Victorian Novels of Oxbridge Life (Innbundet (stive permer))

Christopher Stray is Honorary Research Fellow in the Classics Department, University of Wales Swansea. He has researched and published in the fields of the history of classics teaching and scholarship; schools and universities; and the history of language use.

The books provide a fair coverage of the production history of the nineteenth-century university novel. Three are on Oxford, two on Cambridge; four are male-centred, one (A Newnham Friendship) represents the very small group of university novels about women. Some of them have distinctive features that are brought out in the introduction by Christopher Stray. Lockhart is well known as the editor of the Quarterly Review, biographer of Burns and Walter Scott, and translator of Cervantes. Tyrwhitt was a Christ Church Tory, and his novel was a conservative response to the aesthetic homosexuality of Walter Pater. Hughes is well known, and this novel is compared to his previous best-seller, Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857). Hughes's Tory heartiness (he and Charles Kingsley were the original 'muscular Christians') makes a nice contrast with Tyrwhitt's Ruskinian Toryism. Not much is known of Stronach, but she taught at a primary school in Mull, and contributed articles to the Girls' Own Paper on 'Openings for Women as Civil Service Clerks' and 'Some Splendid Outdoor Games for Girls'. She also translated some very gloomy Scandinavian novels into English.James Rice, author of The Cambridge Freshman under the pseudonym 'Martin Legrand', was a prolific popular novelist who often collaborated with Walter Besant.

Volume 1; General Introduction by Christopher Stray; J.G. Lockhart, Reginald Dalton (1823); Volume 2; Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford (1864); Volume 3; M. Legrand, The Cambridge Freshman (1871); Volume 4; R. Tyrwhitt, Hugh Heron, Ch. Ch. (1880); Volume 5; Alice Stronach, A Newnham Friendship (1900/1)