Wharton

Wharton is an English graduate student in Heidelberg whose lessons give Philip Carey a close view of the unruly freedom of German university life. Poor, habitually dishevelled, and devoted to beer and argument, he is an indifferent mathematics tutor but a vivid informal guide to the world beyond Philip’s schooling. His insistence on freedom of thought gives Philip an alternative to the English institutions and conventions he has known, while Wharton’s own precarious life makes that freedom look both exhilarating and materially uncertain.

Identity and circumstances

Wharton is taking a philological degree at Heidelberg University and earns money by teaching Philip mathematics. He lives alone in one room on the top floor of a shabby house. The room is dirty and untidy; its unmade bed, scattered clothes, empty bottles, and ragged books suggest a life kept at a distance from the cleanliness and order Philip has learned to maintain. At ten each morning, Wharton is generally still in bed when Philip arrives. He jumps up, puts on a filthy dressing-gown and felt slippers, and eats breakfast while attempting to teach.

The contrast between tutor and pupil is immediate. Wharton is short, stout from excessive beer drinking, and unkempt, with a heavy moustache and long hair. Philip, by comparison, appears very neatly dressed, with a clean collar and brushed hair. Their difference is more than appearance: Wharton has embraced a student life that Philip encounters as an adult alternative to school discipline, while the younger man still carries habits of respectability into the garret.

Wharton has spent five years in Germany and has become, in the narrator’s description, very Teutonic. He speaks contemptuously of Cambridge, where he took his degree, and dreads returning to England after completing his doctorate. The expected academic career seems to him a loss of the freedom and companionship he has found in Germany. His membership in a Burschenschaft connects him to the student associations whose customs, rivalries, and duels he describes to Philip.

Teaching and university life

Wharton’s formal subject is mathematics, but the lessons rarely remain mathematical. After a heavy night of drinking, he sometimes has such a headache that he cannot drink his coffee and teaches in low spirits. He keeps beer bottles under the bed for these mornings; a drink and a pipe help him bear the day. He calls the practice “A hair of the dog that bit him,” treating another bottle not as an interruption to his working life but as its makeshift remedy.

The lessons themselves often dissolve into talk. Wharton tells Philip about German university life, including quarrels between rival corps, duels, and the merits of different professors. When he realizes that he and Philip have not really done any mathematics, he sometimes says that Philip need not pay for the lesson. The arrangement is therefore less a conventional tutoring relationship than a doorway into a culture Philip has not yet experienced firsthand. Wharton conveys its habits and contradictions through conversation, even as his own disordered circumstances make the life he describes tangible.

He is poor enough that Philip’s payment can determine whether he eats meat or bread and cheese for dinner. Wharton does not conceal this dependence, but neither does he turn the lessons into rigid business. His willingness to waive payment when no work has been done sits beside his plain need for the money. That mixture of precariousness and casual generosity distinguishes him from the measured educational authority Philip has previously encountered.

A philosophy of freedom

Wharton urges Philip to reconsider the plan to spend only a year in Germany before going to Oxford. He dismisses Oxford as likely to make Philip “a glorified schoolboy” and argues instead for staying in Heidelberg long enough to matriculate and spend five years there. The proposal reflects Wharton’s own attachment to the German university, but it also presents Philip with a different idea of education: not simply advancement through a prestigious English institution, but time spent in an intellectual and social environment that allows a student to become independent.

Wharton describes France as a place where people enjoy freedom of action but must think as everyone else does; Germany, in his account, restricts action through conformity while permitting freedom of thought. He prefers the German arrangement. England, he argues, offers neither kind of freedom because convention governs both conduct and thought. He attributes that restriction to England’s democratic character and expects America to be worse. The sweeping certainty of his judgments belongs to his personal argument rather than to an impartial survey: he measures countries by the kind of liberty he values and speaks against the return to England he himself expects to make.

His advocacy is sharpened by the life he fears losing. If he can scrape together enough to keep himself alive, he hopes to remain in Germany another twelve months; eventually, he expects to leave the garret for a provincial university and seek a chair in philology. He imagines tennis and tea-parties as the rituals of that future academic respectability, and the thought that he will have to wash becomes a comic emblem of the transformation he dreads. The joke exposes a real conflict: professional advancement may bring stability, but in Wharton’s imagination it also means abandoning the disorderly independence that has made Germany feel like home.

Relationships and influence on Philip

Wharton’s influence on Philip is intellectual and experiential rather than curricular. Philip learns more about life from him than about mathematics. The tutor gives the young man access to accounts of student association life, academic quarrels, and adult independence, expanding what Philip can imagine beyond the restrictions of school and the expectation that he will eventually go to Oxford. The importance of Wharton’s teaching lies precisely in the mismatch between the lesson’s official subject and what Philip carries away from it.

Their conversations also make Philip encounter a direct challenge to the authority of English institutions. Wharton’s contemptuous response to Oxford is new to Philip, who has been accustomed to treating that university with awe. Instead of accepting its prestige as self-evident, he now hears it measured against freedom, companionship, and the possibility of choosing a different intellectual life. Wharton does not determine Philip’s future, but he helps make the alternatives imaginable.

Wharton’s connection with Philip remains bounded by tutor and pupil, yet the scenes give it a quality of informal companionship. Their pretense of studying eventually falls away; Wharton talks, drinks, and sometimes admits that the lesson has accomplished nothing. His opinions are forceful, but his poverty, habits, and anticipated return to England complicate them. He is not an idealized spokesman for liberty: he is a man trying to preserve a chosen way of living while facing the material need to leave it.