At the University's formal opening ceremony on 25 April 1876, the Adelaide Town Hall reverberated with the words of Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, as dignitaries set forth their visions for the institution's future. English literature was an important symbol of the British civilisation they wished to implant in a dry and dusty city in the antipodes and, as well as quoting from revered authors, the speeches stressed the value of a literary education. Walter Watson Hughes was not present, but for him, too, the discipline of English represented the best and most respectable traditions of culture and learning, and he had specified that one of the two chairs to be founded with his gift of £20,000 should be in ‘English Language and Literature and Mental and Moral Philosophy’. Hughes had first established himself in the rough and tumble world of whaling and opium trading but, in South Australia, had been able to take up more reputable pursuits; the chair's lofty title in part signified how far he had come.

For the University of Adelaide's first decades, professors of English were from Scotland and Ireland, reflecting the fact that, internationally, the discipline was strong in the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Dublin; there was no chair of English at Oxford until 1904 or Cambridge until 1911. Hughes stipulated that the English and Philosophy chair should be filled by the Reverend John Davidson, a Scottish Presbyterian minister who was lecturing on these topics at Union College, a multi-denominational theological institution founded in Adelaide in 1872.