I promise not to go all literary on you, but for the record:
The Cambridge Observer was founded at Cambridge University in England, in 1892,
by a small group including G. W. Steevens. It included articles by future
heavyweights S. V. Makower and Bertrand Russell, who, in his autobiography
writes that “prompted by Satan…” he promised to submit a piece. He “hurried up and wrote an article on Henry James and when ;he] had posted it…”it suddenly came on me how stupid and bad it was. Well I hope the good man won’t print it.”
Russell found “good things” in the weekly, and thought it should be
“encouraged,” but didn’t approve of its “enthusiasm for
purity,–its jeers at what Milton calls “the sage and serious doctrine of
virginity.” He held that “a civilisation must in the main develop along the
lines and in the lines of feeling already laid down for it by those who founded
and fostered it.” (Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Google Books, p. 89).
According to The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (Volume XIV. The Victorian Age, Part Two:
Largely ignoring the ancient classics, [The Cambridge Observer] set out
épater le bourgeois, and was defiantly propagandist concerning foreign
authors. It contested the claim of contemporary critics, and discovered the best
of all art in the New English Art club. Such a paper could not last, but did
something, in spite of its extravagancies, to enlarge the average mind of the university.”
I’ve also discovered a Cambridge Nebraska Observer–and [to my annoyance] long after New Cambridge Observer was established in 2008, a “Cambridge Observer” is now being published Cambridge, MA.
AMH
