Oxford at the Crossroads

This chapter reflects on questions of language, culture, community, and the state via the history of Oxford University (1860 to 1939). After considering Matthew Arnold’s ambivalence about his alma mater, it turns to the quarrel over the identity of the English language between the historian E. A. Freeman and the lexicographer James Murray and its impact on the Oxford English Dictionary. The second section traces this quarrel through the disputes about the creation of the new School of English in Oxford in the 1890s, focusing on the relationship to the established School of Literae Humaniores and the idealist assumptions underpinning the debate. The third section shows what bearing this had on the creation of the International Committee for Intellectual Co-operation, the precursor to UNESCO, in the interwar years. It centres on Gilbert Murray, then Professor of Greek at Oxford, and concludes with his public exchange with Tagore in 1934.