The spires of Cambridge, its wooden punts, ancient colleges, greens and historic dining halls, do not generally conjure up images of drinking and prostitution.

But for a visiting 19th-century American student, whose diary of his time at the university is being published for the first time in 100 years, the crooked streets of the university city were full of immorality.

Charles Astor Bristed, who spent five years at Trinity College studying classics in the 1840s, said that students would “work hard and play hard”, and his contemporaries saw prostitution as something that was avoided only by those who were “frigid, highly religious or seeking physical benefits”.

“There is a careless and undisguised way of talking about gross vice (prostitution) . . . It is talked of as a thing which is on the whole natural, excusable and, perhaps, to most men necessary.”

Bristed said that people would invite him to visit prostitutes as casually as if they were inviting him for a drink.

One new acquaintance invited him to Barnwell, a village outside Cambridge that was, at the time, notorious for prostitution, while they were in chapel. “He had not known me two days before he asked me to accompany him to Barnwell on an evening after Hall, just as quietly as a compatriot might have asked me take a drink.”

His astonishment at the vices of his fellow students, however, did not encourage him to look kindly on the women of the town. He wrote in his diary, entitled Five Years in an English University, that “a pretty face is a rare sight in Cambridge . . . You don’t see one once in three months on average.”

Bristed, who at the age of 20 had already graduated from Yale, also complained about the “villainously doctored Cambridge wines”. He recalls a drinking game in which he emptied his glass to try to keep up with his fellow students. “The coloured glass enabled me to fill and empty, in appearance, many times, while in reality I only poured out and tasted a few drops; the result of which stratagem was that two or three of the party put themselves completely hors de combat, and were deeply impressed with a sense of my capacity.”

A first edition of the diary was found about 20 years ago by Christopher Stray, an honorary research fellow in classics at Swansea University. He said: “It’s the most detailed and perceptive account of what it’s like to be a student in Cambridge in the 19th century that I’ve ever seen. He was surprised how badly dressed the British were, and he was surprised at how boring and monotonous the food was. But the thing that most shocked him about Cambridge was the immorality.”

The “sometimes puritanical” Bristed was a grandson of the American millionaire John Jacob Astor, and the son of a clergyman. He was born in New York in 1820, and after his time at Cambridge returned to Washington.

Bristed found the streets of Cambridge difficult to navigate. “Imagine the most irregular town that can be imagined, streets of the very crookedest kind, twisting about like those in a nightmare, and not infrequently bringing you back to the same point you started from.”

But behind his fascination with the depravity of the university way of life, there was also admiration. He wrote: “Almost every man looked able and ready to row eight miles, walk twelve, or rise twenty across country at the shortest notice, and to eat half a leg of mutton and drink a quart of ale after it.”

Students would often take in tramps for the evening and get them drunk. On one occasion, he said, students from his college plied a homeless man with so much port that he died.

The reprinted diary, An American in Victorian Cambridge: Charles Astor Bristed’s “Five Years in an English University”, is being published by Exeter University Press.

Explore Education

• Schools

• GCSE and A Level

• Good University Guide

• Sunday Times University Guide

• Student

• Young Times

• School Gate

Times recommends

• University black hole as applicants surge
• Students to be offered 'no-fee degrees'
• 'White flight' causing school segregation