Studying Dickens at university was once considered demeaning. Now it’s too demanding

Any consideration of Stefan Collini’s subject has surely to address a major recent issue. The academic study of English, both at school and university, has fallen away significantly, with the numbers opting for it greatly diminishing. Anecdotal evidence from even the most serious institutions suggests that many students are now finding previously accessible texts impossible to read or understand – because of their length (Charles Dickens), their complexity of meaning (Alexander Pope) or remote sensibility or politics (Joseph Conrad). Collini has been given a generous amount of space to write his history. Despite this, he has chosen to end it more than 50 years ago. His subtitle is quite misleading. But that doesn’t prevent us from examining the foundations of the discipline he explores for the causes of the current decline.

There has, of course, been a discussion of English writing in serious institutional contexts for centuries. Alterations to copyright law after 1774 enabled publishers to issue works by relatively recent authors – collections in multiple volumes of poetry and fiction, like Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s 50-volume series ‘The British Novelists’ (1810). Although at first the study of the emerging accessible canon was informal, over time the institutional possibilities for the study of English literature were increasingly apparent. For example, it became the subject of examination questions for the Indian Civil Service. Public libraries spread after an 1850 Act (not, as Collini says, after 1890) and their guardians considered the availability of the best English classics as a crucial part of their job, though they often excluded novels altogether.