Spend long enough with one of our English undergrads and sooner or later they’ll probably inform you, in hushed and reverent tones, that ‘Tolkien – can you believe it? Tolkien!’ wrote his epic fantasy novels in the Eagle and Child on Woodstock road. But Oxford is not only the progenitor of creative inspiration, but the subject of it. Right from its famous and florid evocation in Brideshead Revisited to an innumerable number of crime novels and thrillers, Oxford has appeared in literary works across the genres and centuries.
A Victorian conjuration of our beloved University was aptly titled The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green. Edward Green’s 1899 novel charts the experiences of naive undergraduate Verdant Green who is the butt of numerous student pranks, gets involved with fights between ‘town and gown’, and has many a night when ‘he kept the spirits up by pouring spirit down’.
This devil-may-care attitude is re-examined in high literary style in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, in which Oxford appears as a city which ‘exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth’. In this novel the innocent student Charles attends Hertford college and his initiator into a world of immoral moneyed aesthetes is Sebastian of – surprise, surprise – Christ Church. This novel proved so popular and influential that it sparked a whole series of fictional works emulating its narrative.
Most recently, Naomi Alderman’s 2010 novel The Lessons charts the story of an impressionable Physics fresher whose time at Oxford introduces him to a lifestyle of leisurely debauchery which
stands him in poor stead for theboring years following his graduation.
Highly romantic dissipation, it seems, is a common trope of the Oxford-centric novel and our own essay crises and alcoholic indulgence take on a veneer of respectability when you comfortingly recall that such situations have been the idealised fodder of creatives for generations.
But the same does not apply for the other favourite literary treatment of our beloved university town. Murder mysteries and crime thrillers are frequently situated amongst our hallowed halls. One entertaining offering is the amusingly titled Landscape with Dead Dons by Robert Robinson which is set in fifties Oxford. A series of murders sends the Oxford Dons into a satirically rendered panic and, in a memorable scene, a collection of them charge au naturel through the city centre.
Finally, it is an unusual undergraduate who has not tasted the delights of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. In a lesser known short story Lyra’s Oxford, Pullman presents a magical version
of our city through which Lyra must travel on a mission to unite a witch’s daemon and a mysterious alchemist who lives in Jericho.
Oxford has appeared in all sorts of guises: the home of desperate bands of youthful revellers, the scene of numerous brutal crimes, and a brilliantly uncanny rendition which reconfigures it as the home of an alternative universe of intellectuals, children and daemons. One thing that is certain, though, is that this long-lived literary love affair is far from over.
