‘Sophonisba Receives a Nuptial Present of Poison from her Husband Masinissa’ ([1818])

The only son of the Rev. J. S. and Dorothy Cobbold of Woolpit, Suffolk, Thomas Spencer Cobbold (1798/9–1827) entered Rugby School in June 1814. Cobbold went on to attend Clare Hall, Cambridge and to be ordained as an Anglican clergyman. An obituary published after his early death following ‘a long protracted affliction, borne with exemplary submission’ praises his talent, integrity, piety and devotion to the duties of his holy office and suggests that ‘his private and preparatory labours in the study and the closet’ were so intense as to overburden a naturally frail body and destroy ‘his health, if not ultimately his life’. The choice of subject in this schoolboy exercise illustrates not only the importance of the classical tradition in the training of British boys of the genteel classes, but also the visions of appropriate family relationships and gender roles that this tradition helped to transmit and, educators hoped, to perpetuate.