Abstract
Upward mobility, betrayal, and the Black Papers on education
Highlights
At a quarter to six on the morning of 16 May 1968, a gas oven exploded on the eighteenth floor of Ronan Point, a London City Council tower block in London
The explosion blew out the exterior wall of one of the upper flats in the building, leading to what the Ministry of Housing and Local Government called in its report a ‘progressive collapse’ as the flats on one corner of Ronan Point gave way, one by one, under the weight of the floors above them.[1]
The pun might be dismissed as an insensitive joke made by people occupying a class position far removed from most of the people who lived in Ronan Point, were it not for the fact that Cox himself, as well as the two men with whom he co-edited instalments of the Black Papers – A.E
Summary
At the heart of the Critical Quarterly Society was the friendship between Cox and Dyson, who met as undergraduates at Cambridge University. Leavis appeared untroubled by the fact that an Oxbridge education was disproportionately bestowed on the upper classes, even though, as Francis Mulhern observes, Leavis and most of the Scrutiny circle were of solidly middle-class origins themselves and laboured to turn the study of literature into a profession, rather than the leisurely pursuit of the gentleman-scholar.[25] Cox and Dyson’s activities through the Critical Quarterly Society over the 1960s can be understood as an attempt to share the fruits of an education in literature still further down the social scale, introducing schoolchildren across the UK to the pleasures of studying literature at the university level, and helping working- and lower-class aspiring academics to establish their careers They published essays in Critical Survey with the explicit aim of encouraging a broader range of students across the UK to follow in their own footsteps to Oxbridge. The Black Papers series whose first instalments would come out in Critical Survey from 1969 was, by contrast, much more of a backward-looking project in which Cox and Dyson attempted to preserve the educational system that had enabled their own social ascent
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