William Poole on John Fell of Christ Church and ‘trunk-spectacles’

A few months ago I wrote about Robert Anatomy of Melancholy Burton and his curious monument in Christ Church Cathedral. Today Burton swam again into my ken, this time in the process of dying, rather than already dead.

I was startled to learn that, when drawing up his will, Melancholy Burton left all his mathematical instruments to a boy named John Fell. Now, this must be the youthful incarnation of the notorious John Fell of Christ Church (he of I do not love thee Dr Fell fame), who can only have been 14 when Burton died in early 1640.

When we think of Fell ruling over Restoration Oxford with his oddly puritanical fist, patrolling lectures to make sure students were present, and taverns to make sure they were not, we espy an altitude of autocracy of which today’s Wellington Square can, thankfully, only dream.

It is nice to think of the young Fell playing about with astrolabes and quadrants, perhaps even gazing at the moon through one of those new-fangled telescopes (or ‘trunk-spectacles’, as they were rather splendidly known).

Actually I am rather a fan of the older Fell too, disciplinarian though he was. He died in 1686, but the tensions he embodied may still resonate with at least some of us in the university today.

He was an institutional snob, but something of a puritan to boot. He wanted to enforce his will on the university, but to be a proper college chauvinist at the same time. Perhaps most importantly, he wanted to raise the scholarly profile of the university, not least because it would make for better undergraduates – Fell was a politician, even a businessman, but one who was hugely, personally committed to his students.

Fell was the effective founder of Oxford University Press. From 1672 he and three friends leased the right to print books from the university, and after his death he bequeathed his venture back to the university. With mixed success – scholarly books did not sell well, and the university itself, ironically because of a shift in clientele forwarded by Fell himself, was entering its long period of Tims-Nice-But-Dim. Of these, the richest and the stupidest could soon be found in Fell’s Christ Church, and made that college richer.

My favourite project of Fell’s, however, was his series of New Year’s Books. From 1666, every New Year’s Day Fell would present to students on his doorstep a book. He kept up this custom with few lapses until his death. These little books encapsulated Fell’s benignly austere manifesto – improving works of ancient literature and history, the Church Fathers, lots of Greek. For all his high flying in university politics, Fell believed he had a basic duty to encourage what we would today recognise as the world of the undergraduate, the tutorial.

What would Fell make of us today? He would be proud of OUP. But we dons, wilting under eight whole hours of teaching a week, protesting that we have some fool research we had best be doing instead? He would take that telescope he may have inherited, and stick it where the ‘Research Excellence Framework’ don’t shine.