Christ’s College, Cambridge (1824-1826)

On October 19^th 1824 a young man of nineteen made his farewells to his family on a country estate just outside Derby and set off in a horse-drawn mail coach to become an undergraduate at Christ’s College, Cambridge. This was William Darwin Fox, second cousin to Charles Darwin, who would be joined by his cousin in the same College in 1828. The young Fox had attended Repton School, just outside Derby, and like several other school contemporaries chose to round off his education by studying for a Batchelor of Arts degree at the University of Cambridge, before entering the Church of England. For the son of a wealthy businessman with connections by marriage to many of the county’s established families, including the Darwins, this was a fairly common sequence of events.