John Churton Collins: The Critic as Pundit and Controversialist

Abstract

Up to the 1980s John Churton Collins was mainly remembered for his quarrels with various late-Victorian literary celebrities – Tennyson, Swinburne, Symonds, and Gosse among them. This notoriety inevitably obscured his achievements as a critic, teacher, and campaigner for English studies in the universities. Though recently there have been efforts to view his career more objectively, his precise position in the literary and educational worlds of the time together with the ideas and values which inspired him still need further attention. In the present article a closer look is taken at his literary and pedagogic ideas in relation to figures such as Swinburne and Matthew Arnold who were important to the development of his thinking. Despite his reputation as a sort of Jack the Ripper of the literary journals, Collins deserves recognition today for leading the movement to have English literature taken more seriously, both in the universities and in national education as a whole, and for his constant battle for literary criticism backed by scholarship and the concern to inform and enlighten.