Oxford

by Jan Morris

An account of the character, history, mores, buildings, climate, and people of one of Britain's most fascinating cities. This book is intended for all those interested in the local history, culture, and architecture of Oxford, especially visitors to Oxford.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, History, British Literature, Essays, Cities

282 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Jan Morris was a British historian, author and travel writer. Morris was educated at Lancing College, West Sussex, and Christ Church, Oxford, but is Welsh by heritage and adoption. Before 1970 Morris published under her assigned birth name, "James ", and is known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy, a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong, and New York City, and also wrote about Wales, Spanish history, and culture.

In 1949 Jan Morris married Elizabeth Tuckniss, the daughter of a tea planter. Morris and Tuckniss had five children together, including the poet and musician Twm Morys. One of their children died in infancy. As Morris documented in her memoir Conundrum, she began taking oestrogens to feminise her body in 1964. In 1972, she had sex reassignment surgery in Morocco. Sex reassignment surgeon Georges Burou did the surgery, since doctors in Britain refused to allow the procedure unless Morris and Tuckniss divorced, something Morris was not prepared to do at the time. They divorced later, but remained together and later got a civil union. On May, 14th, 2008, Morris and Tuckniss remarried each other. Morris lived mostly in Wales, where her parents were from.

Reviews

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book expecting a solid jaunt through some well-worn old anecdotes about the city. I was surprised, however, at how this isn’t really a book about Oxford, nor indeed a travel book at all, but a very cogent examination of English (not British) society, from someone who is both within and without it.

Instead of just quoting Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dreaming Spires’ poem, all dew-eyed as with many books of the genre, Morris deals with class, with the Church, with industrialisation, and ties it all together with a reflection on the silent, unremarked decline of the UK as a world power since the Second World War.

There is also an exceptionally prescient chapter about nationalism. One line in particular has stuck with me - ‘Oxford is too big for its environment, just as England is too big for her islands....The worst thing that could happen to this city would be a withdrawal into national pride or self-sufficiency, reducing it to the levels of a Salamanca - once one of the great intellectual centres of Europe, now merely an historic spectacle’.

[Laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

When is a guidebook like a historical novel, rich in texture and human nature? When it's by Jan Morris--this time of Oxford, and as much memoir as guide.

[Pers · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really engaging book. Morris' enviable prose style is a dream to read.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having enjoyed Morris's charm and wit at a roundtable discussion I attended at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival a few years ago, I was delighted to receive this as a Christmas present having only comparatively recently arrived to live in Oxford.

It's a marvellous overview of the famous city with rich historical research entertainingly interwoven with juicy anecdotes. It's staggering that this relatively small town of 150,000 has come to have had such influence - not that this is always a good things of course - but Morris made me feel churlish for my complaints of privilege and I temporarily abandoned my Class War leanings to bathe in the richness of the Oxford story.

The book was written in the sixties and any updating is cursory at best - so there is little or no mention of Bill Clinton, the Cowley Road, Fuzzy Ducks, the Headington shark, Inspector Morse, Radiohead, Russell George, Oxford United FC (amusingly) or Harris Manchester College. The bulk of the narrative naturally revolves around the university too although the emergence of Morris Motors is a revealing subplot. Required reading for any resident of the city.

[Mary Warnement · Rating 3 out of 5]

Since when has it taken me 5 months to read a 285-page book? I guess I've been staying up too late and falling asleep quickly. Reading other items instead? I did set it aside for some time. Morris has an engaging voice but his/her. (She hadn't yet become Jan when she wrote this in 1965.) I thought this would be the perfect post-Oxford-visit reading, but I was wrong. The last several days, I barely finished a paragraph without my eyes drooping. Friday night was especially difficult. I thought I'd finish the final two pages no problem, but I was wrong.
230 Refers to a "plodding topographer." Is that self-referential? Self-deferential?
228 Refers to Oxford selling of its bits. Morris would want Alfred's jewel. That was definitely something the Ashmolean shared that I hadn't known about. That museum is a little gem.
153 Romantically varied is the face of oxford
162 Oxford built on books
217 "The distant prospect of Oxford is still her greatest treasure." Like the view shown in the tv shows Inspector Morse, Lewis, and Endeavor. Does Morris mean more than the skyline? Does Oxford have more meaning in its imagined self than its actual?

[Jenn · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Oxford inspires both love and loathing: and in this, as in so much else, she is not just a city, but a civilization too."

This book also inspires love and loathing. Some chapters are wonderfully, delightfully evocative. I could feel the damp chill of the atmosphere and wanted nothing more than to lose myself in one of its many storied libraries. Other chapters are such a slog that I wanted to toss the book with all its obscure references into a fire. I'm pretty well grounded on English history up to the Commonwealth but get a bit confused after. Perhaps that was my problem. Ultimately a worthwhile if a bit outdated read on an intriguing city.

[Helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was originally published in the 1960s and this edition revised in the mid 1970s, which feels like a world away now as much has changed. Charming, idiosyncratic history/description of Oxford. Not for you of course if you hate the place, and she has an interesting section on Oxford-bashing and the reasons for it, so it is nothing new even if it is particularly popular at the moment. Lots and lots of anecdotes, no footnotes, no index. (The story about the Victorian skeletons found in a punt is amazing, one to follow up!)
Very evocative: you can almost feel the damp rising from the river and hear the bells ...

[Monty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brimming with anecdotes and tales from the past. I like how the original role of the proctors was, until recently, to tour the streets at night noting down the names and colleges of unruly undergraduates. Forgetting yourself, sometimes you're immersed to the point that you're there (!).

For Morris, an elitist, male-dominated Oxford lies in the centre of a quaint, trafficless England which are both in the process of disappearing. She welcomes the former developmemt - tepidly, mind - but expresses deep regret at the latter. The differences even between now and the time of writing are always present.

[H]

Just a big dump of research, with some pretty prose about the locale. Took two weeks to finish the book.

I'll take a leap and say that it's also uncompelling because the place itself has seen no wars; even Hitler resisted bombing Oxford because he cherished it so much. That means it's a mostly preserved historic site of culture without much change or conflict. That's great for the city, but maybe not so much for a book about it. Where's history without the story arc?

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

My copy of this book goes back to the late 1960s when I was an undergraduate at Oxford. It still has the name James Morris on the cover.

I loved this book; I love it still; though the Oxford it describes is no longer the Oxford we actually experience. Still, the historical anecdotes are as entertaining and amusing as ever.

Definitely a historical curiosity, and one I was glad to read as a 'comfort read' in the unwellness of the last few weeks.

[David Bisset · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somewhat dated but still of value

Jan Morris obviously has a great affection for Oxford, and an encyclopedic knowledge of the city. She writes beautifully and deals with a plethora of fascinating material. Above all she knows every crook and cranny, and encourages intelligent visits.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

good read! the book is well written but probably not for the general reader. you learn more about oxford than most people want to know; sort of like "moby dick" by Herman Melville, where you are exposed to more info about sperm whales than the average reader wants to know.

[Dilip Massand · Rating 4 out of 5]

For anyone who has spent time in this wondrous city.. I thoroughly recommend it.. Reading it takes a bit of diligence though.. as it is so detailed and thorough in its descriptions and hisrory of all the intricacies of this place..

[False · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fortunately for the reader, Jan Morris reads better than Goethe. She writes, in fact, very much like James. Conundrum is a lover's leap removed from those case histories of sexual maladjustment that dish up undigested gobbets of Freud liberally sauced with prurience and self-pity. The book is a brief and graceful, often witty memoir of Morris's inner and outer life. The outer life proceeds from a happy childhood in an artistic upper-class Welsh family (he read Huck Finn, cherished animals, and was taught to "wash my hands before tea"), through years as a choirboy at Christ Church College in Oxford, some time at Lancing, a public school (which James hated), through Oxford and the army (which he enjoyed), as well as work on the Guardian and the Times. (With a touch of male chauvinism, Morris satirizes the liberal Guardian's "stance of suffering superiority, like a martyred mother of ungrateful children.")

Oxford, says Jan, saved James from madness by instilling in him an attitude of tolerance and self-amusement. But in his 20s, James' secret sense of anguishing incompleteness seemed hopeless. The doctors whom he saw blithely suggested that he wear gayer clothes, or bluffly urged him to "soldier on for a lifetime" as a male. Then he met Elizabeth Tuckniss, the daughter of a Ceylon tea planter.

This is an urbane, witty book, beautifully written and structured so that every facet of Oxford is covered in a very readable manner. Although I loved Oxford to begin with, this book enhanced my appreciation of the city and I feel that I know more about its history and its manners now than I ever did before. James Morris never resorts to sentimentality, but she shows her enjoyment of her research in many ways. I would recommend this book to anyone who is even remotely interested in "The Oxford Story." Brain Basils All.

One of my favorite passage is as follows:

In the chapter on "Learning," Morris' states: All these activities revolve around the presence of the University in Oxford, which makes hard thought a local stock-in-trade. "Brain Basil" is Oxford schoolboy slang for a clever boy, and in this city he comes two to a penny. Nobody here is surprised to find that you earn your living with your mind. The bones of the Cetrosaurus in the Museum were discovered and identified by a local watchmaker, and in 1964 the chairman of the Freemen of the City was Lewis Carroll's successor as Mathematical Tutor at Christ Church. I know of no pleasanter place to write a book about. Almost nobody resents questions, and nobody at all is surprised to be asked. One drear and foggy winter morning, so thick that you could scarcely see across Carfax, I happened to be in the Fellow's garden at Merton when I heard footsteps along the path outside, in Christ Church meadows. I pushed my head through the railings, to see who could be out for exercise on such a day, and poised there like a gargoyle, with my nose through the iron bars, I was just in time to see the Warden of New College striding out of the haze. I must have been a disconcerting grotesque, suspended so eerily above him, but he was not taken aback, for he knew I was writing a book. "Ah, Mr. Morris," he simply said, "pursuing your investigations, I see." and with a measured tap of his walking stick he melted into the mist."

[Tom Axworthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oxford is "the city of dreaming spires " according to poet Matthew Arnold and Jan Morris, the English travel writer and historian, has written an engaging account of the city's charms and history.Oxford was an important place long before the university began at the end of the 12th century- Richard the Lion Heart was born there- and relations between town and gown form the core of the book.Morris has a knack for the funny anecdote: when Arnold, who immortalized the university and city with his " dreaming spires' poem, gave an oration at the Sheldonian Theatre in 1864 the undergraduates showed little respect shouting" Cut it short.Give him beer". The book examines Oxford's industry,( Morris car works) contributions to literature( Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde), architecture ( the 35 colleges), museums ( the Ashmolean has a skelton of the long extinct Dodo a character in Alice in Wonderland ) and politics( scores of British prime ministers started their trade in the Oxford debating Union).With wit and erudition, Morris compresses Oxford's rich traditions into 250 pages, every chapter a joy to read.

[Jeremy Walton · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Oxford circus
I bought this book in 1980, shortly after it had been revised, and have read it a few times - most recently this week in preparation for a tourist visit to the city where we once lived. This was the first Jan Morris book that I read; she's an excellent travel writer, and repays re-reading, despite showing some signs of aging (for example, on p102, she denigrates the admission of women to the University, describing "their emphasis on brains, on work and on examination results" as being "out of Oxford's character"). The subject - the history of the city and its university, and to some extent the country - is a complicated one, but Morris deftly unpicks it with some eye-catching detail, for example:

* "for 600 years every Oxford graduate was required to swear that he would never be reconciled with someone called Henry Symeonis (aka son of Simeon)" [p41]. Morris says this was because he'd murdered an Oxford man in 1242, although it seems as if, by the 17th century, no-one could remember who he was or what he'd done.
* "when [the eminent divine] John Keble was looking after the books of Oriel his accounts showed an inexplicable deficiency of between £1,800 and £1,900, until it was discovered that he had added the date to the liabilities" [p67]
* Rosamund, the mistress of Henry II, is supposed to have been murdered at Godstow Abbey by Eleanor of Aquitaine (Henry's wife), and is supposed to have been commemorated by the epitaph "In this tomb lies Rosamund, the Rose of the World [i.e., Rosa Mundi], the fair, but not the pure" [p97].
* the art historian John Ruskin believed so strongly in the dignity of manual labour that he inspired a group of young students (including Oscar Wilde and Arnold Toynbee) to pave a village road at North Hinksey, although he later admitted that the only level parts of it "were due to his gardner - grandly summoned, rather against the spirit of the thing, from [his] country home" [p103].
* on Ascension Day, pennies are scattered in the quadrangle of Lincoln College for the choirboys; half the coins have been heated in a shovel over the fire by the undergraduates in order, according to Canon R.R. Martin's text in an explanatory pamphlet, "to observe the conflict of avarice and apprehension among the young recipients of their bounty" [p121]
* when R.S. Hawker was an undergraduate at Pembroke and was told that his father could no longer afford the fees, he rode down to Cornwall and proposed to his "opulent godmother, a lady 21 years his senior"; she returned to Oxford with him, riding pillion, kept him for the rest of his University terms, and lived happily with him until her death at the age of 81 [p124]. (Hawker went on to be the famously eccentric vicar of Morwenstow, who devised the Harvest Festival and once excommunicated his cat for mousing on Sundays.)
* the Tower of the Winds on top of the Radcliffe Observatory is a copy of the original building in Athens, "upon which Andronicus of Cyrrhus erected the first of all weathercocks" [p136]
* St John's has a picture of Charles I which is made up of tiny quotations from the Psalms. "In one of the silliest Oxford stories", the king so desired the picture that he offered the Fellows any wish in return for it; "they dutifully handed it over, and then wished for it back again" [p197]
* in the quadrangle of the Bodleian, opposite the Tower of the Five Orders (Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corithian, Composite) is a statue of the third Earl of Pembroke, one of the library's chief benefactors. It was given to the library by Pembroke's great-nephew; after he had made this expansive offer to two Oxford guests, they prevented him from changing his mind by immediately taking the head as a security, leaving the trunk to come by carrier. Hence, the head can be "moved this way or that, to catch the best light" [p209].
* at a time when the undergraduate population never exceeded 3,000, nearly 2,700 members of the University were killed in the First World War [p252].

Nuggets like these (incidentally, if you like these sorts of snippets, then I can recommend "The Oxford Book Of Oxford", an anthology also compiled by Morris) keep the story moving along. An entertaining book, which repays re-reading.

[Pablo Magaña Fernández · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jan Morris experiences - and imagines - cities in peculiar ways. And, typically, I love the way she manages to evoke what different places mean to her - how she sees them in her mind's eye, even if she takes a few liberties here and there. In Oxford, she does precisely that half of the time - and wonderfully so. The other half, however, I found rather tedious: interminable lists of things, places, people, and events, with little room for breath. I became captivated by Morris's Trieste when she described what the city means to her; but I find it hard relating to the Pub of Whatever if it's just an item among too many others enumerated over several pages.

[Alan Korolenko · Rating 3 out of 5]

As usual for Jan Morris, a wonderful armchair journey to a distict and unique place, in this case Oxford, but not exactly what I was expecting. The ambiance and atmospheric essence of the place is captured, as I expect from a Jan Morris book. But the book is far more an examination of England's colonial past and the resulting racial and class politics at play in the nation then and now. The sheer number of people and anecdotes reported by Morris can overwhelm, but her wonderful "you are there" sections make it all worthwhile.

[Larn E · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too much venom and bitterness. Too many descriptions that would have been unfair or inaccurate, at best heavily biased, even at the time.

[Grier · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Mr Adrian Pallett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent read, full of facts which, as an Oxford boy, I was unaware. I will be reading this book time and time again for reference. Congratulations to the writer.

[Will Sewell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed that

[Regine · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exuberant, nuanced, scholarly, witty, entertaining paean to the City of Oxford. Morris is a joy to read: the language is a revelation in itself.

[Daisy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jan Morris' book on Oxford is informative and a pleasure to read. After living in Oxford for three years I still had a lot to learn about the city, and for me her account of the history (and particularly the religious past) of both Town and Gown was especially eye opening.

Besides facts and figures, though, I have appreciated Morris more in Oxford and Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere for her extraordinary gift for depicting places. There are moments in Oxford when she captures the feel of the city perfectly. Reading Jan Morris is like having a recurring dream in that sense - even if some details are not exactly as you remember them (this book was written in the 60's) you still feel with inexplicable certainty that you are there.

The softly spoken, 'dreamy' quality of her books grates on me sometimes, but ultimately I think this style distinguishes her from other travel writers. Her narrative voice binds subject to self with unique fluidity, and after a while one cannot help but love the way her writing potters thoughtfully through time and space.

One of my favourite snippets as a recent, already nostalgic Oxford graduate:

'Sometimes as I walk through Oxford, cursing at her traffic, marvelling at her obscurity, and wondering when on earth they are going to bring her up to date, this old magic momentarily dazes me, and I lean against some gold-grey stone beneath the ragwort, and think how lucky I am to be grumbling there at all.'

[Andrew Darling · Rating 4 out of 5]

If only I could live my life over again; not arse about at school doing no work; get enough exam passes and self-confidence to study at Oxford; there to enjoy exchanges like the one Jan Morris describes in this gorgeous book. Dining one day with a distinguished botanist at an Oxford college, she offered to pass him the dish of parsnips; he politely declined, explaining that 'he seldom ate umbelliferae'.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

A biography of Oxford by somebody who knows her stuff and writes very well. If Ackroyd's London had been as focused and organised, I might have gotten through it. While I'm living in Oxford, I just know I'll be coming back to this book time and again, for its tidbits of fascinating information about this city's history, architecture, learning, sophistication - and utter nonsense.

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading Jan Morris' book Oxford because he looked at both the good and not as good parts of this famous university town. I was a bit disappointed that Morris made no mention of C. S. Lewis of J. R. R. Tolkien or anything about the Inklings. However, I learned about a host of colorful characters like the Fellow who fed his pet jaguar live hamsters.

[Andrea Fuller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well written. I was a history major so I read a lot of dry history books, this was the exact opposite. The author's writing style is so wonderful I could see what she was writing about and learning at the same time. I highly recommend!

[Pat Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jan Morris is a fine travel writer who lives in Oxford, England. In this book she gives a description of Oxford and its environs as well information about its history and comments about the university and some of its excentrics.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incomparably virtuosic piece of prose—and one that truly captures the bizarre nuances of Oxford life.