The Perfect Occupation, or Not
Historian A. N. Wilson tells us what his dream job would have been, had he lived in the Victorian period. Wilson is an historian of Marxist stripe. He is not a Believer. Nevertheless he writes:
It is difficult to conceive of any more agreeable way of life than that of the Victorian country parson. If I had to choose my ideal span of life, I should choose to have been born in the 1830's, the son of a parson with the genetic inheritance of strong teeth. (Improvements in dentistry are surely among the few unambiguous benefits brought to the human race by the twentieth century.)
I should avoid a public school education through being 'delicate', and arrive at Balliol with a good knowledge of Greek to be taught by Benjamin Jowett. . . . After a short spell-say, five years-teaching undergraduates at the Varsity, one of them would introduce me to his pretty, bookish sister, and we should be married. I should resign my fellowship and be presented with a college living, preferably a medieval church, a large draughty Georgian rectory and glebe enough to provide the family with 'subsistence'. By now it would be, let us say, the 1860's, and I should remain here for the next forty years, a faithful friend to generations of villagers to whom I would act as teacher, amateur doctor and social worker, as well as priest.
