November 29, 2009

Conspiracy mixes dangerously with fumes of port, clouds of snuff

For bedtime reading, I’ve recently been working my way through the (unintentionally?) hilarious published letters of late, lifelong Oxford don Hugh Trevor-Rover, who, as Lord Dacre, served as a grand — if not especially well-loved — Master of famously traditional Peterhouse, Cambridge. His private writings are undeniably fascinating, though — how should I put it — frequently bitchy. At any rate, he gives a wonderful description of Oxbridge colleges as nodes of intensely conspiratorial activity:

“[College fellows]… sitting congregated in those dens of conspiracy (never more conspiratorial than in the depths of vacation, when their more mobile colleagues are away, and the dank miasma of the river Thames mixes most dangerously with fumes of port and clouds of snuff).”

He also describes a particular Oxford college as “a sort of Oxford Tibet, with primitive inhabitants, strange superstitions, and few economic attractions for colonising powers.” Anyone want to guess which college he was referring to?

These letters capture the air of a now-lost world, much as the following tidbit does from George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier:

“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England”.

Then again, maybe that world lives on.