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February 29, 1996

OPINION / H. David Brumble III

Pitt has a program for undergraduates in London, and so I have the pleasant responsibility of teaching in London this semester. I am here with 32 Pitt students. They are taking such courses as Shakespeare, Twentieth Century British History, Twentieth Century British Fiction, Theater Production Management, Western European Politics and Government, Twentieth Century Art, and Journal and Travel Writing. We also have an excellent internship program.

London does, I find, provide some advantages to the teacher. When it came time to talk about Shakespeare's theatre, for example, I simply told the class to meet me at the Globe Theatre, which is being rebuilt with remarkable fidelity — thatch, oak frame, wattle, and all — near the site of the original Globe in Southwark. That's where we had class that Wednesday morning. And I am able to take them to plays, of course. This semester (at no additional cost to the students) we have seen "Taming of the Shrew" (at Stratford-on-Avon), "Twelfth Night," "Macbeth" and "Richard II" (with Fiona Shaw playing Richard). Later this week we will be seeing "Comedy of Errors" and there are other plays to come, including a second production of "Twelfth Night." This week the students' "homework" will be to see certain paintings by Botticelli, Titian, Rembrandt, Bosch, Holbein, and some others at the National Gallery. I have also taken them to markets — street markets that are not very different from the markets Shakespeare and Dickens would have known.

I offer the following excerpt from my journal to give you a sense of a day in the life of Pitt's London Program.

n I went on a trip today with all the students to Stonehenge and Bath. Perfect day for Stonehenge — with the wind whipping along over the downs, and the gray clouds scudding by low and fast just over those famously immovable stones.

But the real treat for the day was Bath. I was not expecting the place to affect me as it did. We crested a high hill, and there suddenly was the broad valley of the Avon — and there was Bath in all its limestone glory, rising in what looked like terraces from the river right up the hillsides. Once in the city itself, we saw Royal Crescent, the Circus, and the Assembly Rooms — and then the Pump Rooms, and Bath Abbey — all of them very like what they were in Jane Austen's day. Royal Crescent and the Circus are still fashionable places to live in Bath. Austen's cobblestone streets are still there — the house she lived in with her family from 1798 to 1801 is still there. And I was seeing some of the places to which she sends her characters in "Pride and Prejudice" and "Sense and Sensibility." I do not remember Austen mentioning it, but the 18th-century bridge is still there over the Avon — and the bridge is still lined with shops. Austen must have crossed this bridge many times, and so must her characters. They would have had elegant dealings with those shopkeepers. Austen's ladies would have had ribbons to buy; her gentlemen would have bought gloves.

I find that I am very susceptible to these feelings of — what shall I call it? Awe? Maybe not awe, but I walked into the Abbey and paused in the doorway for a moment to read the inscriptions on the white marble memorial stones on the walls there. I expected to read of the fruitful life and sad passing of a lesser lord of whom I had never heard, and maybe of a wealthy merchant or two of Bath. Instead I was, as it were, face to face with Malthus: The Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus long known to the world by his admirable writings on the social branches of political economy particularly by his essay on population . . . 1766-1834 Malthus. Malthus. I was used to thinking of Malthus not so much as a man but as a book — and then not even so much of his book as of his scary ideas about populations growing to keep pace with available resources. I was used to thinking of Malthus, really, as an adjective — and all of a sudden, here I was face to face with the man. The memorial went on to remember his kindness to friends and family, his integrity — Malthus was suddenly converted in my mind into a person; indeed, a parson. It was as though, after years of talking occasionally about Islam and reading here and there in the Koran, I suddenly found myself across the breakfast table from Mohammed. Malthus.

And tonight I am reading in bed, reading Dickens's "Little Dorrit" — and there on page 135 I read: "thus did [Mr.] Cripples unconsciously become a master of the ceremonies between them, and bring them more naturally together than Beau Nash might have done if they had lived in his golden days and he had alighted from his coach and six for the purpose." Just five hours before I had met Beau Nash in that same doorway, right across from the Rev. Malthus, on another of those marble tablets. Nash was an 18th-century gambler and a dandy and a regular habitue of Bath — and he is fondly remembered in that city for influencing tout le monde to think of Bath as a place of fashion and high society.

n I urge faculty to tell their promising students about the London Program. It costs not much more than a semester in Pittsburgh, and scholarship money is available for most students with a GPA above 3.0.

For more information, students should contact the Study Abroad Office.

H. David Brumble III is a faculty member in the Department of English.


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