This thesis is a study of Durham University, from its inception in 1831 to the opening of the College of Physical Science in Newcastle in 1871. It considers the foundation and early years of the University in the light of local and national developments, including movements for reform in the church and higher education. The approach is holistic, with the thesis based on extensive use of archival sources, parliamentary reports, local and national newspapers, and other primary printed sources as well as a newly-created and entirely unique database of Durham students. The argument advanced in this thesis is that the desire of the Durham authorities was to establish a modern university that would be useful to northern interests, and that their clear failure to achieve this reflected the general issues of the developing higher education sector at least as much as it did internal mismanagement. This places Durham in a different position relative to the traditional understanding of how universities and colleges developed in England and therefore broadens and deepens the quality of that narrative. In the light of the University's swift decline, and poor reputation, from the mid-1850s what were the ambitions of the founders and how did this deterioration occur? Were the critics' accusations against the University - principally that it was a theologically-dominated, inadequate imitation of Oxford, bound to the Chapter of Durham and ruled autocratically by its Warden - based on fact or prejudice? And if the critics were wrong, what were the factors that lead to the University's failings?

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My thesis revives the term raciology to describe collectively the literature which emanated out of philological ethnology, that is, out of the studies of man inspired by the rapid advances in linguistic science in the early nineteeenth century. Raciological Thought in Victorian Culture is divided into two parts: it examines the development and dissemination of nineteenth-century raciological knowledge in the works of celebrated philologists and anthropologists; and then investigates typical features of raciological discourse in Victorian and Victorian Canadian culture. It views this regional British literature as a field for the political and educational deployment of British raciological conceptions, and comments on some of the implications of the circulation of raciological doctrine. My argument begins with discussion of the often overlooked celebrity and authority of philologists in Victorian culture, tracing the derivation from philology of raciological typologies which established the raciological associations of terms like "Britons," "Anglo-Saxons," and "Teutons" during the early and middle-Victorian periods. An important aspect of the thesis is a re-evaluation of the influence of Friedrich Max Muller, the most influential comparative philologist and mythologist in the Victorian world. I argue that his use of etymological study for archaeological data greatly contributed to the rapid dissemination of raciological thought among the educated and educating classes. The first part of the thesis concludes with discussion of issues which animated raciological discourse. The second part follows the dissemination of Victorian raciological thought to Canada, and illustrates its effects in an imperial context. It demonstrates the use of raciology in establishing Canada's legitimacy as a British nation, and documents the place of raciology in establishing the authenticity of Canadian continuity with a British culture running into deep antiquity. After discussing neglected raciological aspects of several important Victorian Canadian source works, it goes on to outline the importance of raciological mythology to the preservation of the Dominion from American annexation and Fenian incursion. My epilogue briefly documents the decline of raciological thought in Britain after the 1890s. By investigating numerous neglected Victorian sources, Raciological Thought in Victorian Culture establishes raciology as an important element in Victorian political-and, in particular, nationalist-thinking.

This thesis examines the origins of athleticism in England and its transfer to Canada. During the course of the nineteenth century, the focus of the English public schools changed dramatically. At the start of the century an English upper-class student's leisure time was largely employed in roaming the country-side, trespassing on neighboring estates and poaching. Teachers' responsibilities ended at the classroom door. Seventy-five years later an English public school student's life was focussed on games and team sports including cricket and the various types of football. Teachers now ran all aspects of school life which was designed to instill the manly, Christian, virtues which would enable graduates to take their proper place as leaders in the British Empire. And team sports were a vehicle to achieve that end. Team sports such as cricket and rugby, and the various institutions that promoted them, occupied a central place in upper-class English life and became infused with what Professor Mangan refers to as the 'games ethic': the ideology of athleticism. When the British administrators, soldiers, and immigrants came to Canada they brought with them their love of games and this 'games ethic' that was modified by Canadian experience. In England the 'ethic' was firmly entrenched and supported by a unique class and social structure. Because that structure did not exist in Canada, the attempts of early British Canadians to instill the 'ethic' in the new country were problematic and played out in the conflict between amateurs and professionals. Although an emerging working-class culture and an increasingly commercialized society challenged and eventually made the distinction between amateur and professional athletes irrelevant, belief in the 'games ethic' and in the instrumental value of team sports survived and continues to influence Canadian sport policy today.

My dissertation argues that national tropes are continually in a state of flux as they are employed to respond to historical, socio-political and cultural events and trends, and demonstrates that their state at a specific moment encapsulates struggles between various concepts of national identity. I trace shifts in the configuration of Anglo-Scottish relations by undertaking a microanalysis of two specific recurring tropological categories - familial and homosocial tropes — in a number of key moments in cross-border relations between 1707 and 1830. The first chapter, directed at the years surrounding the Union of Parliaments, traces the suppression of cross-border dissonance in homosocial egalitarian tropes which define Anglo-Scottish relations in the work of pro-union pamphleteers, and contrasts this strategy of containment with the disruptive presence of familial tropes in the pamphlets of anti-union writers. The second chapter traces the reappearance of this conflict in the decade following Culloden. Roderick Random, written from the margins by Tobias Smollett, reveals a discomfort with unifying tropes, although it ends with a cursory gesture towards a national marital union. James Ramble, in contrast, written by the English Edward Kimber, deflects dissonance onto Jacobitism, suggesting through tropes of friendship that all aspects of Anglo-Scottish relations are seamlessly integrated into British unity. Chapters three and four foreground the 1760s, a decade in which Scottish agency, in the person of Lord Bute, the Lord Treasurer, seems to reach new heights. Yet it is also a decade of rampant Scotophobia, incited by the Wilkites to undermine Bute's authority. Tropological warfare is an important element of this rhetorical conflict. In chapters five and six, I uncover two competing concepts of Britishness, primarily created by English and Irish writers, which emerge in the 1790s. The first engages with homosocial tropes to foreground Scottish agency in nation-building and empire-building projects, but does so at the expense of a distinct Scottish culture. The second, also produced by English and Irish writers, reifies and celebrates Scottish culture through tropes of cross-border courtship, but tends to represent the emergent concept as endangered, lacking national agency. Chapter six analyzes the Scottish response to this tropological binary.