CHARLES ASTOR BRISTED IN NEW YORK, YALE, AND TRINITY

‘Late in October, 1840, a young New Yorker was losing himself among the impracticable streets, and admiring the remarkable edifices of Cambridge.’ These words introduce the most detailed and the most thoughtful memoir of Cambridge undergraduate life ever penned. It was written by an American, Charles Astor Bristed, and is considered in this chapter with the reminiscences of another American, William Everett, who followed Bristed to Cambridge (and to Trinity College) in 1859. Both men combined American citizenship and patriotism with sympathy for much in British, especially English, life – the life of the comfortable and cultivated upper-middle class whose attitudes and culture were so often scarcely distinguishable from their own circles’ in the North-eastern United States, and whose bookshelves were filled, as theirs were in New York and Boston, with the works of Scott, Dickens, and Emerson. Both men were less critical of Cambridge and of Britain than, shall we say, a Kansas cowboy is likely to have been in the improbable event of his becoming a Trinity undergraduate. But it also gives their occasional criticisms the peculiar force that comes from intimate knowledge, like the perceptive judgement of a brother. One particularly turns for enlightenment to Bristed, the more informative and reflective man.

A British reviewer – probably W. G. Clark – criticised his undue censure of Harvard and Yale, his ‘sweeping condemnation’ of Oxford on the most perfunctory acquaintance, and his allegation of undergraduate fornication.