My name is Benjamin; I've just finished my second year studying Course I at Lady Margaret Hall. I decided to study English quite late in the university application process: it was only at the start of the summer holidays of my first year at sixth-form that I realised that I wanted to study English, a subject that would put my love of reading to practical use, rather than Law. I also decided late that Course II was not for me: I considered long and hard with many hours’ conversation with Course II students, but ultimately felt that the breadth of covering everything in English from Caedmon’s Hymn to yesterday’s newspaper was too valuable to be lost, even for the opportunity to read Old English fluently. My passion for reading has been put to the test slightly over the last two years (desperately reading the eight hundred pages of Daniel Deronda in four days just before starting was certainly a low point), but for every book I have to read for an essay, I have been gathering books I want to read once I graduate – and it includes a lot of French and Russian literature.
The way Oxford teaches English is unlike anything I had expected. Used to studying a handful of texts in great depth at A-Level, I had to quickly adapt to writing on multiple texts in a single biweekly essay, which took me a while to adapt to but which I now thoroughly enjoy – though I do still appreciate a commentary essay where I can write in depth! The chronological system of study at Oxford also took some adapting to, covering the oldest and newest writing in the English language in my first year, but it gave me a great insight into where the literature in the middle, that I would spend most of my second year writing on, came from, and went to. (It also allowed me to write a slightly wild comparative essay on The Dream of the Rood and The Haunted Oak by Paul Laurence Dunbar for my Old English tutorial. It did not survive to Prelims.)
The teaching I have experienced at Oxford has also been utterly unique. The ability of a professor to tell (sometimes) relevant stories in their lectures – Oscar Wilde and the Cult of the Clitoris; Percy Shelley and Dr Coffey’s collapsed bathroom ceiling; the adventures of the manuscript of Gulliver's Travels – will be something I remember long after the lines of Chaucerian rime royal fade from memory. Not every tutorial essay has been a raging success, and I have occasionally been left wondering whether I might not have done better studying Law instead. But there have been hugely satisfying moments as well: when the essay you slave over for days in the library finally comes good and your tutor declares it is the best thing you have written yet. (There have also been some exceptionally tight deadlines: while my tutors’ zero-tolerance policy to late submission has done wonders for my tendency for perfectionism, a particularly undercooked essay, turned in six minutes before the deadline on a Week 8 Friday, was closer than I would have liked).
The English course’s lack of exams at the end of Year 2 (at least for Course I) also means that I was able to fully throw myself into Oxford’s extracurricular opportunities this year, having spent first year alternately trying to survive Prelims and living on my own, and singing in a choir. I got involved in student drama, appearing three times in Jesus College’s fantastic Shakespeare Project – probably the most ambitious project in the history of student theatre: to stage Shakespeare’s plays chronologically, one a term for thirteen years – as Salarino in The Merchant of Venice, the Groom in Richard II and the Musical Director for a Jane Austen-inspired Much Ado About Nothing. My Shakespeare interest continued, in a slightly less traditional form, as I appeared in the Natural History Museum’s William Shakespeare Walking with Dinosaurs: as Prospero the Liopleurodon, Edgar the Iguanodon and Fortinbras the asteroid. I continued my love of music as musical director of Bush! The Musical, a parody musical of the life of George W. Bush, for its Edinburgh Fringe run at Greenside Theatre this August. Outside of theatre, I also accidentally became President of the Oxford University Lifesaving Club, bringing its quota of Humanities students from two to three, and joined the University Kayaking Club.
And I was doing this all in what is fast becoming one of my favourite cities in the world, Oxford. Coming from a small, quiet town on the south coast, I love how much there is going on here, and I try and make as much use of the student tickets that the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra offers and the countless talks, seminars and workshops offered by the English Faculty. I can spend my days in the Radcliffe Camera writing on metre in Dryden’s operatic librettos (my dissertation), or tracking down a book on Old Irish philology from the bowels of the Taylorian (my special option). I live in one of the best places in the world to do what I do, and I will always find something slightly magical in that.
Benjamin Waterer is a third year English student at Lady Margaret Hall.
