Download full ArticleDownload »

Matthew Sangster »

Matthew Sangster is Professor of Romantic Studies, Fantasy and Cultural History at the University of Glasgow, and the current President of the British Association for Romantic Studies. His recent publications include Living as an Author in the Romantic Period (2021), Institutions of Literature, 1700–1900 (co-edited with Jon Mee, 2022), Remediating the 1820s (co-edited with Jon Mee, 2023), An Introduction to Fantasy (2023), Realms of Imagination: Essays from the Wide Worlds of Fantasy (co-edited with Tanya Kirk, 2023) and David Bowie and the Legacies of Romanticism (2023). He is currently working with Katie Halsey on a book exploring the results of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded ‘Books and Borrowing, 1750–1830’ project. He is also writing about Tom Waits, Pierce Egan, J. R. R. Tolkien’s legacies and rude student marginalia.

Copyright Information

This article is © 2025–26 The Author and is the result of the independent labour of the scholar credited with authorship. Unless otherwise noted, the material contained in this journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND) International License.
Date of acceptance: 16 March 2025.

Referring to this Article

M. SANGSTER. ‘Affecting Retreats and Academic Follies: The Romantic-Period College in Poets’ Spheres’, Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840, 25 (Summer 2024), pp. 29–49.

Online: Internet (date accessed): https://www.romtext.org.uk/articles/rt25_n03/
PDF DOI:10.5281/zenodo.20015084

Affecting Retreats and Academic Follies

The Romantic-Period College in Poets' Spheres

09 May 2026

Abstract Abstract

Abstract: In Jerusalem, William Blake makes it clear that he sees universities as complicit in processes of mechanisation that threaten to destroy creativity and enslave minds: ‘I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe | And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire | Washd by the Water-wheels of Newton’.  However, surveying Romantic-period poetry more generally reveals that Blake’s view is an unusual one, breaking from eighteenth-century modes that remained the dominant discourses for addressing university life during the Romantic period. Poems on academic environments – particularly Oxford and Cambridge—commonly combined gentle satire on scholarly characteristics with presenting colleges as tranquil retreats.  More pointedly, many university-educated poets sought to inscribe the special value of the elite subjectivities they imagined that their university experiences inculcated: this essay examines poems by William Mason, John Duncombe, Richard Polwhele, Thomas Dermody, Frederick William Faber and Christopher Pearse Cranch that work in this vein.  However, such claims did not go unresisted, as shown through verse by Mary Alcock, Joanna Baillie, Phillis Wheatley, Lydia Howard Sigourney, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron and George Crabbe and in more active models advanced by John Wilson and John Mayne in their depictions of the University of Glasgow.  As higher education was diversified through urban foundations and institutions, spearheaded by the University of London, a project initiated in large part by the Glasgow-educated poet Thomas Campbell, the privileged scenes of eighteenth-century university verse became increasingly atypical.  Nevertheless, the powerful ideal of the college-idyll lingered for a considerable time, being both reinscribed and ironised in writings such as Charles Lamb’s ‘Oxford in the Vacation’, which combines a sense of the attractiveness of academic retreat with evocations of its fragility and performativity.

Tags

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

View Fullscreen
Skip to PDF content