LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER FIVE The Don as Scholar – Frederic Maitland

      Trinity is the greatest and grandest of all Cambridge colleges and in science the intellectual power-house of the university. It was the home of Newton and of those formidable classical scholars Bentley and Porson. But though Cambridge was spared the bitter divisions that split Oxford, it too became embroiled in similar political and religious controversy. By tradition Cambridge was a university of the Whigs, but in 1831, as the nation was rocked by the debates on the Reform Bill, the true sentiments of the dons became clear. The Whigs – a young Cavendish who had become second in the mathematical tripos, and young Palmerston – lost their seats in Parliament. The Master of Trinity, Christopher Wordsworth, deprived Connop Thirlwall, the outstanding young theologian of the day, of his assistant tutorship. Thirlwall had come out in favour of admitting Dissenters to Cambridge and had questioned the merit of compulsory attendance in chapel. Wordsworth did not stop there. He let it be known that, had he had the power to deprive Thirlwall of his fellowship, he would have done so. That was too much for the fellows of Trinity. They gave Wordsworth such a hard time that he found life in the Lodge as Master unendurable. But Wordsworth was not a man to give an inch to his enemies. He timed his resignation skilfully. The mastership of Trinity is a Crown appointment, and Wordsworth was determined that he should not be succeeded by the notable liberal and popular professor Adam Sedgwick. Watching the smoke signals from Westminster as keenly as any bushman, Wordsworth perceived that Melbourne’s administration was tottering and he waited until Peel formed a Tory government. Peel did not disappoint him. He nominated William Whewell as the next Master.

      Whewell was a polymath. He introduced analysis into Cambridge mathematics after a visit to Germany, where he picked up crystallography and – after he had been appointed professor in the subject – mineralogy. A treatise on gothic architecture was tossed off, as was a work of considerable importance on the theory of tides and how they affected the British Isles. He was not an experimental scientist. He described science and became famous for a vast treatise on the history and philosophy of the inductive sciences. He had unbounded energy and boundless arrogance. Built like a prize-fighter, he was a bully. But he was not a die-hard and was generous on the rare occasions he suffered defeat. He bounced the university into accepting the Prince Consort as a candidate for the chancellorship, brought him home in a contested election and supported his plans for increasing the number of professorships. Whewell spoke in favour of establishing a natural and moral sciences tripos and put forward a not very practical plan for reforming the curriculum.

      For intellectual distinction Trinity had a rival. Next door was St John’s, where Wordsworth found his sleep disturbed by Trinity’s loquacious clock and pealing organ where in the ante-chapel the statue stood

      Of Newton with his prism and silent face

      The marble index of a mind for ever

      Voyaging through strange seas thought, alone.

      The Master of St John’s, William Bateson, was a more vigorous reformer than Whewell and considerably more genial. The Johnian mathematicians clocked up a record of successes in the tripos that surpassed even those of Trinity. The first chemistry laboratory in Cambridge was set up in St John’s under George Liveing; the moral science teachers included the economist Alfred Marshall; and skilled classicists from Shrewsbury School flocked there to be taught by a notable reformer, Heitland, and by T. E. Page, whose Latin texts for many years every schoolboy had to master. They were the successors of those whom William Wordsworth praised when he went there in 1787, ‘whose authority of Office serv’d, To set our minds on edge’. On the other hand the mathematicians at St John’s tended to be an unimaginative lot, the successors to Wordsworth’s

       Men unscoured, grotesque

      In character, tricked out like aged trees

      Which, through the lapse of their infirmity

      Give ready place to any random seed

      That chuses to be rear’d upon their trunks.*

      Undergraduates studied either for a pass degree or for honours, i.e. the tripos. In the first half of the nineteenth century the pass men regarded the tutors as mere schoolmasters. They were rowdy. The reforming headmasters of the public schools got their boys under control by delegating the problem of discipline to housemasters and prefects and by promoting games. The tutors had no such resources. Their pupils were irritated by the intolerable numbers of petty university and college rules which may have been appropriate three centuries earlier when undergraduates were fifteen years old. To carry an umbrella while wearing cap and gown was an offence. So were pigeon-shooting, attendance at prize-fights, dinners in pubs – even, in one case, sporting a moustache. The college tutors were there to din into their heads the rudiments required for a pass degree – if they were in residence. It was said that you knew it was term-time in Cambridge if you saw Whewell, when he was tutor at Trinity, at the Athenaeum. Whewell knew none of his undergraduates: he argued that if he knew them he could not be an impartial examiner. He once rebuked his gyp (college servant) for not telling him when one of his pupils died.

      The men reading for honours were equally dismissive of their tutors. Few of the 350 fellows taught them. If you sat for the mathematical or classical tripos you hired a coach (who had taken high honours in his time). He would charge you £7 or, if you settled for being taught once a day, £14 a term. The tutor was your enemy, fining or gating you for breaking a college rule. The coach was your friend. You paid him and his job was to get you as high a place as possible in the tripos list; in both classics and mathematics marks were awarded for each question and an exact order of merit was published in the class list. The coach would be an expert crammer adept at forecasting what the examiners might ask that year. He might even be a professor. Henslow, the professor of botany at Cambridge, was so ill-paid that he had to cram students for five to six hours a day. Undergraduates made their name by being classed senior Classic, or among the top Wranglers (i.e. mathematicians).

      One of the obstacles to change was the existence of small colleges. Who was to teach new subjects such as science or history when the few fellows were able only to teach mathematics or classics? When the future historian G. G. Coulton came up to St Catharine’s in 1877 the senior tutor was such an inadequate teacher that Coulton paid to be taught classics by the junior tutor. The Dean was omniscient – that is to say he

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