For a while I considered the collapsed prestige of the English literature degree one of the important misfortunes of my life. I grew up knowing Clive James had written that literary criticism was essential to civilisation. I was aware that when the novelist Martin Amis worked at the Times Literary Supplement in the 1970s he was able to believe that English literature and criticism constituted the “core” of our culture. Both theories now seem eccentric. “Just think,” I used to growl to myself as a penniless book reviewer subsisting in a box room above one of London’s less salubrious branches of KFC, “I could have been so important! So employable!”
When I left school in 2011, English was still the most popular A-level in Britain. It’s now sixth. In the decade since I started university, the number of students studying for English literature degrees has declined by a third. The news that Sheffield Hallam University has suspended its English literature course after the introduction of new limits on funding for degrees whose graduates are less likely to go on to “highly skilled” jobs has inspired new flurries of fretful pre-mortem analysis on the subject’s wider decline: books have been displaced by smartphones and video games (true, I think); the fear of debt has propelled students towards subjects like maths and physics (also true). But the long-term, structural reason why English literature is doomed is its vanishing cultural prestige.
