Mandell Creighton - Oxford Undergraduate, 1862–1866

Oxford Undergraduate, 1862–1866

Creighton's postmastership of £70 a year was enough to cover his tuition at Merton, but not much more. For his other expenses he had to ask his father, whose gruff manner made asking difficult. Under the circumstances, Creighton lived economically in college attic rooms for most of his time at Merton. In his last year he moved out of college to share rooms with George Saintsbury, the future author and wine critic.

Although Creighton's shortsightedness prevented his participation in cricket and football, he was able to join the college rowing team. He continued to go on walks. These, especially around Oxford for a few hours in the late afternoon, were popular among many students; Creighton, characteristically, organised longer walks, some lasting all day.

Creighton's reading continued to flourish, and not just of books prescribed in the syllabus. He read so voraciously that he sometimes stayed at Oxford during vacations in order to read. Among writers and poets, he became particularly fond of Carlyle, Browning, Tennyson and Swinburne. He was also becoming politically aware. If pressed, he professed a liberalism based on the autonomy of the individual. He joined the Oxford Union, and although he seldom gave public speeches there, he was elected Union president. He especially honed his skills in informal conversations, conducted anywhere and everywhere, about topics great and small, bearing easily the yoke of what Gladstone later was to dub "Oxford's agony," the habit of seeing, self-importantly, larger than life significance in Oxford's everyday disputes.

Creighton came seriously to believe that it was the responsibility of all individuals to influence others to the full extent of their abilities. He sought others out to influence and instruct. Predictably, among his Merton friends, he received the nickname "The Professor", or "P". In his second year, he and three other students became inseparable, both during academic terms and vacations, forming a group called "The Quadrilateral". The group friendship was intense, like many such in that time. Although Creighton had a large circle of friends, he did not form any close friendships with women during this time. In his final term, he wrote to a friend, "ladies in general are very unsatisfactory mental food: they seem to have no particular thoughts or ideas"

Academically, Creighton's goal became the pursuit of an honours degree in literae humaniores, a classical studies curriculum attracting the best students at Oxford. In the final examinations, in the spring of his fourth year, he received a first-class. Joining immediately the School of Law and Modern History, and studying all summer, he took the examinations in that School in Autumn 1866. He received a second class this time, his examiners assessing that he had not mastered the details enough. However, since the literae humaniores degree was the more established one, he was asked by the classics professor, Benjamin Jowett, to apply for a college teaching fellowship. As it turned out, he did not have to; he had decided that he would go on to accept holy orders, and his own college, Merton, offered him a clerical fellowship with tutorial duties on 22 December 1866.