Victorian English scholarship’s grammar fixation dulled the university compared to the Continent

Evidence

Palmer was not happy in Cambridge. His friend Besant thought the university environment very dull, believing that this was in part because of the penchant of English scholars for grammar and in part because of ‘the very recent and still partial emancipation of scholarship from the Church’. Palmer’s approach to the subjects he studied was habitually brilliant but unsystematic. He did not care much for the rules of grammar, preferring to listen to how native speakers used their language. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 321

Categorization

• XREF: This tension between philological grammar and living speech echoes the broader amateur-vs-professional divide Irwin traces across the book. — connects to: Elite Oxford education bred contempt for ordinary and colonized people