ABSTRACT
In 1825, Copleston reviewed together Campbell’s Letter to Mr. Brougham on the Subject of a London University and ‘Suggestions respecting the Plan of a College in London. He did not completely oppose Campbell’s ideas for the teaching of English literature, but he dealt with them grudgingly to say the least, suggesting that they were romantic and unrealistic. Campbell had marked out the sons of the middle classes as the likely clientele for University College, but Copleston saw a danger of breeding amongst these young men ‘an ardent love of literature’, and perhaps ‘unsettling the minds of many, who cannot aspire to live by it’. He admitted that the study of English literature might not necessarily have the effect of unfitting men for commerce, but he expressed the reservation that prolonged and systematic study was unnecessary. He thereby hinted at what became one of the major objections to the academic study of English in later debates, as for example at Oxford in 1886 and 1887, that as a subject it was not sufficiently rigorous.
