Professor John Mullan

Professor John Mullan is the Head of the Department of English at UCL. He studied for his BA and PhD at the University of Cambridge and was a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. John then became a Lecturer at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, before he came to UCL in 1994. He has been Professor of English since 2005, and was appointed Lord Northcliffe Chair of Modern English Literature from 1st October 2016.

To begin, you are the Head of the English Department at UCL, which was one of the first universities to offer English Literature as a course. Can you tell us a little more about how this came to be?

What is funny is that lots of people tend to assume that English Literature has always been studied at universities and schools, but this is not so! Its existence as an individual subject is a relatively modern invention, by my standards anyway. When UCL was founded in the 1820s, it was very unusual in that there was a Professor of English Literature who gave lectures on literary topics. However, you couldn’t do a specific degree in English in those days, you could go to lectures on great authors as a part of your general education, but it wasn’t until the end of the 19th century that UCL offered what we would call an English degree. Even though it was the late 19th century, UCL was rather ‘go ahead’ in doing that. For instance, Cambridge, which became the home of English studies in the middle of the 20th century, didn’t offer an English degree until the 1920s. It is a 20th century subject; most other universities in Britain didn’t offer English until the 1920s. English Literature only became a subject to study in schools in the 19th century. It was for young men who were going to work in the civil service, or run the empire, or perhaps who came from backgrounds that were too modest to allow for them to study the traditional subjects of Latin or Greek. It only really became a university subject in the 20th century. In doing so, it knocked those traditional literary subjects of the classics to one side. It is a relatively recent import to the higher education world.

Why do you think it is important for students to study English Language and Literature? What do you hope for them to take away from their degree at UCL?

It is so often the case that if you listen to somebody’s account of how they first discovered the joys of education, of learning things, it will often be through their discovery of the pleasures of reading when they are young. Ninety nine times out of a hundred, that usually means the pleasure of reading fiction, but sometimes it’s the pleasure of reading poetry or something else. Very often, people who might not actually end up studying English at university will first discover the excitement of learning things for themselves through reading fiction. It takes you out of yourself, it allows you to imagine other lives in a way that no other reading experience does. It also introduces you, crucially, to the subtleties and the potential of language and how it is best being used. I hope that by the end of their degree at UCL, students are able to take away not just intellectual self-confidence; the ability to speak and think for themselves, not just a critical scepticism; the ability to read or listen to what others say and analyse it, but I also hope that they go away with literature in their head, with shards of what has best been expressed. Even, I tell them, with quotations in their head. When you read someone who writes well, or when you listen to someone who speaks well in the English language, it is invariably full of what they have actually learnt from reading and from literature.

Most recently, you published a book about Charles Dickens, The Artful Dickens (2020). Could you tell us a little about it? Do you think that Charles Dickens was a social progressive?

I wrote my book about Dickens because I think that he is a wonderfully inventive, audacious and a terribly funny writer. Ever since he first burst onto the scene in the 1830s, he became an almost overnight sensation; he has been looked down upon by critics and other writers as a mere entertainer. You can’t deny the fact that he is entertaining.

Equally, his contemporaries can’t deny the fact that he is the most popular writer in the world from the mid 19th century.

The fact that he was so popular and entertaining became a reason for condescending him; he wasn’t taken seriously as a literary innovator. I think that this has sometimes been the habit of critics and readers in the 20th and 21st century. I wanted to show how artful he was. The title is a joke about the artful dodger, obviously, but it also has a point, which is to show and take pleasure in his literary skill. As a writer, he had the ability to electrify the consciousness of his Victorian readers, and his work can still do that to modern readers to this day. I don’t think that we read him because he is a political or moral sage. I think that we read him because if you open any Dickens novel at any page, randomly, you’ll find the sentences are fizzing on the page with the characterisation of each character. The voices of the characters are immediately alive to you.

Dickens very much liked to think of himself as a sort of political and moral sage, but I think that often his lessons are quite simple ones, particularly when you compare him to a novelist such as George Eliot. I also don’t want to put aside Dickens’s achievements in Nicholas Nickleby, through which he alerted his contemporaries to the scandal of these Yorkshire schools where children were packed off to wither or even to die. I don’t want to diminish his ability to say to readers: “Look at this! This is what is happening in the world around you.” However, I don’t think that that is why I read Dickens. It is certainly not why I wrote the book about him.

In 2012 you published a book on Jane Austen, What Matters in Jane Austen? Why do you think Jane Austen is still so popular amongst students to this day?

Jane Austen is an extraordinary writer. I think the main reason Jane Austen is so popular with readers, particularly with students, is that she is so good at crediting the intelligence of her readers. It is a delight to study or teach Jane Austen, because as soon as you start looking at what is going on in a chapter, in a page, in a paragraph, you start seeing all of the tiny wheels that are spinning round. I think that she shares with Shakespeare this extraordinary ability to make minute connections between everything that is going on - in her case in a novel, in his case in a play.

I think lots of people have this experience: I have read some Jane Austen novels over fifteen times in my life, but I know that if I sit down with Emma with a class of undergraduates, some of whom will have read it for the very first time, as soon as you start looking at particular episodes in the novel, undergraduates will start pointing out things that I had never seen before. Austen is extraordinarily rewarding like that. There is nothing inert or bland in any sentence or any word that a character says. She said very little about what she wrote and why she wrote, but she said to her sister once in a letter: “I do not write for such dull Elves as have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.” She activates our ingenuity, doesn’t she? While we’re reading, she makes us - if we want to be - as clever and witty and perceptive as her. But then, unfortunately, we then have to go back to life afterwards.

Do you have any advice for students who wish to study English Literature at university? Do you feel that there are any books or pieces of literature that students should be considering?

The best advice one could give is what the narrator from Tristram Shandy says rather admonishingly: “Read, read, read, my unlearned reader, read!” When we are trying to choose from applicants for my department to study English, more important than anything else is that the person has got an appetite for reading, that they don’t just read what they need to get A’s in their A Levels or exams. It almost doesn’t matter what they are reading. I remember when I was in my teens I had an incredibly boring time. I lived in the countryside; I had nothing to do in the school holidays. In those days there was no internet, there was no daytime television to speak of. I read because it was my escape into a more interesting world. I realise now, looking back, that I read in slightly random ways, in terms of my choices in what to read. I think that that is fine, there isn’t a list that you have to tick off. Although I think it is better to read well-written things rather than poorly written things. Having an appetite for reading is the most important thing, it feeds itself. There are people who end up doing English at university who don’t necessarily like reading that much. If that is the case, I think they have probably chosen the wrong subject.

The UCL English Department is well-known for having produced some very famous script writers and producers, including Christopher Nolan. Why do you think students have gone on to do so well and many into film production and script writing?

That is a very interesting question. I know Christopher Nolan slightly and asked him exactly this question in terms of what he learned from the somewhat traditional English Literature course that we teach and how that helped him with his filmmaking career. I’m not sure that my answer to that was the same as his, but perhaps I can give an example that can illustrate what I think somebody studying the course will learn. In the first year, all of our students have to study a course called ‘Narrative Texts’, which consists of a sequence in chronological order from the oldest to the most recent great works of literature, all of which tell stories in very different forms and genres. Some of them are poems, such as Paradise Lost or Wordsworth’s The Prelude. Some of them are novels like The Mill on The Floss or Tony Morrison’s Beloved. Some of them are satires, such as Alexander Pope’s The Rape of The Lock. Some of the poems rhyme, some of the poems don’t. The students and those of us who teach the course learn the different ways in which narratives can be structured; how stories often don’t start from the beginning, but at the end and go backwards; how narrators such as George Eliot or John Milton employ time shifts or shifts of perspective. If you see Christopher Nolan’s films, it seems to me as if he has learnt it all from ‘Narrative Texts’. His films are all about extraordinary flashbacks and flashforwards - they all do things with narrative time. You never start at the beginning and work all the way through to the end. You never start at the end and work your way all the way back to the beginning. You sometimes have some of the same bits of a story shown to you more than once from different perspectives. These are all, if you like, bits of narrative trickery that writers discovered before filmmaking or TV filmmaking ever existed. It is no accident, I think, that TV and film, Hollywood in particular, indefatigably keep referring back to literature! It is not just because of the funny costumes or the quaint manners of the past, it is also because some of the narrative trickery was developed by literature before film and TV could ever get a hold of it, and I think this is something that Christopher Nolan learnt through literature too. www.waterstones.com/book/the-artful-dickens/johnmullan/9781408866825 www.waterstones.com/book/what-matters-in-janeausten/john-mullan/9781408831694

We would like to thank Professor John Mullan, Head of the Department of English at University College London, for giving up his time to speak to us.