By Hugh Reid, Adjunct Research Professor
My first blog about ENGL 4135, Studies in Publishing, (but which I refer to as my ‘Rare Books’ course) was about the excitement students feel when handling 200-year-old books and trying to solve the mysteries of their materiality contained therein. The 2nd blog was about the personal component of these books which the students began to discover when dealing with the people who had written or who had owned the books. There is another element to the course, one altogether more utilitarian—a constituent of the course that might seem far removed from examining eighteenth-century books. Nowadays it is fashionable for courses to be seen to be practical, as if a university education were job training, which I most certainly believe it is not. There are frequently subtle, and often not so subtle, queries as to the relationship to jobs that a course may provide. And ENGL 4135 seems to be about as far from job preparation as a course could be. How could examining 18th-century texts possibly prepare students for the world of work? Well, clearly, the books themselves and the mysteries about them that the students discover, don’t. It is the process which is important: through the process that the students learn, by the experience how to approach a problem and how to get through the vicissitudes of solving it. The course work parallels TV detective stories where there is a mystery, lots of clues to begin with, followed by a long period with no major developments. Then, during a lull near the end, some minor clue brings about a resolution, a clue which was often already in sight and generally found with ‘just hard police work’. The mystery is solved. Such is also the case in ENGL 4135. The thrill and excitement of the early stages keeps the students enthused, stimulated, and motivated to spend even more time trying to solve the secrets that the books conceal. But there inevitably comes a time when their work and their research begin to yield very little. Their investigations seem to the students to be moribund, or, at the very least, heading nowhere. It is this stage that is most didactic, most instructional. For the students feel like the detective in the mystery. They have worked so hard and there is no obvious resolution. Isn’t this what we all feel when doing something important, yet challenging? There comes a time in our labours that demands that we persevere even though we feel ignorant as to the direction, or even the method, of our persistence. We feel oddly let down, as if we haven’t done enough, as if we have been indolent all along. But somehow, miraculously, things effloresce, just as in the TV mystery. This year, in the last class of the course, a student discovered the Victorian owner of a 1771 edition of Wesley’s Hymns, an antiquarian from a small village in Oxfordshire who was also, not surprisingly, a Methodist preacher. The student was even able to find a picture of the Methodist chapel in which he preached, and presumably, where he carried this very book. No one seems able to explain these serendipitous occurrences, but they always happen. This is the lesson, the experience, which is important to take away from this course, and indeed, from university education. It is in courses such as this that we learn to think, to solve problems, to persist, and be diligent in our efforts. One of the most endearing moments of the course often occurs long after it has concluded when I encounter a student who says to me, “Do you remember when I was sure I couldn’t find anything more/what such and such meant/how that signature came to be there (or some such thing), and then I noticed…”? These reminiscences are always expressed with the confidence and self-assurance of one who has learned how to deal with problems and their often difficult resolution. In short, these are the words of someone who has benefited from a real university education, and not just a course in how to do something. And oh yes, the Latin title refers to such an education: ‘May it live, grow, and flourish!’