John Sutherland writes about the Condition of English question

• Exploding English: Criticism, Theory, Culture by Bernard Bergonzi
  Oxford, 240 pp, £25.00, February 1990, ISBN 0 19 812852 5
• Professing Literature: An Institutional History by Gerald Graff
  Chicago, 315 pp, £11.95, February 1989, ISBN 0 226 30604 6

In March 1889 Edward Arber applied for the vacant chair of English Literature and Language at University College London. Arber’s career had been unusual. He began his working life at 17 as an Admiralty clerk, but was excited by Henry Morley’s extension lectures into spending all his spare time on the study of English literature. At the age of 42 he left the Civil Service, where he felt his life was being wasted, to take up his first academic post, a lectureship under Morley at UCL. Modelling himself on his indefatigable head of department, Arber soon made up for his late start. In 1881 he was appointed Professor of English at Mason College Birmingham – Birmingham University, as it was to become.