A Staircase in Surrey

A Staircase in Surrey functions partly as a Roman à clef, with multiple allusions to thinly veiled people and places. The College, which is not named in the novels, is very clearly based on one of Stewart's own Colleges, Christ Church, where he was Student (i.e. Fellow and Tutor) from 1949 until 1973, and University Reader in English. Surrey is modelled on Peckwater Quadrangle, which houses the College library as the novels suggest, but does not have a statue of a former Head of House (in the middle of Surrey there is a statue of Provost Harbage). The character of the Provost (Head of the College) is based on that of Henry Chadwick, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford during Stewart's own time there.^[1] His name is taken from that of Edward Pococke (1604–91), seventeenth century Regius Professor of Hebrew (1648–91), after whom the Pococke Tree (the inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky) and the Pococke Garden in Christ Church are named.^[2] The fantasy writer and Oxford don J. R. R. Tolkien appears (or is remembered) as the elderly "Professor J. B. Timbermill" in all the novels.^[3][4] The character of Arnold Lempriere, an ancient and semi-retired history don at the College, is based on the eccentric Christ Church Censor R. H. Dundas. Tony Mumford's title "Marchpayne" is obviously both a nod to the Marquess of Marchmain, a character in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (another novel partly set in Christ Church, Oxford), but also a joke on "marchpane", an old name for marzipan. Stewart makes an oblique reference to himself in Full Term: 'the other [new fellow], bald and abraded, was understood to have escaped in middle age from some professorial assignment in the antipodes' (p. 37) – Stewart had been Jury Professor of English at the University of Adelaide before obtaining his post in Christ Church.

Stewart's sequence of novels is much appreciated for his learned allusiveness and the sheer polish of his narrative style, for his command of irony, and for his remarkable gift for accompanying dialogue with an acute psychological commentary on the contextual motivation for what is said. The quintet is unashamedly nostalgic for an era of Oxford manners that was in the 1970s waning if not already gone, and this has put some readers off (whilst probably attracting others). He reproduces authentic views held by the community he evokes about society, sex, politics, race and education that are by no means widely held nowadays. Few readers will now acquiesce in many of the assumptions made or implied in these areas by the characters or even the narrator. Stewart narrates a world in which privilege and snobbery are normal; he critiques this, but he does not transcend it. In the story about Ivo Mumford's parachuting out of a rape charge a modern reader will surely regret any meaningful reflection on the situation of the victim. The sense that "boys will be boys" abounds in these novels, and there is a simplistic acceptance (on a narrative level) of the normality of class distinction and the way this impacts upon educational opportunity and success. Nevertheless, there is much sensitivity shown towards students who encounter problems. The novels are valuable above all for their insight into the social and intellectual dynamics of academic communities. In this respect Stewart is much more insightful than C. P. Snow, some of whose "Strangers and Brothers" novels from a previous era focus on similar bodies of people, and he is no less successful in plot-construction than his Cambridge counterpart.