The coincidence of title between this biography and Trollope’s novel of 1855 is wholly intentional, and more than a little mischievous. No one could have been less like Mr. Harding, that unworldly cleric who resigned the wardenship of an almshouse, a lucrative sinecure, on a matter of principle, than John Sparrow, who intrigued to obtain the Wardenship of All Souls, Oxford’s only college without any undergraduates, and went to pieces after he relinquished it. John Lowe, a long-standing friend of Sparrow’s, has had full access to his papers and has written an affectionate but unindulgent portrait, a cautionary tale about the vanity of human wishes as well as an elegy for a now irrecoverable ideal of academic freedom.

Born in 1906 into a wealthy manufacturing family, John Sparrow was the eldest of five children. His father, whom in adult life he could hardly bear to mention, was aloof and cold, his mother adoring but not uncritical. He appears to have been old from an early age, remarking at the age of three when rebuked for some piece of outspokenness, “You mustn’t say what you think, but what people like”—a piece of wisdom he largely ignored thereafter. Literary and artistic in nature, a collector of rare books from boyhood, but also a lifelong passionate football fan, he nonetheless had a patchy academic career at prep school and subsequently at Winchester College. He worked only at what interested him, chafing against the concentration on classical studies, which was then a feature of the public school curriculum. Yet, while still a schoolboy, he published editions of Donne’s Devotions and the poems of Henry King, which attracted favorable reviews in the national press.

Books were Sparrow’s passion. His private library, particularly its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century holdings, was world-famous. His four maxims to aspiring collectors were: never lend books, never give them away, never sell them, and never read them. He certainly could not be accused of keeping to the last of these, but cannot be called a scholar in the conventional donnish sense of the word. Despite his dilettante reputation at school, he went up to New College, Oxford, in 1925 to read Greats, which entails the study of the languages, literature, history, and philosophy of classical Greece and Rome. In the second part of this course he studied under Horace Joseph, whose austere intellect and passion for exact statement he relished. Joseph, however, may have been a mixed blessing; Maurice Bowra, a fellow-undergraduate and friend of Sparrow’s, later Warden of Wadham College, thought that “he seems likely to crush the poet by turning him into a logician,” and Sparrow’s approach to poetry always retained a certain naïve literalism. Three months after graduating with the expected First, Sparrow obtained a Prize Fellowship of All Souls by competitive examination, and, still aged only twenty-three, entered that unique institution, which was to become so central to his life.

All Souls was founded in 1483 as a chantry chapel in which prayers were said for the souls of the dead at Agincourt. It is an establishment dedicated purely to research, with no obligation on the Fellows to teach, or even to reside; Fellowships are held for life, and many, including Sparrow until he was elected Warden, pursue other careers while retaining All Souls as a convenient non-London club. Sparrow went to the Chancery Bar and slowly built up a promising legal career, which was interrupted by the War, then resumed until he became Warden in 1952. Lowe’s account of the plotting involved in the election recalls, as Sparrow himself recognized, the maneuvering over the Rectorship of Lincoln College by Mark Pattison in the 1850s and 1860s. Pattison, the subject of one of Sparrow’s books, told the story of his first, failed attempt to be elected in his posthumous Memoirs (1885), Sparrow’s edition of which remains unpublished. Pattison was, however, a zealous teacher, university reformer, and formidable scholar, while Sparrow remained in some senses a gentleman amateur, completely indifferent to his colleagues’ academic achievements, and opposed to any change in the comfortable social routine of the College. The resident Fellows were less sympathetic to him than their non-resident counterparts, but all agreed that, if you wanted a convivial dining companion or stimulating public speaker, Sparrow was your man.

He was Warden for twenty-five years. For half this time he was very happy; the rest was overshadowed by his battles against the attempts of the Franks Commission to modernize Oxford in the mid-1960s. The Commission’s report, with a wounding allusion to Macbeth, described the practices of All Souls as characterized by “infirmity of purpose.” Franks, the Provost of Worcester College, whom Sparrow perceived, in Lowe’s phrase, as “a cold bureaucrat,” noted that All Souls was sitting on a vast amount of money, while contributing virtually nothing to the communal life of the University. Initially, the Fellows considered admitting graduate students as a concession, a proposal which was later dropped as impractical, owing to restricted space, and replaced by the inauguration of Visiting Fellowships, which still exist. The issue was a fundamental one: did the College exist primarily for teaching or research? For Franks this was a matter of social responsibility, for Sparrow one of intellectual freedom and institutional autonomy. The battle was, to quote Macbeth again, “lost and won”; All Souls has managed to resist to this day the clamor for it to be “useful,” which is little short of miraculous given the prevailing political-educational climate.

Sparrow was compelled to retire at the age of seventy, moving into a house owned by All Souls. He convinced himself, unnecessarily, that his life was effectively over, and proceeded to make this a self-fulfilling prophecy by increasing his already imprudent consumption of alcohol to epic proportions and causing such squalid scenes that he was eventually banned from dining in the college over which he had once presided. His memory deteriorated and his capacity for work declined; the possibility of a Visiting Professorship at the University of Chicago evaporated after a disastrous trial visit (he had been a success two years earlier). In the last years of his life, the care of a few devoted friends, among them his biographer, eliminated his drink problem and gave him a measure of happiness. He died in 1992, aged eighty-five.

Sparrow was a homosexual, apparently from an early age. He was untroubled about this, but, since homosexual activities were illegal in Britain until 1962, he had to be discreet, and it is difficult to gather evidence of this side of his life; even his mother, his confidante in all else, was excluded here. (He proved an unexpectedly good officer in the War, partly because he could express affection for the men with relative freedom; he kept in touch with many of them for years afterwards.) Sparrow was promiscuous, but Lowe documents one relationship that was more enduring. When he was forty-five, Sparrow fell in love with an undergraduate, and some of his correspondence, quoted here, touchingly shows the romanticism that he often suppressed in himself. “Our foundations,” he wrote in 1953, “grow deeper every day: strength and calm, and understanding. On that can be built an endless superstructure of delight and pure joy—and fun.” This last observation shows the positive side of the immaturity that could otherwise make the middle-aged writer an embarrassing spectacle. He could stand back from his own ardor, mocking his outpourings (“as if I were to empty over you a cup of very strong sweet tea”) even while believing them. And, after all, his feelings were returned, and the friendship lasted until the younger man’s death in the 1980s (by which time he had married). As Lowe says, there is bizarreness in the spectacle of Warden Sparrow passing from the banalities of a committee meeting to the delicious riskiness of penning letters which might have put him in jail had they fallen into the wrong hands. “But,” he writes, “John enjoyed deception; he was good at it.”

As that comment suggests, there is an occasional astringency in this book, which saves it from being hagiography. Lowe admits that Sparrow could be duplicitous, arrogant and selfish, and is damning about his feckless tenure in the Wardenship.  

He was determined to keep the college as he liked it, without really considering its role for the future, or its contribution to the life of the university or, indeed, the wishes of his colleagues. One can only surmise that John would not be elected Warden today, and I still find it surprising that the college elected him in 1952.

The Fellows did so, it appears, largely to prevent the election of A. L. Rowse. One can see their difficulty.

In his writing, too, Sparrow may have felt a sense of promise unfulfilled. “Quite respectable, don’t you think?” he would say in old age to Lowe, surveying the shelf of his own publications. One can hear a note of anxiety in the question. There is an early scholarly book on Virgil, a late one on inscriptions in Renaissance art; a foolishly censorious attack on modernist poetry (about which Bowra, who spoke with authority, wrote him, “You don’t know nearly enough”), his study of Mark Pattison’s educational thought (the long-projected biography was never written), collections of essays and radio talks, editions of Latin verse, too many vanity publications. One wonders whether he remembered the final report of A. T. P. Williams, his Headmaster at Winchester: “He ought not to be content with any less than a really worthy ambition, for he has the capacity to do much service.”

John Sparrow’s career and character are of their time, a time now gone forever. Universities, even Oxford, have little room for colorful, wayward personalities, who will not obey the diktats of corporatism. In our monochromatic, conformist world, marked as it is by cowardice and dullness, such characters are as rare as the hippogriff, and, when we have the luck to meet them, exhilarating. Yet they can also be showy, neurotic, inconsiderate, and ultimately wearisome. Some lack the equilibrium, the self-knowledge, or the humility necessary to form stable relationships, to do lasting work, or to be content with their own limitations. They are rarely happy, and when their charm fades their erstwhile friends fall away. That almost happened to John Sparrow, but not quite. He died at peace with himself, and this is an honorable book by one of the few who supported him to the end.

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