Glimpsing a moment of real life

As part of the final push toward the end of my PhD (gulp), I've been reading through the book Tennyson's son put together as a sort of biography -- really a collection of letters and memories he gathered from the poet's horde and those of his friends.  Certain excerpts from this book tend to crop up a lot in Tennyson scholarship, and it's high time I read through it to find a few fresh items.  In the process,  I've enjoyed finding passages that give you a recognizable insight into the real, everyday life of young men in the middle of the nineteenth century.

I was struck, for example, by the way his friend Arthur Hallam described feeling out-of-date at Cambridge, just a few years after graduating (1832):
"New customs, new topics, new slang phrases have come into vogue since MY day, which yet was but yesterday. I don't think I could reside again at Cambridge with any pleasure.  I should feel like a melancholy Pterodactyl winging his lonely flight among the linnets, eagles, and flying fishes of our degenerate post-Adamic world."

And as I'm starting to think about the logistics of moving from my room of four years to a smaller space, I was amused to find Tennyson commenting on the exact same issue:
"I have been engaged in packing books.  I have a good many.  I am afraid I shall be obliged to sell them, for I really do not know where to stow them and the [new] house [...] is too small."

Sunset view from the Jerwood library

In making these observations, it occurs to me that many of you (are there many of you?) probably can't picture how I'm doing this "finish the PhD" thing.  Allow me to describe it for you.  I am sitting Owl-like and solitary in my rooms (nothing between me and the stars but a stratum of tiles) the hoof of the steed, the roll of the wheel the shouts of drunken Gown and drunken Town come up from below with a sea-like murmur. No, wait, that's Tennyson again, writing his aunt in the spring of his first year at Cambridge.  However, most days I am perched in the upper floors of the college library.  The shouts of summer-camp teenagers and tourists drift up from below.  I'm wrestling my raw writing for each chapter into something with structure and argument (I hope!) by staring at print-outs, drawing all over them, and then rearranging the computer document.  In addition, I make little trips to other libraries to chase down things I've put off, like finding the original of a second-hand quotation.  It's all coming along, but slowly, and sadly there's no time for 'slowly'.  Deep breaths and friends at the same table keep me calm.