Our pupils do amazing things every single day, but behind those achievements are all of the hardworking staff here at Merchant Taylors’ School. In Staff Spotlights we look to explore the diverse backgrounds and skills of the people who make Merchant Taylors’ a great place to be. This week we hear from Matthew Hilton-Dennis, Head of English
When did you join Merchant Taylors’?
September 2015
Tell us about your subject. What excites you about it? How did you get into it?
English is at the heart of who we are as human beings. It is a subject through which we learn profound things about ourselves and about other people, many of whom have lived at other times, in other places. English deals in the inner life – the unseen – which, let’s be honest, is always the more interesting. To read is to live many lives. No other subject can transport you in quite the same way, and whether what we read be fiction or non-fiction, we know it to be true on the inside. Why do we always reach for literature at the most important moments of our lives? English equips its pupils with the skills necessary to take their place in society, in particular: communication, critical analysis and the art of understanding of how people think and feel. Having command of the English language is one of the most powerful skills conceivable. Never has the adage been truer than it is now: the pen is mightier than the sword. I came to English through stories. My parents ran a monthly storytelling group from our home in Brighton. As a seven-year-old, I remember being in awe of these mysterious figures coming into our living room, sitting down in front of the fire and from their lips new worlds, people and ideas were born. I knew then that words have magic in them.
What are you most proud of outside of your work at school?
I am Chair of a charity (HVP Nepal-UK) which supports three schools in Nepal. It was through this connection that I organised the inaugural MTS Nepal Expedition in Summer 2024. As well trekking through the Langtang Valley of the Himalayas, the trip involved our students teaching a mixture of English, Maths and Science to Nepalese pupils aged between 10 and 15 in a local school in Kathmandu. The team raised over £8000 for two schools, an immense achievement of which they should be very proud. The next expedition is due to go out to Nepal in July 2026, and the last few remaining places are still available to those boys in current Divisions to Lower Sixth who think they might have what it takes for such a challenge.
What did you study at A-Level?
English Literature, French, History and Latin
What piece of media would you recommend and why?
The Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge. I first read this during my A Levels at Brighton College and was never quite the same again. On a Sixth Form trip to the Lake District in 2022, I remember Archie Stewart reading the following extract from ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’ from an original 1798 edition. There can be few lines in all of poetry that describe so well the truth of the connection we have with the natural world. Wordsworth speaks in ‘the language of the sense’: we feel that we are greater than we know.
For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing often-times
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear, – both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
