The road to academic failure

In October 1877 Housman was going up to Oxford from a small town in Worcestershire on the southern fringes of the Black Country, a provincial boy from a family who would have had difficulty in supporting him without his scholarship. He had come from a relatively obscure school to a monumental and imposing Oxford college. Almost twenty years earlier, his uncle Joseph Brettell Housman (he who would soon buy the Housman family home) had won a scholarship from Bromsgrove School to Oxford's Worcester College, but whereas Housman's was an open scholarship at St John's, his uncle's had been a closed scholarship, that is one restricted to pupils of his own school. After two years of not living up to the description of ‘scholar’, Joseph suffered the ignominy of being deprived of his scholarship.

Housman was going up to Oxford without the advantage of relatives who had made their mark; he had nobody to lubricate his entrance; nor was he entering a ready-made network of former pupils from his own school, as could be the case with students from big well-known schools, such as Eton, Winchester, Westminster or Shrewsbury. He had first to make friends in his own college, look out for himself and make his own way forward.

He was without sporting prowess which could have provided him with an alternative route to social connections and self-expression. He was without money which would have enabled him, had he had such ambitions, to aim for the upper pinnacles of Oxford's social and political life. Having shone during his school days, his most likely expectation was that he would go on shining.

Only thirteen letters survive to record the events of his life at Oxford. Together they show no lack of willingness on his part to engage with what was around him. But far from recording awestruck impressions of Oxford, its personages and ceremonies, he was generally scornful. When he went with the other St John's freshmen to be matriculated (entered on the university register), a tutor told each one how to write his name in Latin – in his case, Alfredus Edwardus Housman. They then walked down St Giles along Broad Street, past the Sheldonian Theatre and into New College.