Social Life at the English Universities in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Christopher Wordsworth (1848–1938), was a great-nephew of the poet, and part of a Victorian dynasty of Cambridge academics. Social Life at the English Universities in the Eighteenth Century, first published in 1874 while Wordsworth was a Fellow of Peterhouse, is a comprehensive survey of student life in England a century earlier. Its seven appendices include the diary of a student at Trinity College, Cambridge during the last decade of the eighteenth century. Wordsworth's research covered hundreds of works relating to the political and moral condition of the universities, relations between different categories of members, and proposals for reform that were put forward at the time. Music, dramatic entertainment, and expenses are other areas explored in this thorough overview, which remains a useful source for historians of education and society. A companion volume, Wordsworth's Scholae Academicae is also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection.