Cambridge in the 1830s: The Letters of Alexander Chisholm Gooden, 1831-1841 (History of the University of Cambridge)

240 Pages·2003·1.1 MB·English

by  Jonathan Smith

The History of the University of Cambridge:
Texts and Studies
Volume 5
CAMBRIDGE IN THE 1830s
THE LETTERS OF
ALEXANDER CHISHOLM GOODEN
1831–1841
Alexander Chisholm Gooden (born 1817) went up to Trinity College,
Cambridge in 1836, having previously been educated at theUniversity of
London. A glittering academic career beckoned; he was top of the Classical
Tripos in 1840, and in the following year went to Germany to read for a
Trinity fellowship, but died tragically early from peritonitis after rowing
on the Rhine.
The 170 letters between Gooden and his family and friends collected in
this volume constitute a rich and hitherto unknown source for student life
in Cambridge in the 1830s. They cover a wide range of topics: friendships,
local politics, accommodation, clothing and bills, the personalities and
vagaries of dons, and Gooden’s health. They also give a detailed picture
of his career as a student of classics and mathematics, and, after his
examination success in 1840, as a private tutor to undergraduates. The
differences between Cambridge and London styles of scholarship caused
difficulties for Gooden; they offer the reader an unusual and interesting
light on his struggle to succeed at Trinity.
JONATHANSMITHis Archivist at Trinity College Library, Cambridge;
CHRISTOPHERSTRAYis Honorary Research Fellow at the Department
of Classics, University of Wales, Swansea
The History of the University of Cambridge:
Texts and Studies
ISSN 0960–2887
General Editor
P. N. R. Zutshi
Keeper of Manuscripts and University Archives
Cambridge University Library
1. The University of Cambridge and the English Revolution, 1623–1688, John Twigg
2. Medieval Cambridge: Essays on the Pre-Reformation University, edited by Patrick Zutshi
3. Gentlemen, Scientists and Doctors: Medicine at Cambridge 1800–1940, Mark Weatherall
4. Teaching and Learning in Nineteenth-Century Cambridge, edited by Jonathan Smith and
Christopher Stray
CAMBRIDGE IN THE 1830s
THE LETTERS OF
ALEXANDER CHISHOLM GOODEN
1831–1841
EDITED BY
Jonathan Smith and Christopher Stray
THE BOYDELL PRESS
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
© Jonathan Smith and Christopher Stray 2003
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast,
transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner
First published 2003
The Boydell Press, Woodbridge
in association with
Cambridge University Library
ISBN 1 84383 010 8
The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
and of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
PO Box 41026, Rochester, NY 14604–4126, USA
website: www.boydell.co.uk
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gooden, Alexander Chisholm, 1817–1841.
Cambridge in the 1830s : the letters of Alexander Chisholm Gooden,
1831–1841 / edited by Jonathan Smith and Christopher Stray.
p. cm. – (The history of the University of Cambridge. Texts and
studies, ISSN 0960–2887)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1–84383–010–8 (alk. paper)
1. Gooden, Alexander Chisholm, 1817–1841 – Correspondence.
2. Classical philology – Study and teaching – England – Cambridge –
History – 19th century. 3. Trinity College (University of Cambridge) –
Students – Correspondence. 4. Cambridge (England) – Intellectual
life – 19th century. 5. University of Cambridge – Students –
Correspondence. 6. Classicists – Great Britain – Correspondence.
I. Smith, Jonathan, 1961– II. Stray, Christopher. III. Cambridge
University Library. IV. Title. V. Series.
PA85.G635A4 2003
480′.092 – dc21 2003008125
This publication is printed on acid-free paper
Typeset by Keystroke, Jacaranda Lodge, Wolverhampton
Printed in Great Britain by
St Edmundsbury Press Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction Christopher Stray 1
Editorial note 18
THE LETTERS
Youth, 1831–36 letters 1–22 19
Freshman, 1836–37 letters 23–54 50
Junior Sophister, 1837–38 letters 55–79 100
Senior Sophister, 1838–40 letters 80–107 131
Alexander Gooden BA, 1840–41 letters 108–64 165
Epilogue letters 165–70 215
Index 221
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Our thanks are due to the following:
For allowing reproduction: The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge;
Pam and Ruari Chisholm; Dr. David Wykes, Director of Dr. Williams’s Library.
For advice and help: Jacky Cox, Christian Gehrke, Heinz Kurz, David McKitterick
and Patrick Zutshi. Special thanks are due to John Pickles, for detailed help with
annotation, and to Pam and Ruari Chisholm, for their generous hospitality.

Alexander Chisholm Gooden. A pencil sketch by his brother James Chisholm Gooden, c. 1835.
Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.
INTRODUCTION
Most of the 170 letters in this volume1come from the last six years of the life of Alexander
Gooden, who died in 1841 aged twenty-three, when on the point of returning from
Germany to England to sit the fellowship examination at Trinity College, Cambridge.
After several years at the new University of London, he had entered Trinity as
an undergraduate in 1836, and graduated as Senior Classic (top of the first class in
the Classical Tripos) in 1840. In the Trinity fellowship examination of that year he
failed to gain a place, but was confidently expected to succeed in 1841. Instead,
he contracted peritonitis after rowing on the Rhine in August of that year, and died
shortly afterwards.
Gooden’s letters offer a unique insight into student life in Cambridge in the 1830s.
The topics discussed range from college social life, the virtues and defects of dons,
examinations and candidates, local elections and social events to the decoration and
furnishing of rooms, the washing of shirts and his own health (he suffered from
constipation). Gooden wrote for the most part separately to his father and to his mother.
The added perspective this provides is enhanced by their letters to him, which are also
preserved; and by correspondence between Gooden and his friends, college tutors and
coaches. More will be said about this below; suffice it to say at this point that this corpus
of letters deserves to take its place as a major primary source of information on student
life in nineteenth-century Cambridge, together with Charles Bristed’s Five Years in an
English University(1852).2
Family and upbringing
Alexander Chisholm Gooden was born on 4 April 1818, the second son of James
Gooden and his wife Mary, née Chisholm, who had married in 1812. Soon afterwards
they moved to London, and in 1826 bought one of the seventeen grand new houses
built by Thomas Cubitt on the west side of Tavistock Square.3Tavistock Square was
a very respectable address. At the time of the 1841 census, the Goodens had three
servants; their neighbours the Lamberts at no. 32, with three children, had five.4No.
39 was occupied from 1832 to 1846 by Sir Thomas Platt, baron of the exchequer
1 The letters are referred to in this introduction by their numbers: (1)–(170).
2 C. A. Bristed, Five Years in an English University, 2 vols (New York, 1852); 2nd edn 1852, 3rd edn 1872.
Bristed, a Yale graduate, was at Trinity from 1845 to 1850.
3 Cubitt’s son Thomas went up to St John’s in 1838, and migrated to Trinity in 1839 (80).
4 Charles Dickens lived on the east side of Tavistock Square in the 1860s. No. 33 now carries a plaque
commemorating the brief residence there of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan; in the centre
of the Square is a statue of Jinnah’s great opponent Mahatma Gandhi.
2 The Letters of Alexander Chisholm Gooden
1845–6.5Before they married, both James and Mary Gooden had led interesting lives.
James Gooden was born in 1773, a descendant of a well-known Lancashire Catholic
family who had once owned Gooden Hall at Pendleton, near Bolton.6It is not clear
where he was educated, but he probably attended one of several small Catholic schools
in the region.7
James Gooden had travelled in France and Germany, as is clear from his comments
to Alexander during the latter’s fateful journey to Germany in 1841 (156). But the
fortune which enabled him to live the life of a leisured gentleman had been amassed
in Lisbon, where he had traded as a young man. The success of the English Factory in
the late eighteenth century had been largely due to trading in Brazilian cotton as well
as bullion; and we know that James Gooden sailed to Brazil, since in 1814 he brought
back books and manuscripts from that country and took them to Robert Southey, who
was then engaged on his History of Brazil.8Nor was Southey his only literary contact;
in 1820 he invited Coleridge to spend an ‘Attic evening’ with a Harmony Society to
which he belonged. Coleridge’s letter of refusal noted that the society consisted largely
of merchants.9
James Gooden’s religion meant that he was unable to matriculate at Oxford or
to graduate at Cambridge. However he gained his education, it is clear that he was
a well-read and educated man. We gain a glimpse of this from one of his several
appearances in the diaries of Henry Crabb Robinson. On 21 May 1842, Gooden dined
at Robinson’s house, the other guests including Wordsworth. Listing his guests,
Robinson described Gooden as ‘an elderly gentleman, long an admirer of Wordsworth
and a good scholar; of which he gave me a proof in turning into Latin verse, “As the
laurel protects the forehead from lightning, so the mitre the forehead of bishops from
shame.”’10 The seating plan for another of Robinson’s dinners includes Gooden,
Augustus De Morgan and Frederick Denison Maurice.11 Robinson and Gooden
probably first met at the Athenaeum; they both belonged to the first group of members
elected to the club by its founders in 1824, as did James Gooden’s medical adviser,
5 His son Charles went up to Trinity in 1840 (127).
6 Francis W. Pixley, ‘The Chisholm’, The Genealogical Magazine35 (March 1900), pp. 475–8. Pixley adds
helpfully, ‘By tradition the Goodens are descended from Tostig.’
7 His name does not appear in the few surviving registers of Catholic schools, which Maurice
Whitehead kindly arranged to be checked.
8 H. E. S. Fisher, ‘Lisbon, its English merchant community and the Mediterranean in the eighteenth
century’, in P. L. Cotterell and D. H. Aldcroft, eds, Shipping, Trade and Commerce (Leicester, 1981),
pp. 23–44; A. R. Walford, The British Factory in Lisbon & its Closing Stages Ensuing upon the Treaty of 1810
(Lisbon, 1940); K. Curry, ed., New Letters of Robert Southey(New York, 1965), vol. 2, pp. 102–3: letter
of 10 July 1814. Southey refers to having met Gooden in Lisbon; this will have been during his visit
there in 1796.
9 Coleridge to Gooden, 14 January 1820: E. L. Griggs, ed., Collected Letters of S. T. Coleridge, vol. 5 (Oxford,
1971), pp. 13–15 (original in Dr. Williams’s Library). Gooden is also referred to in C. Woodring, ed.,
Coleridge’s Table Talk(London, 1990), vol. 1, p. 172; K. Coburn and M. Christensen, eds, The Notebooks
of S. T. Coleridge, vol. 4 (London, 1990), p. 4638. The society’s name may be connected with
Coleridge’s view of his philosophy as a ‘harmony’ incorporating all others (Table Talk, vol. 1, p. 248).
Gooden was a keen reader of Kantian philosophy (79, 127).
10 H. C. Robinson, Diaries, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, sel. and ed. T. Sadler, 3 vols, 2nd edn
(London, 1869), vol. 3, p. 200. Gooden is also referred to at vol. 2, p. 403 (1829) and vol. 3, p. 41
(1834).
11 Robinson, Diaries, vol. 3, pp. 480–1.