Cambridge Jokes: From the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century

James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps (1820-1889) was a Shakespeare scholar, archaeologist and controversialist with wide antiquarian interests. In 1842, while Librarian of Jesus College, Cambridge, he published The Jokes of the Cambridge Coffee-Houses in the Seventeenth Century, which he described as a collection of early anecdotes ‘selected from various Jest Books’ which ‘serve to show the state of this class of literature during that period’. In this volume it is paired with a pamphlet, The Fresher’s Don'ts, written by ‘A Sympathiser (B. A.)’, (probably A. J. Storey) and first published in the 1890s. This edition was printed in 1913 by Redin and Co. of Trinity Street (with advertisements for Redin’s and other Cambridge firms’ goods and services at the beginning and the end). This light-hearted guide to student etiquette before the cataclysm of the First World War gives insights into a way of life which was about to vanish forever.