Samuel Webb, Trinity Hall

Biographical Information

I began my undergraduate studies at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, graduating in 2016. After two-and-a-half years working in corporate law at Allen & Overy, I returned to literary study, beginning an MA in Modern and Victorian Literature at King’s College London where I ranked first in my cohort. I started my PhD at Cambridge in 2022, co-funded by the AHRC and Trinity Hall, and under the supervision of Professor Michael Hurley.

Research Interests

My thesis is concerned with the way polemic developed throughout the course of long nineteenth-century Britain. Roughly, the time period under consideration is 1829-1914. Deriving as it does from the Greek word for war (‘polemos’), I am interested in how this word, then and today, was used to describe a huge range of activities, from highly animated hatchet jobs to norm-challenging philosophical treatises. My research often therefore deals with texts not considered literary in the conventional sense (e.g. newspaper articles), but which ought to be considered as literature under its original meaning, littera or ‘letters’. For although in the period poetry, plays, and novels were often used to send polemical ‘messages’ of one kind or another, the focus here is mainly on non-fiction in its various guises, largely because this type of writing seems to account for the majority of confrontational discourse in Victorian culture.

Following necessarily from this, a significant amount of my research concerns the major periodicals in which this nonfiction occurred, especially the Edinburgh Review, Quarterly Review, The Westminster Review, Fraser’s Magazine, The Spectator, The Fortnightly Review, the Cornhill Magazine, and The Nineteenth Century. I am particularly interested in how these media affected the development of Victorian controversies, major and minor. How, for instance, did factors such as the time-scale of a literary feud, anonymity, and public personality transform the environment in which polemicists operated? Did a polemical ‘style’ or ‘styles’ develop? When can we say that a piece of writing transforms from simple ‘criticism’ into ‘polemic’?

Principally for their sustained engagement with polemic, figures of particular interest are Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman, John Stuart Mill, James Fitzjames Stephen, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Leslie Stephen, Frances Power Cobbe, and G.K. Chesterton. However, I consider a number of other figures throughout, canonical and otherwise.

Alongside my doctoral work, I have a number of other literary interests. These include the representation of illness in Victorian literature, Victorian ethics, and their relationship with literature, especially philosophies of friendship, the relationship between the essay and faith/doubt, the historical novel, the work of Charles Dickens, and the impact of oral culture upon writing. I was also, together with Daniel Brooks and Francesca Gardner, creator and convenor of the ‘Latin Rhetoric’ reading group for 2023/24, a weekly meetup of language-learning autodidacts deciphering Caesar, Cicero, and others in the original language.

At Cambridge, I am available to teach any of the papers in which the nineteenth century plays a part (the ‘1660-1870’, ‘1830-1945’, and ‘1847-1872’ papers). I am also interested in teaching the ‘Ethical Imagination’ Special Option paper and have so far taught the 1847-1872 paper, Practical Criticism and Critical Practice, and a dissertation on modernist poetry.

If you would like to get in touch, for supervision enquiries or anything else, my email address is sew77@cam.ac.uk.

Selected Publications

Book Chapters and Peer-Reviewed Journal articles

‘Play-Fighting: The Humour of Polemic in Matthew Arnold’s Criticism’, Humour Across Victoriana (Routledge), forthcoming, 2025

Conference Papers

‘How to Not Know: The Voice(s) of Leslie Stephen’s Agnosticism’, Leslie Stephen: Thinking With and Against His Time International Conference, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, 25th October 2024

‘How Does Lady Dedlock Die? Unexplained Deaths in Dickens’s Fictions’, The Nineteenth Century Today Conference, Durham University, 10th July 2024

‘Walter Pater and Classical Friendship’, Cambridge Classical Reception Seminar, 7th March 2024

‘Wollstonecraft’s Indignation: Style as Politics in A Vindication of the Rights of Men’, The Pleasures of Hating, 1660-1830 Conference, Trinity College, Cambridge, 18th November 2023

‘Pater’s Plotless Novel: Marius the Epicurean and Friendship’, 2023 English Faculty Postgraduate Symposium, 5th May 2023