The Harvard Classics Collection is a Gateway Drug

Actually, the cheaper Walter J. Black Classics club edition are a less expensive gateway, but the Harvard Classics are a better-bound alternative, also available unfortunately inexpensively because nobody values the old canon packaged for the middle brow like they used to.

Except for this newcomer:

For years, I’ve had a set of the Harvard Classics in my study: 50 volumes of “great works” bound in faded green cloth—the “Five-Foot Shelf,” as the collection was called when it was first published in 1910. Our set was left to us by my husband’s aunt. She acquired it secondhand during the Great Depression and willed it to us because we had a literary bent. It is unclear whether she ever looked at it. Despite our literary bent, we let it gather dust.

. . . .

Some of the selections were hard to follow or lacked context. Even so, they generally yielded something of value. I did not understand Faraday ’s treatise on magnetism, but I could discern a method to his argument. I did not know what was transpiring in Act III of “The School for Scandal,” but I could tell that Sheridan had wit.

The editors of the “Reading Guide” were working on the cusp of two worlds: the Victorian and the modern. They returned again and again to predictable classic texts. But they also excerpted repeatedly from Darwin’s work on evolution, and included selections from folk and fairy tales that reflected respect for populist culture.

I was most taken with the great essayists: Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, the Enlightenment philosophes, and the proto-bloggers of the 19th century such as Thomas Carlyle and J.S. Mill. These works, well suited to brief reading bytes, were models of critical reasoning, insight, cleverness and taste. Jonathan Swift ’s “Hints Toward an Essay on Conversation” clarified for me why I like to talk to some people and not to others.

Ah, a gateway.

Or so I thought until I got to the bio at the end of the piece:

Ms. Cohen is a professor of English and dean of Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University.

One would hope that a professor of English and a dean of a college might have touched upon some of these authors before. I graduated in 1994 from the university, and although I was steeped in the Western canon, I had the benefit of studying English and philosophy. Also, I had so many English credits that I was almost ineligible for an English degree. Think on that for a moment: I had to creatively explain why I should graduate even though I had too many English classes along with my second major. So I had a pile of reading in those days in the canon even as I had a pile of reading in the stuff that the young professors was trying to make into the new canon, which would never actually be a canon because younger English professors would have other canon-toppling reading to displace the ephemera from a couple years ago.

Where was I before the rant?

Oh, yes.

It’s a good article about the discovery of the canon, but it’s sad that a professional educator in the field is just now discovering so much of it. It’s possible to get that far in the industry without it, but, zang.

I hope some people read her article and pick up this set or one of so many similar programs and discover that a lot of the Western canon is approachable and, yes, relevant and universal.