Tbe Pbilological Generation Reconsidered:

College Englisb Teacbing at Soutb Carolina, 1880-1920

Patrick Scott
University Qf South Carolina
This is, I suppose, an essay in tribal myth. Though the business of
English professors is ostensibly the written word, we remain, in many ways,
a primitive oral-based culture, and like most such cultures we repeat to each
other stories of the origin of our tribe. Our stories owe as much to our current concerns as to any actual historical record, for myths of origin are
also myths of identity. In kindlier seasons, we used to tell each other romantic legends and comic anecdotes about our predecessors, the heroes and the
clowns under whom we suffered in college and graduate school and our
first jobs. Such good-humored stories then served well enough for laughter
and inspiration, yet somehow they no longer seem to speak so happily to
us now, in the winter of our discontent. The old myths of the MLA generation and a hundred MLA conventions, myths of quest and struggle and
comedy and triumph, need now to be brought back to the test of history;
if Northrop Frye was right, we will survive the winter best by discovering

new myths, more pluralist, more realistic, more ironic, than the old.

One persuasive new myth is already gaining currency, the myth of our
disinheritance, of expulsion from paradise. Rightly or wrongly, whether
we are middle-aged professors regretful that no one now wants to know
about our original specialtyor youngish graduate students sti1Iwithout much
prospect of a job, many of us feel disinherited, cheated of our professional
great expectations. Surely once, one dreams enviously, there was a kind
of academic Eden, in whose groves erudition was rewarded and career patterns secure. A common candidate for a golden age of specialist scholarship would probably be the last years of the nineteenth century, the MLA
or philological generation. In the wintry light of the 1980's, nothing seems
so alien, so insufferable, as the self-confidence with which the MLA generation founded a new discipline, yet we envy them that confidence. Could
any of us now assert, as in 1880 one of my South Carolina predecessors
asserted, that "the assured intellectual possessions of the present day transcend the wildest dreams of a century ago' '1 Could any of us echo unironica1ly his joyful assertion that "knowledge cries aloud in the market-place, 'Ho,
75

76
everyone that thirsteth, let him come to me and drink''''?2
But the disinheritance myth is too simple. Our envy is misplaced. There
may have been a philological golden age in the graduate seminaries of Harvard and Johns Hopkins, but in college-levelEnglish teaching the professors
of the philological generation faced many of the same problems we face
today (an undefined subject, an uncertain future), even if they tackled those
problems with greater confidence or greater innocence.
In the period 1880-1920,my own department at South Carolina had
no heroic scholars, no famous names or legendary achievements, but it illustrates very nicely the hopes, ideals, fears, compromises, and selfdeceptions that created modern English studies. The development of South
Carolina's English department, in curriculum and staffing, is very typical
of the period, but it tells a story, not of the sure triumph of gentlemanly
erudition, but of constant political disruption and economic threat. In the
last years of the nineteeth century, South Carolina College went through
repeated reorganizations, with wholesale changes of institutional mission
and constant curricular upheaval. The professors of the past, too, were
unappreciated specialists, wondering what shape their subject would have,
not just in future decades, but in the next academic session, anxiouslyrevamping their expertise to meet new demands, both real and political. South
Carolina's history shows how shallow and brief the philological triumph
was, and how soon practicing college teachers turn back from specialist
linguistic scholarship towards meeting the classroom demands for general
courses in composition and literature.
What became the University had been founded in 1805as a traditional
classics-oriented college, and like most such colleges it put a strong curricular emphasis on rhetoric, under the Scottish mode of "philosophical
criticism.'" In the aftermath of the War, the unitary college curriculum
began to break down, and in the late 1860's the senior Rhetoric class provided for the first time an historical survey of English literature, based on
Spalding's widely-used manual. This beginning was disrupted by
Reconstruction and the brief closure of the University, and when South
Carolina was refounded in 1880, it was as part of multi-campus land grant
institution, South Carolina A.M., a cut-price, practical sort of place, with
only four professors. It was then that the first South Carolina professor
took "English" as the primary title of his chair.
The new A. and M., however, was still widely regarded as the state's
general college. It rapidly deversified its liberal arts offerings, and among
the specialistfaculty hired in 1882was our fll'stphilologically-trainedEnglish
professor, Edward Southey Joynes.. Within the year, Joynes would be
elected one of the original council-members of the Modern Language
Association. Joynes was a former pupil of the philologist Schele de Vere

77
at Virginia in the early 1850's; he had studied at Leipzig, and had held
chairs combining English and Modern Languages at William and Mary,
Washington and Lee, Vanderbilt, and Tennessee.
Joynes's contribution to the profession was in the dissemination of the
philological approach, rather than in original research. His twenty-odd
books are all textbooks French, German and English grammars and annotated reading-texts--and more than half of his publications from the early
1860's onwards deal, not with language itself, but with pedagogy and
academic politics. Joynes's concern throughout his career was with the status
of his subject, that it should be admitted to "a rank and dignity in our
higher institutions" side by side with the ancient languages. In an early and
admiring article about the Harvard elective system, he argued that:

--

the only conceivable aim of a college government in our

day is to broaden, deepen, and invigorate American
teaching in all branches of learning. It will be generations
before the best of American institutes of education will get
growth enough to bear pruning.'
He repeated the point in an MLA pamphlet of 1887: the great question
of the time, he maintained, was not how to reconcile the various competing
college subjects, but how "to bring each and every department to its own
best and highest development."6 It was the Joynes generation, stressing
English as an acceptable modern equivalent to the linguistic discipline of
the classics, that gained the subject the status that would allow later
diversification.
.

But Joynes's combinedchair of modern languagesand Englishwas

simply too unwieldy for one man. He soon hived off the rhetoric teaching
to the chaplain, and by 1888 the continued growth of the college allowed
a separate new specialist professorship in English Language and Literature.
When subjects are new and growing, they rely quite innocently on networks
of friendship and pupilage that might appear to a later generation
dangerously cosy or even corrupt. As his new colleague, Joynes chose a
Wofford professor, Franklin Cowles Woodward, the grand-pupil (the pupil
of a pupil) of his own mentor Schele de Vere, and a former student at
Randolph-Macon of Joynes's friend and Washington and Lee successor,
James Harrison, of whom more presently.7 Woodward, like Joynes, had
studied at Leipzig, though not taken the Ph.D. With Joynes, he had attended MLA meetings in the mid-1880's and served on MLA committees,
and both men saw themselves as leaders in an educational forward movement; "the hand-large cloud is over the horizon," he wrote in 1893, "and
the classicaldryness is to be tempered with a refreshing downpour of English
study
Unlike Joynes, Woodward published very little, even in textbook

~
form, and he differed from Joynes too in emphasizing literature over
linguistic study, at least in the introductory classes; this may have been a
lesson learned at Wofford, where he had taken over from a young hardline
Leipzig philologist, William Baskervill, who had been much disliked by the
stud~nts.9 At the MLA meeting in Baltimore in 1886, Woodward
commented:
English combines discipline and culture in a great degree.
But we must make the study interesting to the pupil. To
do this, the first thing necessary is to give him some
knowledge of the literature and get him in love with it. 1 0

Woodward aimed to induce such love by encouraging his students in

independent literary study. He founded an extracurricular English Club,
"to study in a recreativemanner the productions of the best English writers"
(chiefly novelists, it seems),"and his students began publishing their papers
in a new university magazine, not only essays on literary topics from Ang10Saxon poetry, Chaucer, and Shakespeare to realism and Hawthorne, but
also polemics in favour of more literature in the required curriculum; one
of the arguments used still has its contemporary reverberations -- "the rules
of grammar and rhetoric, and the writing of essays, will benefit us very
little unless we read and study the productions of master minds and profit
by their modes of expression," but another favourite argument now seems
like a voice from a vanished world

--"English

literature is indispensable

in the study of philology...[which] can only be carried on successfully by

reading the works of English authors, written at different stages in the

growthof our language.'" 2 It's like a medicalstudentarguingto histaxman that frequent experience of French cuisine is indispensable to the study
of biochemistry. Under Woodward, there soon came to be four full years
of English required for degrees in any major, and the expanded requirements, and the growth of student numbers, led to the hiring of further temporary teaching assistance, either graduate tutors or adjunct professors. One of these English tutors, Thomas Pearce Bailey, received the
University of South Carolina's first Ph.D., for work in philosophy and
English, in 1891.
Bailey's Ph.D. was not only the first, but also very nearly the last Ph.D.
from South Carolina, for the very rapid expansion of the 1880's had aroused
deep political jealousy. The University, as it had recently been renamed,
was actually very much the modern, practical, land grant institution it was
meant to be, with schools of engineering, agriculture, pharmacy and
economics, as well as the liberal arts. But in 1888-1890,the rising star of
South Carolina politics was Pitchfork Ben Tillman, the "Agricultural
Moses" from Edgefield County, and his populist platform demanded a new

agricultural college in the upstate to displace the antebellum pretensions

of the Columbia institution. When Tillman swept in as governor in 1890,
the University was stripped of its graduate work and its practical departments; its faculty was cut from twenty-seven to ten; and its appropriations
were cut back by over 70%, from $97,000 to $25,000. By 1895, the library
appropriation, for instance, was a mere $71. Student numbers fell from
above two hundred to a low of sixty-eight. Indeed, in 1892, the State
Superintendent of Education recommended to the Legislature that the college be closed and its buildings turned over to the more flourishing Win-

throp. 13
The political reversal was devastating for the College as a whole, but
its effect on the English program was, paradoxically, far from unhelpful.
Though there was no longer any adjunct assistance, both Joynes and Woodward retained their chairs; the English requirements for most degrees were
cut from four years to two, but this with the drop in numbers permitted
further variety and specialization in upper-level elective courses. Both professors were active also in extramural teachers' institutes. Like William and
Mary in the same period, the once-proud university began to function in
effect as a co-educational teachers' college, and English was therefore a
central subject. It was a sign of the times in 1897, after two scientistpresidents running, that the English professor Woodward should be appointed to the presidency, for English had displaced classics at the core of
the liberal arts curriculum, an English that was more a matter of culture
than of philological discipline in the strict sense.
By 1900, the English course-offerings had stabilized into a pattern
thoroughly representative of its period, indeed a pattern not wholly effaced even today. The first year was devoted to a grammar review, "the frequent writing of themes... with oral and written criticism by the instructor,"
and a survey of American literature. The second year began more formal
study of rhetoric, based on John F. Genung's best-sellingtextbook Outlines
of Rhetoric and emphasizing stylistic revision, and it provided also "a
general survey of English literature from the earliest times to the present."
The third year was based on the close study of major texts, from AngloSaxon prose to Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy; it's worth
remembering that Culture and Anarchy was in 1900 more recent, more
modern than Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" is now. A special
third-year parallel course "especially recommended" to intending teachers
offered a more detailed philological survey, from the textbooks of Henry
Sweet (books I was taught from in the early nineteen-sixties). In the fourth
year, there was a Romantic and Victorian course (which was, I suppose,
the MLA generation's modernism and post-modernism); there was a course
"on the seminary plan" tracing the rise of the novel; and there was still

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an upper-level rhetoric course in argumentation, using a text by Barrett
Wendell of Harvard, and aimed at public performance in the Senior Exercise. There was one graduate class listed, essentially supervised indepen-

dent study in Elizabethand Jacobeandrama. 14 Overthe next fewyears,

expansion of the faculty would allow much greater variety of upper-level
and graduate classes,but the basic pattern held surprisingly well freshman
composition, basic literary surveys, required historical language study for
majors, and then a choice of more specialized period and genre courses
thereafter.
With Woodward as president, further faculty hiring in English was
needed. Once again, the old network was called on. Woodward's new
associate professor, George Armstrong Wauchope, is a very representative
figure of the period, and he is also one whose career we can trace in unusual
detail there are ten boxes of his personal papers preserved in our South
Caroliniana library, and they offer a fascinating insight into the struggles
that a young scholar of that generation went through, even with good connections, to find and keep a university job. I' They show, too, the rapid
evolution under the pressure of pedagogic circumstance of a philological
specialist into a literary generalist.
When Wauchope came to South Carolina in 1898, he was already in
his late thirties. He had done his Ph.D. nearly ten years before under James
Harrison at Washington and Lee, specializing in the Gothic parables and
their Anglo-Saxon parallels; for years afterwards, Harrison hounded him
by letter about the progress of his projected edition of Gothic texts, an edition he certainly never finished and may never even have begun. The year
1889, as one might guess from Tillman's platform, was not a good one for
a new Ph. D. to join the job-hunt. He wrote round desperately to Harrison's friends and former students, who sent him back just the kind of
letter you would expect. W.S. Currell, then at Davidson, for instance, wrote
in May 1889:

--

--

Good openings are very scarce in this state, and...the

which often means
friends of "progressive education"
more bluster than bottom are working their latest 'fad'
for all it is worth and the patient seeker after truth takes
a back seat and listens with ill-concealed impatience to the
blatant fluency of his glibber co-educator. If I see an opening I shall take great pleasure in forwarding your interests,

--

--

though I cannot give you much encouragement.16

In May, Wauchope turned down a high-school level job at $400 a year,
only to find out in early June that the university post he had been promised, at $1000 a year, hadn't been funded by the Missouri legislature. By

November, after his first research trip to Germany, he was applying for
school teaching posts at $250. He was recommended for a job at Kentucky
State College, but nothing came of it. A professor from Alabama wrote
that the only vacancy he'd heard of was at Vanderbilt, but it had already
been promised to a Vanderbilt graduate, and so on, and so on.
For two years, Wauchope hung on, teaching Greek, Latin and
arithmetic in a military academy in North Carolina. In 1891, the longpromised Missouri job at last came through, and Wauchope was appointed
Assistant Professor of English, at a salary of $1200. He went, though, not
to teach Gothic philology, but to face his first freshman composition class,

and he had to write to Harrison to ask how to teach it.

I7

At Missouri,

Wauchope developed new courses in the modem (i.e. nineteenth-century)

essay and in Shakespearean drama, and in 1895 he moved on to become
professor at the Universityof Iowa, where he introduced a year-long seminar
on the English novel from Thomas Nashe to J.M. Barrie and Rudyard Kipling. He founded a student drama club and became engaged to one of its
members. He also fell out with the administration, and by 1897he was once
again writing to Harrison to ask about job openings. Harrison wrote back
paternally:
Meanwhile, here's a bit of my ripe experience: never take
a very decided or partisan side in mere faculty questions;
be neutral & uncommitted unless principle is involved.
Faculties fight over mere nothing & it's all 'no good' -merest bosh! "
Wauchope failed to get the Minnesota chair in November that year, and
he left Iowa at Christmas for six months unpaid research leave in the
Harvard libraries. Essentially, he found himself, at thirty-seven, unemployed
once more.
He leapt, therefore, at the offer Dr. Joynes sent him in May to go to
South Carolina, even with a drop in rank. His scholarly interests had changed greatly since his Ph.D. training in Gothic. Though he had won an Early
English Text Society prize in 1892, he had, like Woodward, really given
up historical philology for a modem literary-based pedagogy, and his main
publications in the nineties had been annotated schooltexts of nineteenthcentury prose-writers for D.C. Heath of Boston (which was also Harrison's
publisher and had put out Woodward's little book about English teaching,
in its Pedagogical Library). He had begun work, too, as an assistant editor
on W.P. Trent's Library of Southern Literature, and Dr. Joynes, who had
served in the Confederate War Department and had taught under Robert
E. Lee himself, provided a living link with many of the figures whose
background he was researching. After Woodward left in 1902, Wauchope

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82
took over the English program. For his first twenty years at South Carolina,
he taught eighteen hours a week, carrying the regular two year-long sections of freshman English as well as undergraduate and graduate courses.
Even in his seventies, in the early nineteen-thirties, when he was head of
a department of fourteen faculty serving over seven hundred students, he
still taught twelve hours, and noted somewhat ruefully that he had no
secretarial assistance. In 1941, he calculated that he had, in fifty-six years
of teaching, taught more than 8,000 individual students and delivered over
thirty thousand class-lectures. I' He remained head of department till 1934,
and finally retired from regular teaching in 1942.
Quite obviously, in such circumstances, Wauchope's professional attitudes and goals would differ from those of his contemporaries in more
ambitious research universities. In the late 1880's, as I mentioned, he had
studied in Germany, and as late as 1908he made a research trip to Britain,
but I can find no evidence in his papers that after the eighteen-nineties he
went to any professional meetings. His professional contacts were on a much
more personal and regional level, through exchange teaching during summers and sabbatical leaves for friends and colleagues at the University of
Virginia, Chapel Hill, and Peabody Institute in Nashville. His research interest changed once more, from the nineteenth-century essayiststo Southern
literature, especially the writers of South Carolina itself; following up on
his Library of Southern Literature work, he published both a general study
and an anthology of South Carolina writing. This was writing for the general
reader, not for a specialized scholarly audience, though it seems to me, a
non-specialist, solid enough; I don't think he ever contributed to a scholarly
journal in any of the fields he taught, and this must surely have been a
conscious choice. He was one of the founders of the Columbia Drama Club,
and so of the community theatre movement; in the 1930's, he gave some
of the first radio talks for the University's extension department; and one
of the last courses he taught before he retired was entitled "Living Writers."
Wauchope's attitude to his career, to teaching and literature, set the pattern on which other, younger, South Carolina colleagues would model their
own activities. In part, of course, the new stability of the South Carolina
English program was the product of greater economic stability for the
University as a whole, but it is hard not to see some kind of turning-point
around the turn of the century, a new stability in the idea of English at
the college teaching level, and in that stability the disruptively innovative
scientific research of the original philological generation had no place.
The final seal on this process of stabilization, the middle-aging of
English as a subject, came in 1914, when Wauchope and the aging
Dr. Joynes together persuaded the Trustees to bring in as university president yet another of James Harrison's Washington-and-Lee circle and his

successor in the English chair there, W.S. Currell. Since Currell was also
a philologist by background, and had even edited a volume for Harrison's
Library of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, it looks like the final triumph of the
philological generation, the ultimate rout of the old, amateurish, but adventurous, antebellum tradition of rhetoric-and-belles-Iettres. Indeed, Currell's
appointment meant that in 1914 South Carolina could boast an English
department of four, three specialists in Old English and one an early ballad
scholar .
But the philological triumph was more apparent than real. One needs
to remember what these philologically-trained professors were actually
teaching. Though historical language study was required in the major, the
simple facts of pedagogic tradition, student needs, and student interests ensured that the general English curriculum always remained based in composition and literary criticism, and in very general literary-cultural history,
rather than in the newer philological or literary-historical research.
An unkind critic might argue, indeed, that in colleges like South
Carolina, the MLA generation sold out, that they used the prestige of the
new research, the sense of a discipline on the move, simply to validate their
takeover of the core curriculum, but that they hardly brought philology's
new professionalismto bear in their work once the battle for curricular status
had been won. We tend to think of the MLA pioneers as iron-willed Germanic grammarians successfully imposing the study of Grimm's Law on
luckless farmboys, but it was right in the heyday of philological pride, in
1890, that South Carolina's Dr. Joynes argued, in PMLA itself, against
excessive"erudition in the classroom" and the "premature and injudicious

obtrusion of learnedmethods and results."20

But there is another way of looking at these developments. A more
kindly observer might argue instead that the first philologists had been narrow, and priggish, and self-important in their proclamation of a new
discipline, and that once they allowed themselves a broader perspective,
in particular once they had to face, year in, year out, the realities of the
classroom, many of them realized that narrowness very quickly, backed
away from their earlier scientific pretensions, and returned to the older and
wiser traditions of humanistic pedagogy. Which attitude one takes, whether
one judges the evolution of English in the 1890's as realism or as apostasy,
will, I suspect, depend less on any realities of academic history than on
one's current self-image as scholar and teacher.
If the South Carolina story teaches us anything, it teaches us this: there
never was an academic golden age, when professorial careers were harmonious and secure, and when scholarship and teaching were romantically
married and lived in pastoral bliss. It is right that we should recall with
awe the scholars of the philological generation, and praise famous men,

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the Greenlaws of North Carolina, the Hubbells of Duke; such remembrance
can be inspiring as weII as chastening. But most college English teachers
will find a more appropriate tribal myth for this wintry season in turning
from the famous men and re'callingsome of those who have no memorial,
the practicing teachers who are perished as if they had never been. "That
things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing
to those who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs."
When we look away from the great philological graduate research centers,
and look instead to our own predecessors in the college classroom, we can
take, a wintry kind of comfort: our unease and our uncertainties, in the
1980's, are not without precedent.
IThere is no general history of English in American colleges, though see Wiliam R. Parker,
"Where Did English Depanments Come From?," College Englisb, 28 (1967),339-351; for
tbe application of genre tbeory to professional self-knowledge, cf. David Lodge, Small World,
An Academic Romance (London: Secker and Wamburg, 1984).
'Edward Southey Joynes, "A Southern View of Education,"
Education (SeptemberOctober 1880), 72.
'On the antebellum period, see my "Jonathan Maxcy and the Aims of Early Nineteenth
Century Rhetorical Teaching," College Englisb, 45:1 (January 1983), 21-30, and "From
Rhetoric to English: Early Nineteenth-Century
College English Teaching at South Carolina,"
South Carollna Historical Magazine, 83 (July 1984), 42-53. The basic institutional histories
are: M[aximilian] LaBorde, M.D., History of the South Carollna College from Its Incorporation (Columbia, S.C.: Peter B. Glass, 1859; second edition, Charleston, S.C.: Walker, 1873);
Edwin L. Green, History of the University of South Carolloa (Columbia, S.C.: the State Company, 1916); and Daniel W. Hollis, University of South Carollna, 2 vols. (Columbia, S.C.:
Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1951-56).
'George Armstrong Wauchope, "Memoir," in A Tribute to Dr. Edward Southey Joynes
on bis Elgbtieth Birtbday (Bulletin of tbe University of South Carollna, no. 37, April 1914),
pp. 7-12.
'E.S. Joynes, "President Eliot's Inaugural Address," Educational Journal of Virginia,
I (March 1870), 136-140.
'E.S. Joynes, "Position of Modem Languages in the Higher Education,"
read to the
National Education Association in 1876, reprinted as a pamphlet by the Modem Language
Association of America (1887), and included in A Tribute, pp. 20-34.
'On the importance of Randolph-Macon
as a centre of the new philology, see J.B. Henneman, "The Study of English in the South," Sewanee Review, 2 (1894), 180-197.
'F.C. Woodward, Englisb In the Scbools (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1893), p. 4.
'David D. Wallace, History of Wofford College, 1854-1949 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1951), pp. 87-91, which gives some student verses on Baskervill's teaching:
The class heeds not his high behest,
But utters up a strong protest
Against each foolish innovation
Brought hither from the German nation.
"PMLA,
2, supplement (1886), xxviii. Woodward's experience at South Carolina appears to have modified his earlier enthusiasm and made him more conservative: see his "The
Decline of Discipline

in Schools and Colleges,"

Tbe Educational,

1:3 (April 1902), 62-68,

where he attacks the growth of electives as offering "scope to idleness, the chance to avoid
real training, the opponunity to escape an education even within the college walls" (p. 65).
I IUniversity Carollnian, 2 (March 1890), 164.
I '''The Value of Literature in Education,"
University Carollnlan, 3 (November 1890),
48,50.
"HoUls,

as in note 3 above, II, 167, 179.

"Catalogue
of the South Carollna College (1900-1901), pp. 35-39.
"Wauchope Papers, South Caroliniana Library, Columbia, S.C., briefly described in
University South Carollnlana Sodety, Thirty-Ninth Annual Meeting (April 22 1975), pp. 6-7.
"W.S. Currell to G.A.W., May 25 1889, Wauchope Papers, folder 7.
1'Harrison replied that, as he didn't teach rhetoric himself, he wasn't familiar with its
literature, but recommended somewhat eclectically the writings of A.S. Hill and Fred Newton
Scott, respectively villain and hero to modem composition historians: J.A. Harrison to G.A.W.,
February 12, 1893, Wauchqpe Papers, folder 15.
"J.A. Harrison to G.A.W., May 24 1891, Wauchope Papers, folder 21.
1'Note in Wauchope Papers, folder 52.
"E.S. Joynes, "Reading in Modem Language Study," PMLA, 5 (1890),45. Joynes was
cenainly not alone in his attitude; cf. the largely anti-philological collection of essays by English
chairmen, in William Monon Payne, ed., Engllsb In American Universities (Boston: D.C..
Heath [Heath Pedagogical Library], 1895).