Two (or three) naughty boys in Jesus
On a visit to Cambridge last week, the first for over fifteen years, we stayed in one of the guest rooms in Jesus College. We were free to roam the courts, and to eat breakfast with the students in the Hall. On the walls of the Hall were several indifferent portraits of College worthies, presumably past Masters. And there were two ‘celebrity students’ from the eighteenth century – as it happens, both of them less than completely respectable in their time, but both long forgiven for their sins.
At breakfast we sat down under a copy of Joshua Reynolds’s fine portrait, now in the National Portrait Gallery, of Laurence Sterne, who was a sizar or ordinary student in Jesus between 1733 and 1737. Earlier Sternes, including his scheming Uncle Jacques and his great-grandfather, Richard Sterne, a Master in the seventeenth century, had been Jesus students, and so his ward and cousin Richard knew where to send him. In 1733 Cambridge University and its colleges were sunk in torpor and corruption. Jesus was small, conservative and academically impoverished, and its Master, Dr Charles Ashton, ancient and invisible. Students, it was assumed, were being prepared for the Anglican priesthood – exactly what would happen to Sterne – though, curiously, theology was absent from the undergraduate curriculum, which favoured classics, philosophy, law and maths.
Not much teaching went on. This was no loss since, in the words of Thomas Gray (Peterhouse, 1734-38), the fellows were ‘sleepy, drunken, dull, illiterate Things’. Sterne probably learned most from his own reading, which must have been wide and voracious, to judge from the abundance of scholarship and cod-scholarship to be found in Tristram Shandy. He passed his exams – not written exams, but oral disputations and debates in Latin – and then settled down to studying theology for what lay ahead of him.
But there was another, rowdier side to life in Jesus. A sociable man, Sterne became close and lifelong friends with a younger, gentry-family Jesus student, John Hall, with whom he explored the alehouses, coffee shops and no doubt brothels and gambling dens of Cambridge. Later, at Skelton Castle, his ancestral home in north Yorkshire, John Hall-Stevenson, as he was now known, brought together a group of cronies he called ‘Demoniacs’, who indulged in heavy drinking and, it was alleged, orgies; he also published licentious verse and satirical political diatribes. He’s often seen as the model for the character of ‘Eugenius’, Tristram’s supposedly wise and trusty friend.
It was at Cambridge that Sterne felt the first effects of tuberculosis, the disease that would eventually kill him. He recalled, ‘I had the same accident I had at Cambridge, of breaking a vessel in my lungs. It happen’d in the night, and I bled the bed full.’ For the rest of his life he engaged Death in a game of hide-and-seek. Tristram recalls one of these encounters:
When DEATH himself knocked at my door – ye bade him come again; and in so gay a tone of careless indifference, did ye do it, that he doubted of his commission –
‘ – There must certainly be some mistake in this matter’, quoth he.
On the opposite wall, not far from Sterne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge stares sternly out at the diners, in a copy of a portrait by Washington Allston in the National Portrait Gallery. He came to Cambridge as a nineteen-year-old student in 1791. Though academically able, he was uncertain of himself, as many new students still are in that intimidating institution, and self-conscious about his shambling body. Jesus was an unwelcoming home, ‘the very palace of winds’. His rooms near the Porter’s Lodge were cold and clammy. He caught ’flu, which he treated with opium, and suffered from his bad teeth. Still, like Sterne, Coleridge must have worked hard at his studies, at least to begin with. In June 1792 he won the Brown Gold Medal for a Greek Sapphic ‘Ode on the Slave Trade’ – despite the Professor of Greek, Richard Porson, finding no fewer than 134 examples of bad Greek in it.
Coleridge’s second year seems to have been less academically successful. ‘I became a proverb to the University for Idleness’, he wrote later. He enjoyed taunting conservatives with his new Jacobinism, and got into debt through drinking, going to the theatre and visiting prostitutes. He was still pursuing his girlfriend from back in Devon, Mary Evans, and began to write verses in English, the beginning of his career as a poet. The start of his third year, much of it spent in London, was worse still. His debts piled higher, and his drinking and guilt intensified, provoking suicidal feelings. The only thing that flourished was his poetry writing.
In December 1973 Coleridge found what he thought was a way out of his difficulties, and volunteered as a private in the 15th Light Dragoons, under the name Silas Tomkin Comberbache. The only task given to him – he was the least military of soldiers – was to care for a fellow soldier with smallpox. Luckily, both survived. In a letter to his brother he wrote, ‘I have been a fool even to madness … I am lost in a labyrinth, the trackless wilderness of my own bosom.’ He got himself out of the army – ‘discharged S.T. Comberbache, Insane; 10 April 1794’ – and returned to Cambridge.
The University authorities gated him for a month and ordered him to write ninety pages of translation from Demetrius Phalerus, a fatally tedious fourth-century Athenian orator. He vowed to improve. But he was now beyond redemption, and had already gained a reputation as a wild man of letters, with outrageous political and religious views. In June, with a student friend, Joseph Hucks, he set out for Wales on the first of his walking tours – a trip that counts as one of the seeds of the Romantic revolution in English literature.
Coleridge never graduated. As, by now, a Unitarian in religion, he would not have been allowed to. And in any case, in April 1795, the College had passed this resolution:
Whereas Coleridge is still in arrears with his Tutors and has been absent for some time from the College (where we know not), it is ordered by the Master and Fellows that his name be taken off the boards on the 14th day of June next, unless cause be shown to the contrary, or some one of the Fellows declares himself willing to be his Tutor before that time, and that his present Tutors do endeavour to inform him of this order.
On the day of our visit to Jesus the current Master, Sonita Alleyne, was photographed in the company of the rapper Stormzy, newly installed as an honorary Fellow of the College, in recognition of his philanthropic work for black students and his concern for social justice. Stormzy, by his own account, had led a far from unblemished youth:
I was a very naughty child, on the verge of getting expelled [from school], but I wasn’t a bad child; everything I did was for my own entertainment.
In the Hall, a smile may have crossed the lips of Sterne and Coleridge.