Posted on 12/03/2008 6:06:02 PM PST by bruinbirdman
Modern students are known for their heavy drinking and sexual exploits, but a Cambridge University diary which has been uncovered suggests that Victorian students were even more debauched.
Charles Astor Bristed, an American who spent five years at Trinity College in the 1840s, described how British undergraduates thought nothing of visiting prostitutes, and revelled in drinking games involving "villainously doctored Cambridge wines".
"There is a careless and undisguised way of talking about gross vice (prostitution)... It is talked of as a thing which is on the whole natural, excusable and perhaps to most men necessary," the grandson of multi-millionaire John Jacob Astor wrote in his diary.
Students who refused to partake were considered "frigid, highly religious", he added, describing his shock at being invited by a fellow student to visit a prostitute "just as quietly as a compatriot might have asked me to take a drink".
Mr Bristed, who was the son of a reverend and raised a strict Puritan, also recorded how he secretly emptied his glass in order to stay sober during drinking contests at his college.
"I stuck to the Hock – or, more critically speaking, to something in a green bottle – the bottle and glass were colored, that was the main point; the colored glass enabled me to fill and empty, in appearance, many times, while in reality I only poured out and tasted a few drops; the result of which stratagem was that two or three of the party put themselves completely hors de combat, and were deeply impressed with a sense of my capacity," he wrote.
But Mr Bristed did not leave with an entirely unfavourable impression of life at a British university; he praised his fellow students for their athletic prowess and their reluctance to gossip.
"I might say that these young
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
-- Dean Vernon Wormer
Reminds me so much of a younger me.
Back before my methamphetamine days...
Where is your link?
Every generation thinks they invented sex and binge drinking.
Practice debauchery and visit enough prostitutes, your link will eventually wither and fall off.
No surprise - how do they think Bill Clinton spent his Oxford years??
Victorian society was very corrupt. Something like every third single woman in London was a prostitute during the nineteenth century. The corruption was hidden behind a veil of excessive propriety and religiousity.
“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,” he wrote.
The Illuminati.
So it’s more or less like New York today.
HeeHee.
I had aunts who lived the “Great Gatsby” life, who got whupped for doing the Charleston dance. By the time I was old enough to know them, they were sweet little old ladies who would have a hissy fit if you drank a beer or glass of wine.
Years ago, I bought an old Victorian house and remodeled it, in a small, historic east Tennessee town. The big old Victorians were the ones that, at one time, belonged to the upstanding, upper class business owners near the little downtown area, the center of commerce in those days.
One of my neighbors gutted (and renovated)an old house, which, at one time, belonged to a prominent doctor in the town. When they tore out the walls, they found a corsett (sp), and several vials of dried up Morphine stuffed away in between a crack in the walls.
We happened to have another elderly neighbor who lived next door to this house, and he remembered growing up there in the house he inherited from his parents. He said he remembered the doctor’s wife from his childhood, and she was “a really strange lady.”
and she was “a really strange lady.”
Not too surprising if she was using the Docs dope allotment. LOL!
LOL. Words to the wise.
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