Sir Christopher Wren

Sir Christopher Wren died on 25 February 1723. On this 300th anniversary of his death there are several commemorations around the UK, listed on the dedicated website wren300.org. In Cambridge we celebrate the Library of Trinity College as being arguably Wren’s greatest secular building. In preparation for the tercentenary celebrations we have digitised all of …

Advent Calendar of Christmas Cards from Trinity College Archives

The ephemeral nature of Christmas cards makes them quite rare in the Trinity College archives.  Here are 24 from across the collections, some traditional, some quirky, some personal:   Rose Macaulay designed Christmas card MACR.8.99 Christmas card sent by Wittgenstein WITT.402.6 E.M. Forster's Christmas Card TRER.3.25 Frederick Anthony White's Christmas Card Add.ms.a.84.16  Rose Macaulay designed …

“It doesn’t matter what you think of me. I know you love me-” – Erskine Childers’ goodbye

“It doesn’t matter what you think of me, I know you love me.” So wrote Erskine Childers to his friend Ivor Lloyd-Jones on 24th November 1922, hours or even minutes before he faced a firing squad. Robert Erskine Childers was executed at Beggars Bush Barracks, Dublin, in the recently formed Irish Free State. Before his …

Fellows and Felony: A Kitchen Clerk’s Autograph Book

Henry Coggin, an accounts clerk in the kitchen at Trinity in the 19th century, kept a small book (O.10a.45) in which he pasted autographs and letters collected during his working life. He added handwritten notes alongside the entries. This blog highlights some of the contents. Henry Coggin was born at Old Lambeth in 1823 but …

Thanks for the Cheese

An archivist at Trinity has shared a humorous poem ‘Thanks for the Cheese’ written by Hassard Hume Dodgson (1803-84), uncle of Lewis Carroll. The poem was composed for Susan Emma Smith, mother of Trinity Fellow Sir Henry Babington Smith and found among his papers. Dodgson begins Should you wonder, why it pleases Mrs Smith to …

Andrew Marvell at 400

The poet and patriot Andrew Marvell was born on 31 March 1621 in the East Riding of Yorkshire. He attended the Grammar School in Hull, where his father had been appointed Master of the Charterhouse. Two of his teachers in Hull were graduates of Trinity College Cambridge, but he would later comment rather sardonically that …

Thomas Hebbes’s Pocket Diary

This year we begin a series of posts looking at new acquisitions. Almost all the books in the Wren Library were presented to the College, and the tradition of giving books to the College continues to this day. As well as donations of books, the College has been presented with various financial gifts by alumni …

Florence Nightingale’s Bicentenary

Florence Nightingale was born 200 years ago today while her parents were on a Grand Tour of present-day Italy. Frances and William Nightingale named their two daughters after the cities where they were born: Florence was named after the Tuscan city and her sister was called Parthenope, the Ancient Greek name for Naples. Florence Nightingale’s …

‘This doomsday’: the Trevelyans in the First World War

On 27 October, 1918, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson wrote a postcard to his friend, Robert Trevelyan, the poet, playwright, and classicist, wishing that the war could be resolved as easily as their latest postal game of chess; instead, it still seemed to ‘hang on a razor’s edge’. Trevelyan, whose papers in the Trinity archive are currently …

Bromide and champagne: a new glimpse of Housman at Trinity

A. E. Housman lived in Trinity College for the last 25 years of his life, following his appointment as Professor of Latin at Cambridge in 1911. A newly discovered collection of 53 hitherto unknown letters to his godson reveals much about life in College between the wars. While a student at Oxford in 1887-81, Housman …