The Cambridge Apostles: The Early Years by Peter Allen (review)

HUMANITIES 425 along with biblical quotations, but a number have the charm of originality . Then there are a number of sketches of family homes or familiar scenes, mostly from East Anglia but others from Mrs Gilbert's years in Yorkshire. Some of the pages serve as a memorial programme for family reunions, a baptism, a wedding, or a funeral. Indeed, several dozen pages at the end of the album are entered long after Mrs Gilbert's death in 1866; these include modem photographs of Taylor houses and more recent family history. Understandably the quality of such diverse ephemera is variable. Too many of the pages presented have little but earnestness and good intentions to recommend them. But then album verse is synonymous with facile penmanship. The majority of the verses are wistful and sentimental , as their titles may suggest: 'To an Old Chimney seen from My Garden' (Josiah Gilbert); 'On the Death of a Wasp' (Ann Taylor); 'Farewell to Sudbury' (Ann Taylor Gilbert). Others are curios of vanished taste, and perhaps a few have vitality, such as the witty parody 'My Elbow' (Jefferys Taylor) or the delicate elegy by Mrs Gilbert's husband on their eight-year-old son, 'I loved thee, Edward.' The price of this tome is very high, but Stewart appears to have her priorities right. Reproducing most of the five-hundred-odd pages of the album is expensive, and to cut costs the copious notes on persons and places, useful and occasionally every bit as interesting as the texts they illuminate, are photographed typescript rather than typeset. The legibility of the critical apparatus is good, unlike some of the reproduced pages of the album. The introduction is brisk and rewarding, if not wholly without error; Stewart knows her quarry well, has her own collection of Taylor letters, and has previously published a two-volume Analytical Bio-bibliography (Garland 1975) of the Taylor family. In one of her verses Ann Taylor Gilbert invites the reader to smile on these 'humble lays: and it may well be that the childlike character shared by Ann, Jane (author of 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star'), and Jefferys Taylor and reflected in their work ought not be entirely forgotten. Despite the phenomenal success of blooms such as Edith Holden's Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, albums, after all, grow on the marginal lands of literature, and Ann Taylor Gilbert's Album makes a modest case for the survival in print of such works of period charm. (r.s. BATTS) Peter Allen. The Cambridge Apostles: The Early Years Cambridge University Press 1978. x, 266. $29.50 Since its founding in 1820 the Cambridge Apostles, an unabashedly elitist undergraduate society, has played a role in the development of the British intelligentsia. Peter Allen's book 'presents a study in intellectual 426 LETTERS IN CANADA 1979 companionship by telling the story of the early Apostles' (p viii), who became in time 'a powerful coterie of considerable importance in the development of Victorian culture, allied to the Establishment, yet perSistently liberal in their influence' (p to). The story begins with an account of the deplorable academic conditions at Cambridge in the early nineteenth century, in reaction to which the Apostolic spirit developed. This spirit was characterized by an emphasis on self-examination, spiritual development, and intellectual freedom , and by the recognition that 'ideology is a function of personal experience and that opinions are less significant in themselves than the human truth on which they rest' (p 5). Two chapters are devoted to F.D. Maurice, who became an Apostle in 1823 and exercised a great influence on Apostles of the late 1820S and early 1830S, the heyday of the society's first years. This group included john Sterling, disciple of Coleridge as well as of Maurice; Richard Trench, the future Archbishop of Dublin, who insisted to the young Alfred Tennyson that 'we cannot live in Art'; j.M. Kemble; W.B. Donne; j.W. Blakesley; Tennyson; and Arthur Hallam , the magnetic figure who died suddenly in 1833. Allen's last chapters recount what happened to the members of this group in the 1830S and 1840S; he places their efforts in the larger context of the growth...