In the middle of the eighteenth century one might walk across the University of Cambridge at its widest point – from Peterhouse to Jesus – in fifteen minutes. In less than half a square mile were placed the sixteen colleges that constituted the university, and in them lived their 700 undergraduates and the 400 fellows who were the university's teachers and administrators. This small world was part of the British, or more properly English, Establishment. Only members of the Church of England might be members of the university, or at all events might graduate from it and hold office within it. So far as we can tell the largest group of graduates became Anglican clergymen, while most bishops had been fellows of colleges in Cambridge or Oxford. The university had the functions of a seminary, and was to retain them until well after 1850: in this as in other respects the period 1750–1870 was one of very great continuity. But the intellectual character of the institution was quite unlike what one would expect a seminary to be. Cambridge was quite different, for example, from the theological colleges that the Victorians founded to improve the professional education of the clergy.

In 1700 the Cambridge arts curriculum was recognisably the Renaissance mixture that had been introduced 150 years earlier: an attempt to survey knowledge by teaching philosophy and divinity, mathematics and science, and the classical languages and literatures.