Christopher Wordsworth (1848–1938), was a great-nephew of the poet, and part of a Victorian dynasty of Cambridge academics. In this book, published in 1877, he describes the state of the English universities in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, before the reforms following the 1852 Royal Commission. He reviews the historic areas of study from the arts and mathematics to the 'trivials' - grammar, logic and rhetoric - and discusses the introduction of more recent disciplines such as physics, anatomy, chemistry, mineralogy and botany. His stated aim is to preserve an account of 'the methods and processes of University Study through which were educated the minds which have done so much to make our University and our Country what they are'. A companion volume, Wordsworth's Social Life at the English Universities in the Eighteenth Century is also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection.
Christopher Wordsworth (1848–1938), was a great-nephew of the poet, and part of a Victorian dynasty of Cambridge academics. Social Life at the English Universities in the Eighteenth Century, first published in 1874 while Wordsworth was a Fellow of Peterhouse, is a comprehensive survey of student life in England a century earlier. Its seven appendices include the diary of a student at Trinity College, Cambridge during the last decade of the eighteenth century. Wordsworth's research covered hundreds of works relating to the political and moral condition of the universities, relations between different categories of members, and proposals for reform that were put forward at the time. Music, dramatic entertainment, and expenses are other areas explored in this thorough overview, which remains a useful source for historians of education and society. A companion volume, Wordsworth's Scholae Academicae is also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection.
