Terræ-Filius: Or, the Secret History of the University of Oxford (1721; 1726)

Terræ Filius, literally the son of the earth, was the licensed fool who provided a running commentary at the Oxford degree ceremony. He lampooned the follies and foibles of dons and undergraduates, including their relations with the female toasts of the town. As we see in the frontispiece engraved by Hogarth for the 1726 edition of Nicholas Amhurst’s Terræ-Filius, any decorum the occasion was intended to maintain descended rapidly into chaos. The proceedings became so scandalous that the academic jester was suppressed by the university authorities in 1713.

Amhurst (1697-1742), whose ambitions for a fellowship at St John’s College were thwarted on account of his Whig politics, took up the figure of Terræ Filius in a series of periodical papers attacking the Oxford of the early 1720s. Amhurst decried the university’s prevailing orthodoxies—High Church and either Tory or downright Jacobite—and criticized what he saw as maladministration, corruption and intellectual narrowmindedness. His main target was William Delaune, President of St. John’s and vice-chancellor of the university, who had embezzled £3,000 from the funds of the Clarendon Press in order to pay his gambling debts, and who epitomized for Amhurst everything that was wrong with Oxford. It was Delaune who blocked Amhurst’s fellowship, so there is an air of the personal vendetta to all of this, even where the complaints are largely justified. Also pilloried are the Oxford divines who more or less openly preached treason on behalf of the Pretender, and the university officials who cracked down on student societies of a pro-Hanoverian character. Amhurst’s satire is thus highly particular, but at the same time reveals the principal fault-lines of early eighteenth-century England: Whig versus Tory, George versus James, Low versus High in matters of religion, all against the backdrop of public debate about political and financial corruption. This is the era of Walpole, Mist, Atterbury, Curll, Sacheverell, Defoe, the Bangorian controversy and the great Bubble which had just burst. As literature, Terræ-Filius or, The Secret History of the University of Oxford is unlikely to knock Addison and Steele off their perch, but it does offer a vivid (if highly partisan) picture of early Hanoverian Britain, at its best both witty and scurrilous in the tradition of Ned Ward.

The last printed edition of Terræ-Filius was that of 1754, produced after Amhurst’s death and included in Thomson-Gale’s Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). Rivers takes as his copy-text the first of two editions prepared under Amhurst’s supervision in 1726, which collected and revised the papers which had appeared as separate folio sheets over seven months in 1721, noting the significant textual variants. Rivers’s edition also reproduces the format of the original, complete with reproductions of the printer’s ornaments (and some sample pages from each previous edition of the work), so we have a good sense of the look and feel experienced by the eighteenth-century reader. Rivers is at pains to show us that Amhurst’s portrayal of Oxford is detailed, accurate, and largely true. He usefully identifies persons and incidents wherever possible, generally from standard works of reference like DNB, Alumni Oxonienses and The History of the University of Oxford (1986). Occasionally the process of factual verification becomes repetitive: the main biographical facts about Delaune are given far more often than they need to be, for example. Eighteenth-century journalism not being noted for its objectivity or factual accuracy, one wonders if Amhurst’s extreme personal and political bias make his text less reliable than Rivers would have us believe, but the point that there is a strong factual basis for the satire nevertheless appears well founded. On the other hand, while he acknowledges that modern historians have questioned the traditional view of Oxford as an intellectual wasteland during this period, Rivers could perhaps make more of an assessment one way or the other. He does make out the case, however, that Amhurst’s motivation in attacking the current state of Oxford was his love for the university and a sense of bitter disappointment that malign influences were preventing it from being the seat of learning and virtue.

Without wishing to sound petty, there are a few technical deficiencies. The odd piece of Latin is left untranslated (257), and it would probably be helpful to identify “P—y, and T—n”, which Amhurst calls the requisite qualifications for an Oxford degree, as “Popery” and “Treason” (309). Rivers is guilty of some solecisms, too: “Abington” (15), “Worchester” (61n, 191n), “Westminister” (246n), “Christ Church College” (35, 150n; Amhurst’s usage, but not correct for a modern editor). Using ECCO’s 1754 edition as a guide, there are what appear to be some typos: e.g., “Loyality”, 89; “bantilng”, 113; “god”, 253.

There is, however, nothing that would seriously undermine confidence in the edition as a whole—a point which could not be made about, for example, Bradford Mudge’s collection of libertine texts When Flesh Becomes Word, also reviewed in these pages. This new edition of Terræ-Filius is a useful addition to the shelf for those who are interested in the early, tumultuous decades of the eighteenth century in England and the vibrant periodical press of the day—in both of which Nicholas Amhurst played no small part.