An American in Victorian Cambridge : Charles Astor Bristed's "Five years in an English University" /

Charles Bristed, New Yorker and urbane young man of means, spent five years at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1840-45, following his Yale degree. His fascinating and often witty account of those years, intended for US readers, is the most detailed rendered by any American about British university life in that age. It is also a comparison of British and US universities, to the detriment of the latter, which, Bristed claims, were intended to produce orators and writers, not deep thinkers. At Cambridge, the education was severely competitive and geared toward mathematics and the classics. Bristed introduces his readers to the arcane curriculum with its complicated ranking of students and exams, a setting in which the intelligent, amiable American managed to thrive, although he did not get the hoped-for "first." He was comfortable with his fellow students in the solidly Anglican setting, expressing his disdain for Catholicism and the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement. Stray has done a fine job of editing this work. He has provided extensive footnotes and references, which include informative comments made by British readers in their personal copies of the book, first published in 1852. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. P. T. Smith Saint Joseph's University