Oscar Browning OBE (17 January 1837 – 6 October 1923) was a British educationalist, historian and bon viveur, a well-known Cambridge personality during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras.

A vociferous and active opponent of the school's traditional curriculum and teaching methods, he introduced novel and progressive techniques to the classroom, to the general approval of his pupils but to the dismay of the Eton authorities.

[8] Browning was initially shocked by life at Eton, which his biographer Ian Anstruther describes at that time as "a rough world of its own in which the weaker boys were helpless, and where the delights and depravities of vice were imposed on the youngest without restraint".

[14] As Browning matured and his interests widened, his formal schoolwork suffered, to Johnson's distress,[15] but the scope and extent of his reading is evidenced by a list of his books, included in his journal in November 1854: Byron and Edward Gibbon are accompanied by works from Addison, Sydney Smith, Thomas Arnold, and many more writers, classic and contemporary.

[18] He was invited to join the intellectual group known as the Apostles, was President of the Cambridge Union in 1859, and that same year was elected a fellow of King's – a lifetime appointment which would provide a fallback should his career in other fields falter.

[19] Among the more significant friendships initiated at Cambridge was that with Henry Sidgwick from Trinity College, later a leading educational reformer, of whom Browning would write: "I consulted him on every important matter, and never failed to follow his counsel".

"[21] When Browning began teaching at Eton he found the college's governance was largely unchanged from its foundation in the 15th century, and its general curriculum barely reformed from those days: classical Latin and Greek texts learned through repetition, a little mathematics, and all other subjects taught as optional extras.

[23] When the commission investigated Eton, the newly-appointed headmaster, Edward Balston, presented a cautious traditionalist view of the curriculum and governance, and saw no need for significant changes.

There was much jolliness and ragging led by the man–boy at the centre, but the bronzes and marbles in his corridors discouraged rough-housing ... OB passionately desired to reform Eton so that it could educate an effective governing class for a democratic age; these new rulers, in his ideal, would rest their power on the Platonic virtues of wisdom and goodness as well as hereditary privilege.

"[1]Although not opposed to healthy physical activity – he was a keen climber and member of the Alpine Club, and promoted sports and games among the junior boys – Browning disavowed the cult of athleticism.

He instituted regular poetry and play readings, and encouraged the appreciation of music with performances by local musicians of works by emergent modern composers such as Brahms.

[47] Hornby thought that Browning neglected his real work, the teaching of classics, in favour of his experimental pedagogical methods and outside activities such as "lecturing to ladies",[48] and was critical of a supposed lack of discipline in his classes.

[61] The nature of this association became the occasion for gossip amongst the staff; Curzon's housemaster, Charles Wolley-Dod, complained to Hornby, who after some equivocation ordered Browning to end all contact with the boy during term-time.

This act of insubordination, the latest in a long line of infringements and subversion of regulations, alongside the suspicions arising from the Curzon relationship, proved to be the last straw for Hornby.

However, a group of more sympathetic dons, under John Robert Seeley, raised a subscription which funded an unofficial lectureship in history and enhanced Browning's earnings by around £150 a year.

[77] Browning's tutorials, held in his book-lined and lavishly decorated rooms, soon became famous; in the memory of one participant, "his talk was like a flow of molten lava that bore every kind of reminiscence on its tide".

[78] Within months of his arrival he had founded the Political Society, where students presented papers for discussion and criticism, thereby anticipating the role of the seminar as a feature of English university education.

[80] He also instituted a regular series of "at homes" in his rooms, at which his students would be able to meet and converse with Browning's distinguished friends and acquaintances, who might include George Eliot, Walter Pater, or John Ruskin.

His books were regarded by his peers as slipshod and inaccurate, one critic writing: "If the reader is not particular about grammar and style, and is judiciously suspicious of dates, he, or more likely she, will derive both amusement and profit from Mr Browning's pages".

During that time, he hosted a whole range of society events at his rooms in King's, from committee meetings and sherry parties to the larger "At Home" evenings which offered a rare chance for men and women in Cambridge to socialise together.

[120] In conjunction with Samuel Barnett, the founder of East London's Toynbee Hall settlement, he developed a student sponsorship scheme which had raised £385 (approximately £45,000 in 2017 terms)[38] by 1893.

[131] In the inter-war years the university's interest in teacher training withered, and by 1939 the CUDTC had ceased to exist as a distinct entity; it had "fall[en] to a sort of un-noticed death", according to Hirsch and McBeth.

[133] On 17 November 1896, after a series of complaints about Browning's overbearing manner, "imperial conduct" and bullying behaviour, he was forced to resign as Treasurer of Cambridge University Liberal Club, of which he was the founder.

[1] In his biography, Anstruther stresses the complexity of Browning's character, in which intelligence, wit, and a real love of youth combined with conceit, laziness, insensitivity and trouble-making.

[161] The writer concedes that his aims generally exceeded his achievements, but acknowledges him as "a man of great power and force ... possessed of a thorough knowledge of the world, with immense kindness of heart".

[162] In her 1929 essay A Room of One's Own, the writer Virginia Woolf depicted Browning as a misogynist, a personification of the patriarchal system which restricted women's educational opportunities.

[163] Invoking a passage from Wortham's biography, Woolf wrote: "Mr Oscar Browning was wont to declare that ... irrespective of the marks that he might give, the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man".

[164][n 13] The feminist scholar Jane Marcus, writing in 1985, characterised Browning as "the great misogynist of his age, the heroic figure of the man with his finger in the dike against the rising tide of female education...[He] held the unofficial Chair of Applied Misogyny at Cambridge for many years".

[169] In his professional life Browning maintained discretion and decorum; according to Davenport-Hinds: "His eccentricities enabled his protégés to share emotional intimacy without impermissible sexual contact".

[1] Beyond his Cambridge life, Browning acquired a set of rooms in St James's Street, London, a base from which he entertained a variety of mainly working-class boys and men, over many years: "Any youth whom OB liked", says Anstruther, "to whom he thought he could do a kindness, perhaps in exchange for a little amusement, arrived, stayed and went away".