the reader via the material regulations of language and form.Footnote ²

In her essay, Woolf characterises Oxbridge as a place vigilant in its resistance to the intrusions of change. However, in the century preceding the publication of A Room of One's Own change had come to the university system in Britain. As T. W. Heyck's classic account of nineteenth-century university reform has shown, by the end of the Victorian period, the emergence of academic disciplines, the rise of the natural sciences and the subsequent separation of the university from the Church of England, and the increased emphasis placed on scholarly research had laid the foundations for a modern system of higher education (223). In 1836 George IV ended Oxford and Cambridge's monopoly on degrees by granting a royal charter to the University of London. Charters were subsequently granted to Durham, King's College, Birmingham, and Queen's Belfast, and by the turn of the century there were fourteen centres of university education in Britain. There were changes within Oxford and Cambridge as well. Their systems of privilege, under the scrutiny of Lord John Russell's Commission of Enquiry into “the State Discipline, Studies and Revenues of Oxford and Cambridge” (1850), which was prompted by sharp attacks from Whig journals such as the Edinburgh Review, underwent gradual and partial reform: the curriculum was expanded, the principle of fair and free competition was applied in the gifting of scholarships, the examination of degree candidates was more systematically instigated, and, in some colleges (Balliol, Clough's college, was one example of this), fellowships were granted to scholars who did not intend to take religious orders.

The principle at stake was that of liberal education. Finding its origins in the classical civilisations of Greece and Rome, and with its emphasis on the cultivation of the individual, liberal education represented a tradition of learning peculiar in its availability as an ideological basis for the cases made by conservatives and reformers alike. Defenders of the status quo drew a direct link between the Socratic origins of the liberal university and the classical scholarship that dominated the university curriculum and that they wished to protect. As the preserve of the “free man” in Greek and Roman society, classical liberal education also encoded class structures that informed a conservative articulation of liberalism within the Victorian university. Conservatives voiced their objection to the more systematic introduction of the tripos examination in terms of a liberal education that emphasised the value of education for its own sake, undertaken without a view to particular (often vocational) ends. On the other side of the debate, advocates of university reform were able to revive the vocabulary of classical liberalism as part of a modern liberal tradition that, following the philosophy of enlightenment Europe, redefined the state as the servant of the individual, thus making all state institutions vulnerable to the demands of enlightened reform. The educational treatises of philosophers such as von Humboldt and Kant rewrite liberal education to intersect with these demands and as part of a more general call for individual liberty.Footnote ³ In turn, liberal education in Britain was redefined by reformers such as John Stuart Mill, disciple of Bentham and von Humboldt, to mean a broadening of the curriculum and the reform of structures of assessment to ensure greater fairness in the rewarding of degrees.

Despite these differences, conservatives and reformers both employ the vocabulary of liberalism as one that achieves freedom via the regulatory structures of law. Martha McMackin Garland's history of Cambridge between 1800 and 1860 charts the achievement of gradual change, often in spite of the dons of Cambridge who “managed to articulate a stable university ideal which they were determined to uphold: the ideal of liberal education” (113). Garland's account of liberalism's decline in the second half of the nineteenth century focuses on the more systematic instatement of the tripos examination, which, according to its detractors, restricted intellectual freedom, even as it ensured greater equality. This point of view is set out in an 1868 essay by Professor Seeley, who writes that “the conditions of original research are leisure and ability, a limited field, a sense of duty, and rewards in reputation and money proportionate to exertion” (qtd. in Farrer 151), implying that it is through physical boundary (“limited field”) and material reward that students and scholars become “more manly and free” (176).Footnote ⁴ Likewise, in 1867, on being made dean of the University of St Andrews, Mill outlines the great improvements that had been made to university education in England, which was now the great focus “of free and manly enquiry” (Mill, Inaugural Address 10). This, he argued, had been achieved by following the Scottish system, which, “in point of fact, . . . comprises the whole of a liberal education, from the foundations upwards . . . including the whole, both in depth and in breadth.” Like Seeley, Mill adopts a spatial turn of phrase that returns us to the liberating confines of Woolf's room. Similarly, J. H. Newman, who, in his lectures “On the Scope and Nature of University Education,” delivered in 1852 and published in the same year, offers a model of demarcated liberty as an ideal for university education. Discourse IV: “Liberal Knowledge, Its Own End,” which famously defines liberal knowledge as that which “stands on its own pretensions, which is independent of sequel, expects no complement, refuses to be informed . . . by any end” (92) goes on to argue that the university is well-placed to provide such an education, separated as it is from the duties and cares of marriage and family. Divorced from these material ends, the university provides a place where “an assemblage of learned men, zealous for their own sciences, and rivals of each other, are brought, by familiar intercourse and for the sake of intellectual peace, to adjust together the claims and relations of their respective subjects of education.” Thus, says Newman, “is created a pure and clear atmosphere of thought, which the student also breathes” (92). Newman's figures of speech are echoed by Matthew Arnold, who, in The Popular Education of France (1861), reminds the reader that “life itself consists, say the philosophers, in the effort to affirm one's own essence; meaning by this, to develop one's own existence freely and fully, to have ample light and air, to be neither cramped nor overshadowed” (55). The link between the light and air of the environment and the light and air of the mind (itself reminiscent of Arnold's famous call for “sweetness and light” in Culture and Anarchy) is again implied when Arnold goes on to criticise the English educational system, which leaves the faculties “crammed so full and fast” that development is stifled. As in Woolf's essay, there is a fine line between matter and metaphor in the reformist liberalism of Newman, Arnold, and Mill, whose educational philosophy rests on an idea of school and university as physical spaces, where the foundations that secure walls are the same as those that ensure the free development of the liberal individual. What Woolf's essay shows us is not only that these walls are at once material and ideological, but also that they have as much to do with exclusion and limit as they have to do with freedom.

Woolf's brief sojourn at Oxford is shaped not only by the materials of college wall and cloister; it is also informed by a range of textual materials. As she strolls through the grounds of the college, “some stray memory of some old essay about revisiting Oxbridge in the long vacation brought Charles Lamb to mind” (9). It is easy to see why. Like Woolf, Lamb was denied a university education (because of money rather than gender), and his short essay, “Oxford in the Vacation,” like Woolf's, describes an act of pleasant trespass through “the tall trees of Christ's, the groves of Magdalen! The halls deserted, and with open doors, inviting one to slip in unperceived” (12). That Lamb's stroll does not suffer the interruptions experienced by Woolf may be partly to do with the time of year. Whereas Woolf's visit takes place on a “fine October morning,” Lamb is in Oxford during the summer vacation and so he “can take my walks unmolested, and fancy myself of what degree or standing I please. I seem admitted ad eundem. I fetch up past opportunities. I can rise at the chapel-bell, and dream that it rings for me” (12). As Lamb's account suggests, the long vacation (or “the long”) presents a challenge to the temporal and physical structures that govern university life. In one sense it is defined by the same paradoxes that characterise the liberal university more generally: its length is circumscribed by particular dates, and its vacancy – followed as it was in the nineteenth century by examinations – is expected to be productive.Footnote ⁵ However, these troubling binaries are also tested by the vacation, which makes the material structures of university life temporarily permeable, challenging the rarefied freedoms of liberal education with more radical forms of liberty.

At the same time, as undergraduates and their tutors leave the walls of Oxford or Cambridge, the privileged structures that facilitate and police their liberty are at once exposed to and imposed upon the world beyond the university. The challenges and tensions of the long become the subject of a number of poems, short stories, and essays that appear with sporadic frequency, both in college journals such as Isis and the Cambridge Review, as well as in a substantial number of national periodicals, including Macmillan's, Blackwoods, All the Year Round, Once a Week, Cornhill, and Vanity Fair, throughout the long nineteenth century. Some of these compositions would best be described as travel literature; others are meditations on what Arthur Hugh Clough describes, in a letter written during the long vacation of his first year at Oxford, as a condition of “great-do-nothingness” (Correspondence 1: 49). However, whereas Lamb celebrates the opportunity to give full rein to the free play of his imagination, the undergraduate authors of these long poems and stories tend to worry about and defend themselves against a vacancy that they perceive to be isolating and unsettling, employing literary form as a means to reassert the boundaries of liberal privilege that they perceive to be under threat.

The ambivalent attitude of these texts toward the temporary liberties of the long is captured by a parody in an 1867 number of Punch entitled “The Long Vacation.” A letter, signed by “AN UNDERGRADUATE, with every prospect of remaining so,” describes its author as the victim of the Long Vacation, the “detestable, annual justitium, by which one's friends and acquaintances are, for the space of four months, scattered over the face of the earth beyond any possibility of communication” (139). The “undergraduate” goes on to describe how, because he is neither “sportsman, fisherman nor pedestrian,” he has been able to find nothing to do and so has “driven back to Oxford on the dismal pretence of reading.” He concludes by introducing his poem: “My overwrought feelings have sought relief in some verses, which I enclose, as conveying a more vivid conception of the feeble state of mind to which I am reduced, than any other form of expression I could adopt.” The verses describe the student's plight in more detail. He has been denied the activities that upper-class young men usually take part in during the summer months – Continental tours, shooting parties, “cricket and Aunt Sally” – but is scarcely happier back in Oxford where he wanders, disconsolate, through familiar haunts, finally resolving to go back to town. The poem is written expressly to kill time and to fill space. Its author writes to relieve the overwrought feelings provoked by the gaping void that has opened up between the managed time of the Trinity and Michaelmas terms. By passing time in this way he can be understood to gain some kind of control over it, describing it and demarcating it using the materials of language and metre. The brief stanzas are characterized by lack: populated by “nought” and “no-one,” “bare” walks, and listless inactivity. By naming these lacks, the writer cancels them out and transforms them into occupied sites of productivity, containing Oxford's empty spaces within so many square feet.

The vacancy of the long also leaves room for undesirable intrusions, which undergraduate authors chronicle in ways that reassert their authority. Accounts of the long often make a joke of such invasions, employing laughter to circumscribe the liberties taken by men and women who do not belong to the university. In “Very Hard Cash,” a short story published in All the Year Round in 1863, it is the student's return home that occasions his sense of displacement, a disorientation caused by the interference of the women whose influence is not felt within the walls of the college: “But lo!, ere he had been an hour at home, he found his things put neatly away in his drawers on the feminine or vertical system – deep strata of waistcoats, strata of papers and his Logic gone” (169). It transpires that the young man's Logic has been taken by his sister, who is also responsible for the radical re-ordering of his landscape of “things.” Describing this minor coup, the narrator's tone is indulgent, defusing his sister's behaviour by making it into a joke between men. Collegiality is re-established within the pages of the fiction: absence and displacement create grounds for newly imagined communities.

Wat Bradwood describes these changes in more hostile terms in a short story published for London Society in 1868: “cads and broken-down stablemen were loafing idly at Carfax, scouts and counter-skippings lording it as the reigning stars and swaggering down the High” (40). Bradwood's narrator scatters his description with university jargon in an attempt to maintain authority even as he complains about its loss. The story features a set of undergraduates whose braying humour self-affirms their identity as members of the same privileged class. Having established that they need something to do before heading “To Lords for the match” or “To the July meeting” (the questions “which match?” or “which meeting?” would be asked only by the uninitiated), one of the party suggests a walking trip to Wales, to which one student responds:

The aggressive snobbery of the undergraduates is a direct response to the threatened encounter with the world beyond Oxbridge that is both the joke and the horror of “the long.” Bradwood's story arms against the contamination that it laughs about; its bluff, upper-class exclamations brush off the “odds and ends of Queen's English” and scattered “h's” that might otherwise soil them as they walk beyond the confines of their college walls.

Dispersed undergraduate communities are rebuilt within the space of long vacation texts that are written for an exclusively Oxbridge readership. “A Long Vacation Sketch in Scotland” and “Long Vacation” (1868), both – the latter explicitly – about undergraduates with “time to kill,” were published in London Society: an illustrated magazine of light and amusing literature for the hours of relaxation; a title that allows reader, author, and character to be imagined sharing their aimless hours together. Other poems address themselves directly to members of the world they describe or use self-parody as part of an arch pose designed to amuse those in the know. “A Dirge From the Long Vacation,” published in Once a Week in 1866, begins in bathetic mimicry of literature's most famous victim of Long Vacation malaise:

The poet names neither Hamlet nor the dismal location in which he finds himself, creating a coterie poetics that reassures the poet and audience that they are part of the same club. Language is similarly employed as a territorial marker in “A Day in Vacation at College,” which is addressed “to a Friend” and concludes with a note and glossary, explaining that “several of the Expressions in this Poem being local, and not intelligible to any but a Cambridge Reader, I thought it would not be disagreeable to add a few short Explanations of such Terms as are particular.” In this instance, the author adopts the pose of the gracious gentleman, offering limited and temporary access to his grounds, in order to establish that he holds the keys to the gate.

Undergraduates not only write to pass time during the vacation, they also read. Reading takes on a particular meaning for members of Oxford and Cambridge communities in much the same way that “men” is redefined to mean Oxford or Cambridge undergraduates. Footnote ⁶ It is often undertaken in parties: “Most delightful things. . . . Sometimes, it is true, they are only an excuse for an agreeable tour in agreeable society, but more often a large amount of solid work is conscientiously performed and a man who means to take a good degree will generally read as hard in the long vacation as in the term” (“Oxford in Undress” 420). The author of “A Dirge from a Long Vacation Reading Party” complains that he and the “dull undergraduate squad” that make up the party are forced “to sap at their books and sturdily plod, / With a ghost of a hope that a stroke of luck / May somehow or other save their ‘pluck’” (24–26). In most vacation pieces, however, like the undergraduate described in Punch, who comes up to Oxford during the long vacation “to read” but instead spends his time wandering through the empty streets of the University town, reading is, for the authors of these texts, an alibi. A short article in the Cambridge Review advises anyone arranging a reading party that “opportunity for golf, lawn tennis, cricket, boating, or swimming will be more appreciated than fine scenery. We believe it is because men get their games so easily up here that they face the depression of Cambridge in July and August” (139). The author of the “Dirge” compares the situation of his friend, who has travelled abroad and enjoys a vacation “where all is jollity, mirth and bliss” (35) with his own hollow reading experience that consists of learning by rote the answers to a long list of random questions:

Another student concludes a description of a fishing trip in Scotland arguing that “Old and reverend seniors will say this was an ill-spent vacation; but I do not agree with them. I saw nature and sport and fun, and after some very hard reading with my door locked, admitting no strangers or friends, I saw myself a full-blown Bachelor of Arts” (“Angling Reminiscences of a Long Vacation” 430). “A Long Vacation Romance” (1893) describes the failure of a relationship between a tutor and his betrothed because the tutor remains in Oxford to read for his examinations leaving his fiancée to travel abroad, where she meets and marries a wealthy cousin. The moral of this tale is that reading is rightly understood not as scholarly and solitary, but as communal, physical, and strenuously masculine. It is a kind of reading that is both represented and carried out by long vacation literature, which describes or inscribes undergraduate communities, enabling them to inhabit and possess potentially anarchic lengths of summer time and space.

It is this sort of reading that is described and invited by The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, Arthur Hugh Clough's “Long-Vacation Pastoral.” The poem was composed in 1847 following Clough's resignation from Oriel College on religious grounds, a departure that marked the end of a troubled decade at Oxford. Clough's mercantile background meant that he did not experience university life with the complacency of those who could claim it as a birthright, and he felt its pleasures and failures with intensity. His letters and journals record his days in college with an equal measure of enchantment and dissatisfaction. In a letter to J. N. Simpkinson in which Clough compares Oxford and Cambridge, he remarks without irony on Oxford's significance:

Three years later, in another letter to Simpkinson, he writes as one who has seen this potential (both of himself and of the university) go unfulfilled: “That I have been a good deal unsettled in mind at times at Oxford, and that I have done a number of foolish things, is true enough, and I dare say the change from Rugby life to its luxury and apparent irresponsibility has had a good deal of ill effect on me” (Letters 44). This half-evangelical, half-dubious perspective was the legacy of the Arnoldian education with which he compares Oxford in the later letter. A product of the newly reformed Rugby School, Clough was formed in the mould of liberal individualism. His poetry displays what John Maynard describes as a “sceptical, probing mind [that] insists on exposing the limits and weaknesses in any would-be orthodoxy it considers” (39); a mind that is therefore also in thrall to the tenets of liberal education, his honest doubt always a Tennysonian marker of sincere faith. The Bothie, which has been identified by Isobel Armstrong as radical in its sexual and class politics,Footnote ⁷ relies for its radicalism on the privileged confines of academia that it also critiques. Clough's poem simultaneously deconstructs and re-inscribes the university space, finally resolving on a complete break from its delineated freedoms, a break that, I argue, provides paradoxical confirmation of Clough's commitment to liberal models of progress.

The Bothie is as liberal and leisured as the party of undergraduates it describes, and relies just as much on material boundary and formal limit. In the pure clear air of the highlands, reading provides Clough's group of undergraduates with room for a variety of social activities (as well as studying, they are described taking long walks, bathing, and in conversation with one another); it defines and is re-defined as a sociable, exclusively masculine space that has much in common with Newman's university. The party closely resemble Newman's assemblage of learned men, zealous for their own sciences, and rivals of each other, who are brought, by familiar intercourse and for the sake of intellectual peace, to adjust together the claims and relations of their respective subjects.

The poem begins with a reading party and ends with a marriage, a first class degree (“’tis said”) and emigration to a farm in New Zealand – a liberal fantasy whereby reward comes, not to those who strive for it, but to those who strive without object, and whereby disinterested critique of self and society effects potentially radical progress. Philip Hewson (the poet-hero) is a wanderer, both in his travels and in his conversation. As he meanders around Scotland, he talks and writes letters about women. More than the plot, it is this verbal and epistolary conversation that carries the poem through from beginning to end. The other characters in the poem are his interlocutors and his audience. Clough's neat delineations of these young men are often recognised as The Bothie's main success, and the poem's liberalism is achieved out of their different personalities and points of view. Their difference is both established and bridged by the women who pass between them in conversation (as in The Princess in Eve Sedgwick's seminal account).Footnote ⁸ The real women that Philip encounters exist only to provide cases in point for Philip's on going argument with his friends.

The absence of any flesh-and-blood women from the self-sufficient male set-up of the reading party points towards the material limits that define it. The group of men make up their own family unit: they are described at one point as a “household” (3.85). Adam, the tutor, is doubtless in loco parentis, but there is a suggestion that the young men are not only brothers, but also lovers, husbands, and wives. The “lily-white legs” that Hewson describes when he is talking about the woman who first awakens his sexual desire as she stands in a field picking potatoes (2.111) are transferred to his friend Lindsay, who wounds his “lily-white thighs” (3.170) when he gets swept away by a strong current while bathing. This small joke is achieved by the kind of adjectival repetition that is part of The Bothie's mock epic style, itself a remnant of the Rugby schoolroom that plays around on familiar territory. As Yopie Prins has observed, The Bothie's quirky hexameters are also a product of Clough's classical education, which taught him to scan poetry “on the model of classical verse,” measuring it out into long and short syllables. Its self-conscious formal innovation, which “draws attention to its own lengths and measures” (103), constitutes a playfulness that rests on the formal limits of Clough's education.

Analogues for this formal and generic playfulness can be found in the geographical and conversational wanderings that the poem describes. The journeys that the young men make through the Highlands are almost always facilitated by university contacts who they arrange to meet and travel with. The poem's conversational wanderings are similarly bound to the forms of Oxford society. However much the poem and its readers insist on the difference of its characters from one another, beyond the context of the poem it is their sameness that is most apparent. They are all young men of similar age (even Adam the tutor is unlikely to be much older than thirty) and very similar social background. Critics disagree about which of them represents Clough: some say he is Hewson, the poet; others that he is Adam, the tutor; and speech that is attributed to one of the party in the manuscript edition of the poem is sometimes given to another in the published version. These editorial changes lose their potential force because the poem contains no speech marks. By omitting to use speech marks, Clough seems to admit that his reading party speaks with multiple versions of the same voice.

This voice speaks a language that is self-consciously exclusive. Lindsay, introduced to us as “the lively, the cheery, cigar-loving Lindsay / Lindsay the ready of speech,” is nicknamed “the dialectitian” because “of the words he invented, / Who in three weeks had created a dialect new for the party” (1.26–29). He calls the cottage where they are staying “the shop” and the bathing-place “the wash-hand-stand-basin” (2.229), terms which are translated for the reader by the narrator in rare moments of inclusiveness. By calling Lindsay's idiosyncratic vocabulary a dialect, the poem's narrator encourages us to think in the same way about the Oxbridge slang used throughout the poem by the other students. Clough's attitude to the poem's Oxbridge dialect is ambiguous. His italicisation of words like “topping” and “shady” suggests that we are being invited to laugh at the undergraduate silliness of these young men and the mock heroic tone adopted by the narrator indicates that he is laughing along with us. Armstrong locates Clough's radicalism in The Bothie's language, which, she argues, “become[s] the object of democratic investigation” so that the poem becomes something like an anthropological study of the way speech “is determined and organised by and in specific social groups” (180). Likewise, she suggests that the narrator's mock heroic allows a doubleness that both invests in and critiques the “largeness that it imparts to its subjects” and so becomes “implicated in the problems that it seeks to analyse” (184). Armstrong is astute in her identification of the seeds of radicalism in the poem's wry self-critique, but the poem is only radical on its own terms and within its own sphere. Clough acknowledges this tension in a letter to Thomas Arnold, stating that although the poem has had “tolerable success” at Oxford, its local allusions might make “a larger success quite problematical” (Correspondence 1: 224). The poem's dedication to his “long vacation pupils” further suggests that Clough expected a local readership for his poem. The joke can only be read by those who speak the language and so the poem excludes even while it laughs at its own exclusivity. Author, narrator, and reader form a convivial reading party of their own, sharing a familiar, leisurely, and authentically liberal intercourse.

The only other person to make significant contribution to the poem's conversational to and fro is Philip's “prize” Elspie Mackaye, and much has been made of her ability to match Philip in debate. Focus usually falls on their first exchange and Elspie's mastery of the matrimonial and sexual metaphor of the bridge, reaching towards itself from opposite sides of a riverbank and held together by the keystone. However, in their second conversation – the last they have in the poem – their shared vision of an idyllic and equal future falters over the question of reading:

On this occasion, sex comically fails to bridge the gap between the couple, or to stop Elspie's mouth. Like the undergraduate who finds that his sister has stolen his Logic, Elspie's suggestion that Philip should lend her some of his books causes unexpected consternation. Women are better than books, Philip argues, because they know everything already. They are “the running spring” (116), “the woodland and water, the freshness and beauty of nature” (118), whereas a book is a “pump,” which the man must ply (116). Philip's topographical metaphor makes clear that woman might furnish and supply the space of reading, but may not act within it. As Elspie realises, being better than a book does not make her into a reader, but simply a more agreeable thing to read. Philip's argument is thin, but although Clough invites the reader to find holes in it, Philip does get his kiss and it is by no means clear that Elspie gets her books. It is Philip who returns to Oxford “to read like fury” (9.13). His preparations for the Oxford examinations perhaps constitute a more solitary and conventional form of study than that which engaged him in the Highlands; however instead of evidence of study and accounts of exams, it is Philip's epistolary conversation with Adam that fills the space between vacation and wedding. Reading again provides an alibi for an on going familiar intercourse within the liberal spaces of university and poem.

The poem's final lines describe Hewson's rejection of Oxford life and his emigration to New Zealand, a geographical move of such scale that it works to critique and expose the limited freedoms of the Scottish adventure. The narrator, himself, we assume, back in College, concludes his tale with a brief and speculative epilogue:

The hexameter breaks in two as the poem moves into the present tense, registering a measure of disruption; but the narrator gets quickly back to his feet as he sketches his hero's new life in a way that balances radical change with continuity. Philip's rejection of his cosy academic milieu for agricultural labour in foreign climes offers a glimpse of a more democratic existence, one that, although it concludes the leisurely progress of the poem, appears strongly at odds with what precedes it, as if the poem's liberal self-interrogation has proved rather too effective, pointing as it does towards the possibility of real change. However, the poem works to contain this change. In this new world, Philip Hewson hews. The narrator's last joke at the expense of his hero is a pun on his name that seems slyly to suggest that Philip has not so much moved forward as returned to his proper place, so that the apparently seismic shift in his fortunes, at once a critique and exemplar of his liberal education, is itself securely contained within the enduring forms of birth and name. Likewise the narrator wishfully imagines that the place itself, peopled by a new generation of Elspies and Adams, has undergone a cultivation that has inscribed onto it the familiar names of the old world.

Of course, The Bothie's biggest joke, the name that begins and ends it, got cleaned up when the poem went into its second edition. There is some debate over whether or not Clough was aware that Toper-na-Fuosich meant “bearded well,” but Clough's denial of the double entendre is entirely in keeping with the poem's covert or coterie humour, which laughs amongst itself, not out towards a wider audience. We are shown glimpses of Clough's attitude towards this more general readership in the letters he writes to his sister, Anne, his close and devoted companion who was nevertheless denied unmediated access to his university life. The first letter he writes from Oxford to his sister reveals both the novelty of university form to this freshly-gowned undergraduate and, more crucially, his awareness that his sister does not share that status:

Clough is obviously delighted by his new identity. His description of his first few days at Oxford makes enthusiastic use of a language only recently acquired, but he is also aware that Oxford, its dialect and rituals are unknown to Anne. Clough is careful to offer explanations of words he thinks she will not understand (he explains that “Hall” means dinners in Hall) and adapts his language slightly in order to make it more comprehensible to an outsider (he says “wine party,” rather than “wines”). Anne's reading of Oxford, the letter suggests, can only ever be partial: a glossed translation of the real thing.

Anne Clough's position is similar to that of Lilia, the sister of young Walter Vivien, one of the group of undergraduates that compose together the story of the Princess in Tennyson's long, experimental poem of that name. Although preceded at Cambridge by his grandfather, father, and elder brothers, Tennyson's university career might, like Clough's, be understood as that of an outsider. Remembering his first months in Cambridge, fellow students and tutors frequently record an impression of physical distinctiveness that, in Edward FitzGerald's account, amounts to the otherworldliness of Keats's Hyperion (4: 100). Robert Bernard Martin describes him as “a poet and not a scholar” (51): neither a reading man, nor a sporting man, he “fell somewhere between the two groups” (54), and although he is most frequently associated with The Society, or The Apostles, that close-knit circle of brilliant young men founded on the principles of liberal debate, his connection with them was only ever informal, his membership becoming untenable when he failed to take his turn to read an essay aloud to the group. His university career ended when he left Cambridge in 1831, called home to his dying father and never returning to take his degree.

It is in Tennyson's poetic representations of university life that he is able most easily to inhabit the quiet collegiate cloisters in which his rangy, ill-washed frame never found a comfortable home. In section 87 of In Memoriam, the poet's return to the university some time after the death of his friend, which culminates in a memory of Hallam speaking to The Apostles, liberal oratory is suggested as the product of the circumscribed freedoms of the college environment. The “thunder music” (7) of the organ is just barely contained by the windowed walls of the chapel; the shout of rowers is balanced by the “measured pulse of racing oars” (10) and the poet listens at a closed door, behind which all is “noise / Of songs, and clapping hands, and boys / That crashed the glass and beat the floor” (18–20); all of which leads to a memory of himself as one of a “band / Of youthful friends” (21–22), and of Hallam whose “rapt oration flowing free” (32) is also “music,” this time “in the bounds of law.” This model of good rhetoric is likewise a description of the formal freedoms of poetry and so Tennyson's memory of Hallam and Cambridge provides a pattern for poetic practice that might also be termed liberal.

In The Princess we encounter a similar band of youthful friends. This time, however, the solid walls of Trinity College are replaced by the open gates of Vivian Place. Like The Bothie, the occasion of Tennyson's Princess is a long vacation party and its undergraduate speakers, like those in Clough's poem, talk of women and marriage. The poet and his friends make up a story about the fictional Princess Ida and her university for women in answer to Lilia's question: “— what kind of tales did men tell men, / She wondered, by themselves?” (Prologue: 193). Sedgwick rightly points out that this question is central to the understanding of the poem, and her seminal reading focuses on the men who answer it and the answer that they construct.Footnote ⁹ Equally important is the questioner, and the audience she provides for the tale, which places pressure on the integrity of the university community. Walter, attempting to placate his sister, after making fun of her plans for a university for women, describes how much he misses her while he is at university:

Here again we have the reading party, the tutor, and the less than studious band of undergraduates whose attention cannot be held by the “cube and square” (Tennyson was himself poor at mathematics and took a tutor at Cambridge to help him). Like the happy household of students and tutor in The Bothie, their thoughts and then they themselves turn to women as they pledge toasts to their sisters and play trivial games “like as many girls.” However, Walter begins his recollection with an exhortation to Lilia to “Come, listen!” an imperative that separates Vivian's account of an undergraduate reading party from Clough's. Vivian describes his Cambridge Christmas reading party as part of an appeal to his sister and for the sake of domestic peace.

In the same way, the story that he and his friends tell (the mainstay of the poem) is told in response to Lilia's demands and those of the maiden aunt: “‘Why not now?’ the maiden Aunt. / ‘Why not a summer's as a winter's tale?’” (203–04) As such it cannot be the same tale as the one his friends tell each other. Indeed, the women require that it be different – a summer's rather than a winter's tale. Although Lilia's question is the thing that moves the men to reveal the tales they tell, her presence (and ours) means that they are not “by themselves,” and the tale holds traces of a struggle for liberal space that is never quite achieved. The tale itself, which takes its inspiration from Lilia's vision of a university for women, is a tale told to order, but it is also a tale told to impose order in that the dissolution of the university and the marriage of prince and princess that conclude the story exert the patriarchal will of the narrator over Lilia's subversive dream. Conscious of this particular end and reminded by the presence of sister and aunt of the domestic demands of home and family, the story of Princess Ida lacks the material conditions that define and confine liberal thought. Likewise, The Princess itself is perhaps too aware of audiences and ends to be properly liberal. A self-consciously modern poem, it seeks to engage with a world beyond the palaces of art that had fostered Tennyson's development. This “mock-heroic,” “seven-headed monster” is characterised by hybrid genre and multiple form, a material instability that is reflected in Vivian's own discomposure when at being required describe “— what kind of tales did men tell men . . .?” replies “‘Kind? what kind?’” (Prologue 193) It suggests that the difficulty of liberal education is one of communication and accountability beyond its own self-sustaining limits.

The Princess is brought to an abrupt conclusion by a shout as the gates of Vivian Place are shut, marking the long day's end. Two college men left inside reflect together on the day's events, concluding, “Why should not these great Sirs / Give up their parks some dozen times a year / To let the people breathe?” (103–05). Pure clear air, sweetness and light has been extended to the public temporarily, and no harm done.

The Princess, The Bothie, and the range of undergraduate scribbling about the long vacation only suspend material law in order to reassert it with greater force. However, a different response is suggested by Amy Levy's “Cambridge in the Long” (1889). Like Tennyson and Clough, and unlike Woolf, Levy was a student at Cambridge and so, from one perspective, she writes as an initiate of those places where Woolf is an outsider. But whereas Woolf, whose principal audience is made up of women already in possession of “rooms,” argues that the privileges of liberal space be made available to both sexes, Levy's challenge is at once more slight and more fundamental.

Levy's initial experience seems to pre-empt the experience described by Woolf:

Levy describes herself lying on the banks of the Cam, surrounded by a hyper-natural landscape that dazzles in much the same way that Woolf's riverbank flora “glows” and “burns” with colour. However, whereas Woolf is lost in thought, Levy dreams. The poem is soporific, a lazy incantation the words of which slip and slur into one another across the lines: “drowsy,” “drowsy,” “dazzling,” “densely”; “the limes, / I lie”; “radiance,” densely”; “gardens,” “green,” “grey”; “small,” “slow,” slides”; these threaten to tease the reader out of thought. Levy too is plagued by the intrusions of the everyday. She complains that “The strenuous life of yesterday / Calleth me back again,” and she can never completely forget the life she has left behind in “town.” She describes the desire “spirit with sky to change” as an “idle hope” and concludes,

Whereas Woolf is expelled from a place that might otherwise enable her to think and write, Levy rejects the liberties of the Long as an illusion and asserts her own strength of mind over what she implies is a pleasing mirage. She is close kin to the group of women in The Princess who have no time for mockeries; like them, the play of a liberal aesthetic is not for her, and, although she seems to regret its loss, we sense that she is better off without it.