ABSTRACT
Calverley (1831–84), poet and parodist, was at Christ’s College, Cambridge, when he set this examination paper at Christmas 1857; the prizewinners were W. W. Skeat (later Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge) and Walter Besant (later a popular novelist). Besant recalls the literary tastes of his generation at Cambridge in the late 1850s: ‘Tennyson, Kingsley and Carlyle were in everybody’s hands, with Dickens of course as the first favourite’ (Autobiography (1902), 91). Calverley helpfully provides a ‘Key’ to the examination paper (pp. 125–9). Pickwick was, clearly, already a cult-book: and swopping arcane Dickens tags was something of an undergraduate fashion (William Morris was one who indulged in it). At least this is preferable to Pooh games, not unknown, it is ignominious to report, in British universities in the 1960s.
