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Author:   Christopher Stray ,  Chris Stray ,  Chris Stray ,  Patrick Leary
Publisher:   University of Exeter Press
Imprint:   University of Exeter Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.00cm , Height: 3.60cm , Length: 22.70cm
Weight:   0.862kg
ISBN:  

9780859898249

ISBN 10:   0859898245
Pages:   448
Publication Date:   21 November 2008
Audience:   General/trade ,  College/higher education ,  General ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Illustrations Photograph of Charles Astor Bristed Foreword by Patrick Leary Introduction by Christopher Stray Bibliography Original dedication Original preface 1. First Impressions of Cambridge [1840] 2. Some Preliminaries, Rather Egotistical but Very Necessary [1835-9] 3. Introduction to College Life 4. The Cantab Language 5. An American Student's First Impressions at Cambridge and on Cambridge 6. Freshman Temptations and Experiences 7. The Boat Race [1841] 8. A Trinity Supper Party [1840] 9. The May Examination [1841] 10. The First Long Vacation [1841] 11. The Second Year [1841-2] 12. Third Year [1842-3] 13. Private Tuition 14. Long Vacation Amusements [1843] 15. A Second Edition of Third Year [1843-4] 16. The Scholarship Examination [1844] 17. The Reading Party [1844] 18. Sawdust Pudding with Ballad Sauce [1844] 19. On the Razor's Edge [1844-5] 20. How I Came To Take a Degree [1845] 21. The Polloi and the Civil Law Classes 22. The Classical Tripos [1845] 23. A visit to Eton. English Public Schools 24. Being Extinguished [1845] 25. Reading for a Trinity Fellowship [1845] 26. The study of Theology at Cambridge 27. Recent Changes at Cambridge 28. The Cambridge System of Education in its Intellectual Results 29. Physical and Social Habits of Cambridge Men. Their Amusements, &c. 30. On the State of Morals and Religion in Cambridge 31. The Puseyite Disputes in Cambridge, and the Cambridge Camden Society 32. Inferiority of our Colleges and Universities in Scholarship 33. Supposed Counterbalancing Advantages of American Colleges 34. The Advantages of Classical Studies, Particularly in Reference to the Youth of our Country 35. What Can and Ought We To Do for our Colleges? Charles Astor Bristed 1820-1874: An annotated bibliography Index

Reviews

From readers' reports commissioned by University of Exeter Press on the proposed Christopher Stray edition of Charles Astor Bristed's Five Years in an English University: I was very glad to be offered the opportunity to read this manuscript, and, having now been over it with some care, can heartily recommend it for publication. Bristed's account of his time at Cambridge enthralled me when I first encountered it many years ago, and I have often wished that this insightful and entertaining book was better known. I always imagined that if it were ever to see print, it would be in one of those vile facsimiles that are little more than bound photocopies. Thanks to the University of Exeter Press and to Dr Stray, who has brought such extraordinary erudition and such indefatigable research to bear on the project, a carefully edited and usefully annotated and indexed scholarly edition is now possible at last. The introduction and scholarly apparatus should go a long way toward giving the book the long life it deserves. ... Bristed has much to offer not only those scholars and students working on the history of education, but equally those whose field is the history of the book, and, more particularly, the history of reading. Because Bristed's prose is so accessible, the book's potential classroom uses are intriguing, as well: I can easily imagine it as an assigned text in a history survey class on Victorian Britain, or, for that matter, in a graduate-level Victorian literature seminar, as background reading for the study of such fictional accounts of student life as Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown at Oxford and Cuthbert Bede's The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green. But the main fascinations of the book to those who are not specialists in the minutiae of English university history lie in the manifold ways in which it reflects the tensions and fascinations then existing - and, in many respects, still surviving - between the two great poles of the English-speaking world: Britain and America. No cultural history of the relationship between these societies, from the 19th century to the present, can afford to ignore Bristed's account of his years at Cambridge. This aspect of the book will be of particular interest to American readers, as well as to cultural historians of all sorts, and I would strongly urge that it be emphasized in the marketing of this edition, as well as in the revised introduction and notes. Explication of the details of Cambridge academic rituals and hierarchies, as interesting as those details may be to specialists, should not be allowed to obscure the central rationale for the book, one that Bristed made quite clear in his choice of title and that is as appealing today as it was then: this is not simply a book about English university life, but pre-eminently a book about an American student at an English university. There is scarcely a page of it that is not imbued with this heightened sense of difference, of a peek inside a mysterious and rarefied world at the heart of an alien culture, by someone whose wealth and privilege have procured him a degree of access vouchsafed only to a favored few. Like all travelers to exotic lands, Bristed noticed and recorded a multitude of things about that world that were either invisible or unremarkable to its native inhabitants, and he did so in the service of a specifically American readership, one that craved insight into the unfamiliar attitudes and rituals of a foreign educated elite whose books and authors still dominated American literary and intellectual life. [...] Preeminently, Five Years should be seen as part of a fascinating trans-Atlantic publishing genre whose heyday ran from about the 1820s through to the end of the American Civil War: the travel account that attempted to describe and explain American culture for Britons, or vice-versa. [...] His book should be set alongside titles such as Frederick Law Olmsted's Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (1850) and Ralph Waldo Emerson's English Traits (1857), to name but two. Like Bristed, Olmsted enlivens his observations with set-scenes of dialogue to help convey the flavor of his encounters with individual Britons; Emerson, like Bristed, moves easily among the educated elite and contrasts their attitudes and institutions with American equivalents. Situating the book in this way points up how very contentious and influential this whole literature was, particularly among the American readers who were Bristed's intended audience. [...] Being able to see how Bristed is part of an ongoing discussion and debate between the two cultures also makes clearer some of the things that make him so unusual. For of course Bristed also wrote, and published in book form that same year, The Upper Ten Thousand, an attempt to describe elite American society for British readers. I can think of no other writer of the nineteenth century who worked both sides of this particular dialogue, let alone one who did so with such panache and insight. Dr Patrick Leary, author of the Foreword to the edition (Patrick Leary is a historian who has published widely on Victorian authorship and is currently in the last stage of completing a book on Punch for the University of Toronto Press; he is founder and manager of VICTORIA, the listserv for Victorian Studies, and Vice-President of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals.) The intention of this edition is to bring to a modern audience an extraordinary ethnographic study, an enterprise which succeeds admirably. I have no hesitation in recommending publication. After gaining a degree at Yale, Bristed entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1840, graduating in 1845. His book was first published in 1852. It is one of the richest and most vivid accounts of undergraduate life ever written. [...] It is Bristed's achievement to lead us easily and painlessly into this world and to give us an unparalleled portrait of the Cambridge of the 1840s. One of the eeriest aspects of this work for a reader who has taught in the University of Cambridge for forty years is the extent to which the culture described has survived into the twenty-first century. Habits, styles, patterns of work, slang are all, at times, arrestingly familiar. Yet to say this is not to suggest that Bristed's book is of only local or parochial interest. [...] Bristed had intellectual ambitions [...] He was, moreover, at one of the two colleges - the other being St John's - which were the two powerhouses of the nineteenth century Cambridge scene. He offers a unique insider's account of this, its competitiveness, its camaraderie and its sheer basic mechanics. We begin to see what underpinned so many of the relationships in the world of nineteenth century British government and politics. Having begun his university career at Yale, however, Bristed was both outsider as well as insider. Additional strengths of his account include the care he takes to explore the curriculum and culture of Oxford, for comparison with Cambridge, and a larger comparison between English and American higher education. In making the latter, he stresses the emphasis that American colleges and universities place on debate and discussion - a point which again has an eerily contemporary ring - and contrasts it with greater English reticence. At the same time he is critical of the glibness and superficiality which too often goes with this ready participation in debate and signals his approval of the depth and precision which marked the best of English classical scholarship in his day. In the process of this he shows us exactly what was expected in early nineteenth century textual criticism. It is primary source material of the most valuable and rarest kind, almost like finding a nineteenth century examination script which has survived because the examiner used the back for rough paper. Bristed's Anglo-American comparison has interest and importance not only for the historian of the nineteenth century but also to the present-day educationist. It contributes to serious reflections on national styles and objectives in higher education and their durability. Dr Stray's editing is exemplary, unobtrusive and economical. He has used surviving annotated texts of Bristed - themselves of considerable bibliographic interest - to decode the pseudonyms and supply short sketches of the dramatis personae. He has translated where necessary - accurately as far as I can judge; and he has glossed and indicated additional secondary reading at appropriate points. Dr Gillian Sutherland,Newnham College, Cambridge University It has been many years since I used Bristed, as I mentioned to you, and seeing it again reminded me of what a great read it is. Yes, there is nothing quite like it, almost for any university that I know of (although I know only a fraction of them), nothing quite so detailed, so inside the institution and what is for Bristed a foreign culture. It was a tour de force by a man whom Chris Stray describes (accurately) as something of a playboy. The account mixes delightful anecdote with real understanding, and it is always lively. A new edition, slightly expanded with material from other editions, and, when it comes, an index - really indispensable for a book this size - will be very attractive indeed. [...] Chris Stray's introduction is certainly required for new readers, and he is, as always, informed, accurate and helpful. I like very much the fact that he copied into footnotes some of the comments found in annotated copies of Bristed, and his own parenthetical comments are hugely desirable. Professor Sheldon Rothblatt, University of California, Berkeley I think this is an excellent project. The book is important and highly deserving of a new edition. I also have the highest regard for Chris Stray as a scholar and believe that he will have produced an edition of real excellence. Professor Frank M Turner, John Hay Whitney Professor of History and Director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Patrick Leary likes the book as it is but suggests it could be developed, expanded slightly, and revised to appeal to more and wider audiences: specifically, to Victorianists and students of Anglo-American relations, rather than just to historians of universities. I concur with his opinions, and am happy to revise the book accordingly. My files on Bristed contain ample relevant material, and it should be possible in a short space of time to add the extra layer of annotation and introduction. Dr Leary's kind offer of a Foreword will also add significantly, as he is a leading Victorianist. The bibliography of Bristed's publications I have assembled is fairly comprehensive, and includes evidence of reviews of his books (Dr Leary asks for reference to reviews of Five Years). No such bibliography has been attempted before, and I believe it will add significantly to the value and appeal of the volume. Chris Stray, response to Patrick Leary's report quoted above

Author Information

Christopher Stray, Department of Classics, Swansea University, is the author of Classics Transformed: Universities and Societies in England 1830-1960 (OUP 1998); The Living Word: WHD Rouse and the Crisis of Classics in Edwardian England (BCP 1992); Gilbert Murray Reassessed: Hellenism, Theatre and International Politics (OUP 2007). He has been described by Professor Amy Richlin (UCLA) as ‘the God-Emperor of Victorian Classics’. Patrick Leary is a historian based in Evanston, Illinois who has published widely on Victorian authorship and is currently in the last stage of completing a book on Punch for the University of Toronto Press; he is founder and manager of VICTORIA, the listserv for Victorian Studies.

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