Most of the 170 letters in this volume come from the last six years of the life of Alexander Gooden, who died in 1841 aged twenty-three, when on the point of returning from Germany to England to sit the fellowship examination at Trinity College, Cambridge. After several years at the new University of London, he had entered Trinity as an undergraduate in 1836, and graduated as Senior Classic (top of the first class in the Classical Tripos) in 1840. In the Trinity fellowship examination of that year he failed to gain a place, but was confidently expected to succeed in 1841. Instead, he contracted peritonitis after rowing on the Rhine in August of that year, and died shortly afterwards.

Gooden’s letters offer a unique insight into student life in Cambridge in the 1830s. The topics discussed range from college social life, the virtues and defects of dons, examinations and candidates, local elections and social events to the decoration and furnishing of rooms, the washing of shirts and his own health (he suffered from constipation). Gooden wrote for the most part separately to his father and to his mother. The added perspective this provides is enhanced by their letters to him, which are also preserved; and by correspondence between Gooden and his friends, college tutors and coaches. More will be said about this below; suffice it to say at this point that this corpus of letters deserves to take its place as a major primary source of information on student life in nineteenth-century Cambridge, together with Charles Bristed’s Five Years in an English University (1852).

Family and upbringing

Alexander Chisholm Gooden was born on 4 April 1818, the second son of James Gooden and his wife Mary, née Chisholm, who had married in 1812. Soon afterwards they moved to London, and in 1826 bought one of the seventeen grand new houses built by Thomas Cubitt on the west side of Tavistock Square. Tavistock Square was a very respectable address. At the time of the 1841 census, the Goodens had three servants; their neighbours the Lamberts at no. 32, with three children, had five.4 No. 39 was occupied from 1832 to 1846 by Sir Thomas Platt, baron of the exchequer 1845–6.