An American in Victorian Cambridge: Charles Astor Bristed's Five years in an English university

Abstract

Stray, Christopher. An American in Victorian Cambridge: Charles Astor Bristed's Years in an English University. Exeter, Eng.: U of Exeter P, 2008. 448 pp. Cloth $85.00.IN EARLY DECEMBER 2009, THIS REVIEWER STEPPED OUT OF ONE of the libraries at Duke University on an urgent errand-to feed a parking meter. It was at the top of the hour and classes were changing. Among the many students crowding the flagstone walkways, a young man in an academic gown, black with purple bands on the sleeves, was more than conspicuous. His sartorial accoutrements included Chuck Taylors (or the Chinese replica) and shades, and he paused occasionally to shout Eruditio et Religio while executing patterns of curious hand jive. Echo-like, the phrase Eruditio et Religio was heard again from a distance, and three similarly clad young men appeared from across the quad, also making strange gestures. Back in the library, I mentioned what I had seen and asked, What in hell was that? Oh, it's the last day of classes. That's the Old Trinity Club; they've been performing that ritual for ages.Charles Astor Bristed (1820-74) was the favorite grandson of furrier John Jacob Astor, perhaps the wealthiest American of his day. Under his own name and as Carl Benson, Bristed became a much published essayist and critic with readers on both sides of the Atlantic. His father was Dorset-born, Episcopal cleric and author John Bristed (1778-1855), who immigrated to America in 1806. In the 1820s his mother Magdalen Astor divorced the Reverend Bristed, her second husband whom she had married soon after her divorce in 1819 from Adrian Bentzon, colonial governor of the Danish colony of Santa Cruz. In 1832 when he was twelve, the younger Bristed's mother died, and he spent the remainder of his formative years living with his grandfather in the Astor household. He was graduated with honors from Yale in 1839 and attended Cambridge University from 1840 to 1845, remaining there until 1846. An inheritance in 1848 from his grandfather's estate freed him from the necessity of gainful employment and allowed him to follow his chosen profession as a writer while suffering few of its constraints or pecuniary embarrassments. He is the subject of an article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) by Christopher A. Stray, who also has edited, annotated, and indexed this new edition of Bristed's Five Years in an English University.Stray, an honorary research fellow in the department of Classics at Swansea University, has written and published widely on classical education and educators in England, on English academic traditions in the nineteenth century, on the history of textbook publication, and on several private languages that have at least distant relevance to the Carlyles' own coterie speech. His Mushri-English Pronouncing Dictionary: A Chapter in 19th-century Public School Lexicography (U of Reading, 1996) is a monograph of exceptional charm, and its lively and learned text, apt annotation, and attractive graphic design bring to life the classroom of Winchester College schoolmaster Edmund Doidge Anderson Morshead (1849-1925; ODNB). With much patience and skill, Stray has performed a similar resurrection upon Bristed's forgotten literary classic, and he has further refreshed it with the addition of contemporary illustration by John Lewis Roget (son of Thesaurus Roget) .Roget's pen-and-ink renderings, such as this oft-repeated example, reinforce the literary portraiture with a simplicity of line that anticipates later English illustrators E. H. Shepard and C. G. Harper. This new edition benefits further from a panoply of useful, and at times comical, annotation, which comes from seven sources (five in addition to Bristed and Stray). Patrick Leary, independent scholar and founder of the Victoria Research Web, introduces the volume with an appreciation of Bristed the writer and a chronicle of the Anglo-American cultural context. Stray's own introduction provides particulars of Bristed 's life as well as a glimpse into ancient traditions, academic and social, of Cambridge University and its colleges - most important, an explanation of the mathematical tripos and the classical tripos. …