“Wander[ing] from the studious walls”: Itinerant Scholars in British Literature, 1850-1930

This dissertation examines the significance of a largely overlooked figure in British literature and culture—the wandering scholar. The unprecedented proliferation of information in the nineteenth century resulted in the standardization and institutionalization of knowledge throughout England and its colonies. At a time when Victorians endeavored to consolidate curricula and bureaucratize information, an expanding travel industry attracted a new class of British citizens who sought intellectual and cultural experiences outside of formal educational settings and, in many cases, outside of England itself. My dissertation argues that the literary trope of the wandering scholar signals a growing distrust of epistemic institutionalization, as well as an effort to envision alternatives to English ways of knowing at a moment of unprecedented globalization and migration. Matthew Arnold’s “The Scholar-Gipsy” (1853) is likely the most well-known example of this figure. In the poem, an Oxford scholar embraces intellectual methodologies incompatible with the university he has left behind. Arnold’s poem serves as my point of departure for subsequent chapters in which I argue that writers of this period believed that “true” learning and knowing diverged from established educational and intellectual itineraries. In my first chapter, I argue that George Eliot’s essay, “The Natural History of German Life” (1856) depicts the scholar, Wilhelm Riehl, as a wanderer and “pedestrian,” anticipating her fictional depictions of learning that take place outside of privileged intellectual spaces. In my second chapter, I frame Jude Fawley’s doomed pursuit of a university degree in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) in terms of Hardy’s distrust of established educational pathways, or maps. Finally, in my third chapter, I argue that the wandering scholar becomes the locus of uncertain knowledge in Virginia Woolf’s unconventional narratives and serves to defy the strict borders of both the British Empire and that of an elite, masculine education. By depicting the acquisition of knowledge as shaped by setbacks and digressions, these texts not only critique an educational system that encouraged rote learning and reified social privilege; they also demonstrate that the path to knowledge is inherently uneven, evolving, and, often, politically transgressive.