ABSTRACT
Just as we tend to have a picture in our mind of the late Victorian and Edwardian upper middle-class family, so too we have a sense of what it was like to be a university student in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Oxford and Cambridge. We envisage a world of wealth, power and privilege, of precious, young dilettantes or sporty, young ‘bloods’ living lives of idleness and indulgence, interspersed perhaps with the occasional visit to a library or lecture theatre. ‘“Oxbridge” between 1875 and 1914’, confirms J.A. Mangan caustically, ‘was more a place of privileged play than it was a centre of meritocratic cerebral effort’.1 Contemporaries agreed: ‘the visitor to Oxford and Cambridge is often impressed with the idea that recreation and amusement form the real work here, and that study is merely useful insofar as it goes to fill up some corner of the day’s routine, which cannot be otherwise allocated.’2
