You know, every college movie made since Animal House has chosen to play up all the fun aspects of college: drinking, partying, doing any number of stupid and reckless things that you later regret. You know, the stuff you’ve always wanted to do but couldn’t in high school because you still lived at home. Apparently, there really is nothing new under the sun, because Victorian college students were just as wild as kids are today.
This isn’t some party school like Chico State, this is Cambridge. This is an above-Ivy league institution! Charles Astor Bristed spent 5 years at Trinity College, and all he could talk about was how much his English compatriots loved drinking games and prostitutes.
However, it wasn’t all bad. Bristed wrote of Englishmen, “I might say that these young men, so inferior to ours in purity, were superior to them in some other moral qualities; that they minded their own business, and told no lies or scandal of others.”
Of course they didn’t! When you’re consorting with loose women and binge-drinking, you don’t talk about other people because you don’t want them gossiping about you!
Image: Amazon
Tags: Cambridge, Victorian college students, Trinity College, Charles Astor Bristed, Five Years In An English University, college
