‘My Christmas is a bright one enough, and I have great hopes of a happy New Year.’

The letter Caroline Jebb wrote to her sister on 25 December 1874 was trying hard to sound upbeat, but her first Christmas in Cambridge was a pretty miserable one. She was missing her family back in Philadelphia, and the happy chaos of exchanging gifts with her young nieces and nephews. When she sailed to England six months previously to marry the Classics scholar Richard Jebb, it had seemed at first, she told her sister, deeply romantic and ‘just like the novels we read of English life’. Now she was living far from her friends and family in a remote university town, sharing a cold house with a man she did not know very well, who was usually either in his college or in his study. She suspected Richard was drinking too much…