Building a Monument: Willis, Clark and The Architectural History of the University of Cambridge

In 1872, the ageing and increasingly enfeebled Robert Willis, Jacksonian Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and pioneering architectural historian (Fig. 1), made his Will. To his nephew, John Willis Clark (1833–1910), who was to act as joint executor (Fig. 2), he bequeathed some Italian statuary and up to fifty volumes to be selected from Willis's valuable library. He also made what was to prove a more onerous bequest, leaving his nephew all his ‘manuscripts, plans, tracings, drawings and notes'. The Will added that ‘he shall be at liberty to publish such of the same as he may from time to time see fit'. The nature of these notes was left unspecified, but Clark himself had no doubt as to what his uncle intended. The younger scholar was expected to complete the work which had already occupied at least twenty-one years on Willis's death in 1875 and was to fill eleven more.