Last Poems after a Century

  Nicolas Bell considers a new edition of A. E. Housman’s second poetry collection 2022 is a year of literary centenaries: on 2 February 1922 Joyce’s Ulysses first went on sale at Shakespeare & Company in Paris, and the October issue of the magazine Criterion included another modernist masterpiece, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. …

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 …

Cake, Caraway and Commemoration

A commonplace book typically includes notes and passages from literature compiled as work of reference. Manuscript R.2.45 is an example of this kind of memoranda and was probably put together by the printer William Bowyer (1699–1777) sometime in the 1750s. This is a very personal miscellany including many ‘stories’, description of the parts of a …

James Bond at Trinity

On 5 February 1964 Ian Fleming and James Bond met and dined together for the first and last time. Fourteen years earlier Fleming had been at Goldeneye, his home in Jamaica, preparing for his wedding, when he began writing a spy novel to settle his nerves. His hero, he decided, ought to have a straightforward …

Three Women in a Boat

At sunset on Wednesday, 9 November 1904, one day into the month of Ramadan, three tourists arrived at the famous Mena House Hotel, five miles west of Cairo in Egypt, then under British control. Behind them stretched the route of the parallel railway and road which had brought them and their luggage by train and …

Questions on Criticism: Arthur Balfour’s Romanes Lecture on literary criticism and beauty (1909)

Among the material recently acquired by the College is a collection of documents relating to Trinity alumnus and former Prime Minister Arthur James Balfour (Add.MS.a.616). Following his entry into Parliament in 1874, much of Balfour’s early career was focused on Ireland, where he remained staunchly against Irish home rule and oversaw the redistribution of land …

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 …

A Very Trevelyan Christmas

Trinity College Library is home to the archive of poet and dramatist, Robert Calverley Trevelyan and his Dutch wife Elizabeth, a musician. Robert and Elizabeth Trevelyan, who married in 1900, had a wide circle of friends from many countries, including writers, musicians, family, and members of the Bloomsbury Group. Many items in the collection of …

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 …

Cambridge Election Fever

Tomorrow’s general election, 7 May 2015, will see Cambridge city once again hotly-contested. The University of Cambridge was given two parliamentary seats in 1603 and this constituency (of two seats) was not abolished until 1950. In 1866 the Rev. Dr William Whewell (1794-1866), Master of Trinity, bequeathed to the college a large collection of papers, …