Oriel was only the fifth college to be founded in Oxford, in 1326. Although it has gone through periods of relative obscurity in the intervening seven centuries, it has also, at other times, been at the very centre of the intellectual life, not only of the university but of the nation. In the early 19th century, the Senior Common Room was dominated by the Noetics. These broad churchmen, who included Thomas Arnold, a fellow of the college before he became a famous head-master, believed in the acceptance of utilitarian economics, but also an application of Christian principles to society at large.
Against them, and in the same common room, were the high churchmen or Tractarians, the most hypnotic of whom, John Henry Newman, was the closest Oxford ever got to possessing a guru. Many of those Oriel men who would later eschew Newman’s outlook — Matthew Arnold (a fellow) or James Anthony Froude (a commoner and later a fellow) — recognised the stupendous impact made by Newman on the English imagination.
Simon Skinner’s chapter on ‘Oriel to Oliver Twist’ is an eloquent demonstration of the political difference between the Noetics and the Tractarians. Whereas the Noetics were Benthamites, who believed that Christianity was an instrument for social improvement, the Tractarians deplored the secularism and the cruelty of so-called social improvement: in particular they hated the Poor Laws and the use of the workhouse as a ‘deterrent’. He made me want to read F. E.Paget’s novel The Warden of Berkingolt; or Rich and Poor (1843), a seering attack on ‘political economy’ written from the Tractarian viewpoint. ‘Political economy,’ said Philip Pusey MP, brother of Oriel fellow Edward, ‘is very like individual stinginess.’ So, the central debate about the state of the nation was being played out in the SCR of Oriel.
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