12 September

Death of a literary louse

1908 On this day John Churton Collins died, aged 60. His was the lot of the worthy scholar, outshone by what F.R. Leavis and his stern disciples liked to call ‘facile journalists’. They usually win.

A career swot, Collins made it with difficulty to Balliol College, Oxford (a benevolent uncle paid his way, under the misapprehension – encouraged by his nephew – that a career in the church was in prospect). At university (Oxford was currently going through the period that Gladstone called its ‘agony’ of religious doubt) Collins read deeply and widely.

He aimed already to be a man of letters based in Oxford, the only thing he is recorded in his life as ever having passionately loved. Alas, he was awarded a second-class degree: a handicap that hung, for the rest of his career, like an albatross round his neck. It precluded any academic post and his kind uncle, on learning of the fraud perpetrated on him, was kind no more.

Collins took up hack work in Fleet Street and, when his fortunes ran low, menial clerical work. It is recorded that he was superhumanly fast at addressing envelopes, for which he received a pound every thousand he did. Eventually he found a steady post as a ‘crammer’ for students entering the universities or the Civil Service (the Northcote Trevelyan Report of 1854 had recommended entry examinations – much to the disgust of old hands like Anthony Trollope).

What he really wanted to do was to write about literature, and by the end of the 1870s he had made a small reputation for himself as a higher journalist and could marry the lawyer’s daughter who had already borne the first of his seven children.

In 1880 Collins was taken up by Henry Morley, the indefatigable founder of adult education in England, and head of the English department at the University College of London. Collins followed Morley’s example as an industrious university extension lecturer. He is estimated to have given some 10,000 lectures. It was not, however, Oxford where, in the few days allowed him, he took his annual vacation.

Collins’ enduring quality was that of making himself royally unloved by the literary great. An uncomplimentary, but solidly researched, article on Tennyson’s poetic derivativeness earned him the description from the laureate that has immortalised him. Collins, Tennyson declared, was ‘the louse on the locks of literature’.

Collins buried his vengeful hatchet into the work of other literary grandees – always with sound scholarly warrant, which made him even less loved. His attempt to get himself elected professor of literature at Merton College, Oxford in 1885 provoked a powerful critique of the feeble way the subject was taught in the universities. He was right, but it won him no friends in high places.

His greatest offence, in the eyes of the London literary world, was his devastating satire on the (admittedly lax) scholarship of Edmund Gosse’s Clark lectures at Cambridge in 1886. A ‘mass of error and inaccuracy’, he called it. Collins’ hatchet was razor-edged, delicately aimed and transparently a shriek of (egotistic) scholarly pain:

That such a book as this should have been permitted to go forth into the world with the imprimatur of the University of Cambridge, affords matter for very grave reflection. But it is a confirmation of what we have long suspected. It is one more proof that those rapid and reckless innovations, which have during the last few years completely changed the faces of our Universities, have not been made with impunity.

Gosse’s reputation never recovered. On 12 September 1908, Collins’ body was found in a dyke at Oulton Broad in Suffolk, with a bottle of sedatives nearby. Despite the court’s verdict of accidental death, suicide seems more likely.