All's Well That Ends

Abstract

provided a form in which the university did not exist as separate from the community outside it. It could thus be responsive to those whose complex lives might interrupt any sustained course of study. Lawrie’s book is attentive to such detail at its heart, but seems at odds with this ethos in how it is framed. Lawrie closes this account by noting deftly that when the Newbolt Report, The Teaching of English in England, was published in November 1921, Arnold Bennett was ‘occupied with other matters’: he was finalising his divorce and subsequently escaped to socialise in the south of France (p. 160). This is a good image for the clashing visions and influences that informed the rise of university English and that are intertwined in this history. It is a reminder too that the university remains both a ‘vital spot’ in which people can find and hear one another, and an institution that can be oblivious to forms of expertise that exist outside its walls. This study, in sensitive detail, honours the traditions on both sides of the divide.