Romilly's Cambridge Diary 1842-1847: Selected Passages from the Diary of the Rev. Joseph Romilly, Fellow of Trinity College and Registrary of the University of Cambridge (review)

Reviewed by: Romilly’s Cambridge Diary 1842–1847: Selected Passages from the Diary of the Rev. Joseph Romilly, Fellow of Trinity College and Registrary of the University of Cambridge Peter Allen (bio) Romilly’s Cambridge Diary 1842–1847: Selected Passages from the Diary of the Rev. Joseph Romilly, Fellow of Trinity College and Registrary of the University of Cambridge, edited by M. E. Bury and J. D. Pickles; pp. xviii + 270. Cambridge: Cambridge Records Society, 1994, £19.00. The diarist Joseph Romilly (1791–1864) was a clever, amiable, and conscientious Cambridge don who found his lifework when in 1832 he was appointed Registrary of the University of Cambridge. A bachelor clergyman, he soon set up a household with his two unmarried sisters at the edge of the town. Everything that interested Romilly found its way into his methodical daily account of his public and private lives, from the shillings he won at whist to the texts of the sermons he attended or gave, from the reprehensible behaviour of his sister Lucy’s rascally cat to the even worse behaviour of the Master of Trinity College, William Whewell. The result is altogether too much of a good thing. Romilly’s diary, now at Cambridge University Library, is an invaluable record of the University, of the town and of daily life in the mid-nineteenth century. But it is far too long and minute to be published in its entirety. In 1967, J. P. T. Bury edited a selection of extracts from an earlier period: Romilly’s Cambridge Diary 1832–42. His work has been continued by the present editors to cover a further five years. The chief principle of selection has been to emphasize Romilly’s life in Cambridge and hence to omit his accounts of holiday tours, trips to London, and so on. The editors were however so reluctant to lose all this that they have supplied a linking narrative for every major gap, often quoting extensively from the diary entries that they are summarizing. Whether this form of abridgement is still too much of a good thing, or not enough, or just right, will depend entirely on one’s interests and tastes. For my part, I was fascinated by the medical information that Romilly gives us. Illness, especially that of his sister Margaret, is a major topic in the diary, and the methods taken to counteract it are striking to the modern reader. Take, for example, the treatment by the surgeon Sudbury of a swelling in Romilly’s cheek: “Mr Sudbury’s Pupil [. . .] applied a couple of Leeches to the inside of my mouth; they were marvellously tiresome about biting, but when they had once taken hold they sucked away famously for near 2 hours, & Mr Sudbury (who came at that time) took them off with salt. Uncomfortable having leeches in one’s mouth as it is very difficult to swallow one’s spittle without giving them a bite:—their bodies hung dangling out of my mouth” (150). Just what I wanted to know about Victorian medicine. I was also intrigued by the insights into town and undergraduate life afforded by the proceedings of the Vice-Chancellor’s Court of Discipline, which had the power to revoke merchants’ licences, to punish prostitutes, and to intervene in local affairs in a [End Page 533] number of other ways. And by the information that dissenters were far more generous than Anglicans in raising money for “the starving Irish” (191) in 1847. And by the “recumbent female statues [. . .] covered with gauze” (2) in Buckingham Palace. And by other snippets of historical information too numerous to list. On the other hand, I learned far more than I ever wanted to know about the visits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to Cambridge. Obviously, other readers would disagree, for Romilly’s elaborate accounts of these occasions have in fact been given a volume all of their own, Victoria and Albert in Cambridge (1977), edited by R. S. Walker and E. S. Leedham-Green. So readers will have to judge for themselves. Should the editors have bothered to inform us in one of the narrative links that while visiting Audley End, Romilly met a Miss...

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