“Getting to grips with minds is difficult,” writes Clare Bucknell in her review of Arnoud Visser’s On Pedantry in our May 14 art issue, which is perhaps why historical accusations of pedantry were often based less on the practitioner’s actual erudition than their conduct. As it turns out, humans have long been interested in intellectuals and dilettantes behaving poorly. Drawing on case studies from the Sophists of Ancient Greece to the “unmarriageable” studious women of the early modern period, Bucknell traces the evolution of the word “pedantry.”
Bucknell is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Her most recent book, The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture, explores how poetry anthologies have shaped British politics and society over centuries. Her writing for the Review has covered a range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers and artists, including Alexander Pope, Charles Lamb, James Gillray, John Sloane, and Jane and Maria Porter. She is a contributing writer at the London Review of Books and has also written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, and Apollo Magazine.
This month, I wrote to Bucknell to ask her about the history of pedants, politics in literary criticism, and her love for the visual arts.
Julia Shi: In your essay, you observe how the meaning of the word “pedantry” has evolved over the centuries, designating, variously, “sticklerishness,” “the performance of cultivation in front of others,” “incompetence in matters of etiquette,” and a kind of dilettantism. You also show that pedantry was often imagined as a physical condition as much as a mental one. What is your sense of its contemporary valence?
Clare Bucknell: One of the most interesting aspects of the history of pedantry is that evolution of its meaning. Nowadays, “pedant” tends to mean someone committed to the pursuit of accuracy—wrongheaded, maybe, unable to see the wood for the trees, but hell-bent on being right. Whereas, in early modern Italy, where the word comes from, the pedante—a professional teacher of Latin—was a figure associated with folly and intellectual overreach. The court tutor in Pietro Aretino’s comedy Il Marescalco (1533) is a “silly old fathead” who gets his classical references wrong and is outsmarted (painfully) by two boys and a bunch of fireworks.
What our understanding of pedantry does have in common with earlier ones is the association with intellectual littleness. Rarely is there much conceptual overlap between the categories of pedant and genius. Presumably the assumption is that if you’re obsessed with grammar, it’s because you aren’t capable of aiming at anything bigger. It’s difficult to imagine Einstein, say, being called pedantic, though I’m sure he had his moments.
Tarring someone with the pedant brush is polemical, of course. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a time-honored way to bring down educated or opinionated women was to label them as pedants. Applied to men, the word meant roughly what it does now. Applied to women, it meant something more: that they were unfeminine, bad wife material, even sexually promiscuous. Pedantry in women, the writers Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier observed in 1754, was roughly equivalent to “want of domestic virtue.” Collier published a satirical advice manual, The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, in which intellectual women are figured as easy prey for tormenters: “Omit not any of those trite observations; that all Wits are slatterns; – that no girl ever delighted in reading, that was not a slut.” When I was at school in the 1990s and 2000s, boys called clever girls “frigid,” which I suppose is a version of the same thing, just flipped on its head. It’s as if the perceived wrongness of intellectual ambition in women—a sense of wrongness that endures in various, more or less underground ways—can’t be articulated on its own terms, it has to be yoked to sexuality. One kind of “perversion” gets expressed as another.
After coediting the 2021 essay collection Byron Among the English Poets: Literary Tradition and Poetic Legacy, you published The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture in 2023. Did the work on these two books overlap in some interesting ways?
All roads lead back to Byron, in my world at least. The third chapter of my book on anthologies, The Treasuries, is about literary censorship in the early nineteenth century. Byron features extensively there because he presented publishers with a problem: You wanted him in your poetry collection because the name Byron sold books, but did you want to associate yourself with material that most readers considered immoral and heretical? So you managed by censoring. In The Beauties of Byron, an anthology published in 1829, the famous shipwreck passage in Don Juan appears in a castrated form that makes it sort of like a shipwreck itself – thirty verses shorter and full of holes. It’s fortunate that Byron was dead by this point or he would have been livid.
I’m also interested in the uses to which writers put other writers, especially dead ones. There are almost no limits to what you can do with a voice or a text once it’s no longer around to protest. Byron used and abused all kinds of sources—classical, vernacular English, vernacular Italian—and was in turn recycled by others both during his lifetime and after his death. The Treasuries is partly about what you can diagnose about a culture or historical period from its literary touchstones. Why did W.H. Auden compile anthologies of humble folk songs, nursery rhymes, and sea shanties during the 1930s? Why did a vicar and antiquarian, Thomas Percy, publish a collection of superstitious old ghost stories at the height of the “Age of Enlightenment”? Or Rupert Brooke pretend that he was on a Homeric trireme bound for Ilium rather than a naval ship to Gallipoli? The history of reception is also a history of cherished hopes, beliefs, and misgivings.
In your review “A Brief Literary Emancipation,” you describe how certain scholarly readings might box in their subjects, particularly historical women’s writing, in their desire to support feminist grand narratives. How ought literary criticism engage with politics?
I’ve never liked grand narratives. I’m much more interested in particulars than generalities, especially particulars that don’t add up to generalities. There’s a well-known argument of Isaiah Berlin’s that writers tend to fall into two camps: the hedgehogs, who see the world in terms of a single unifying idea, and the foxes, who don’t (centrifugal vs. centripetal thinkers, Berlin says). Just as hedgehogs deplore foxes for a lack of theoretical ambition, foxes spend their time screaming at hedgehogs for missing this or that eloquent detail. I wouldn’t know how to read like a hedgehog, and I tend to have trouble with works of criticism that exemplify what I see as a bad faith kind of hedgehoggery—distorting material to fit a model or system.
That’s one reason I’m so fond of satire as a mode, early modern satire especially. The best satires lather themselves into a fury by listing every single incidental thing they think is wrong with the world. The Latin word satura comes from lanx satura, meaning a “medley” or “mixed dish.” Who wants a one-note meal? Eccentricities, crotchets, and hobbyhorses are such interesting intellectual drivers.
As much as possible, I like to look at things and people as they are and try to stay out of the way myself. I’m not fond of efforts to see ourselves reflected in places where we aren’t: better, I think, to let the past be the past in all its irreducible bloody-minded weirdness. A few years ago I had an enjoyable time writing about representations of venereal disease in the eighteenth century. The paranoia and the narrative shapes it took fascinated me because they seemed bizarre to the degree of being almost inaccessible to the modern imagination.
Beyond literary criticism, you’ve also written on the visual arts, from Mondrian to Rachel Ruysch to Joseph Wright of Derby. Were you always interested in visual culture? How does writing about art differ from writing about poetry and literature?
I loved art at school, but when I was fourteen I had to switch to a class called Graphics, which was less interesting and involved exclusively straight lines. Without much of an art historical education, I wouldn’t have dared to pitch art pieces, but a few years ago a brave editor at Apollo suggested I try eighteenth-century subjects, Thomas Gainsborough and William Hogarth, and that felt somehow “allowed” and not beyond the pale. Since then, I’ve gone a long way beyond the pale and written about all sorts of painters and periods, from Maes to Mondrian, Vermeer to Zorn.
The more I read and look, the less the disciplinary divide between literature and visual culture makes sense to me. I think art historians should be let loose on novels and literary critics on paintings, it would do a lot of good. Especially when it comes to the eighteenth century, the great age of ut pictura poesis. Take Hogarth, whose moral series seem to me to be exploring how storytelling works through metaphors of paths and journeys. Or Henry Fuseli’s marvellous reimaginings of scenes from Paradise Lost and Macbeth, which somehow squeeze narrative’s prerogative of temporality—the before, the now, the after—into painting’s single “all at once” moment.
It helps that I was trained to read literary texts, poems in particular, in a way that was formal to the point of being visual. Still now, when I read a poem for the first time, I’ll read it sideways and backwards and across itself as well as forwards—looking for repetitions and mirrorings, line endings that double back on themselves, little moves that are multidirectional and somehow three-dimensional. It’s how I’ve learned to read pictures and understand the way that formal elements interact and passages of paint can rhyme or repeat. And it’s a beginning: I have a lot more learning to do.
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