Not being of age to take orders, he appears to have stayed a year at Oxford, pursuing various studies, though he never matriculated, and while there he formed a lifelong friendship with John George Wood.

He remained there over four years, during which he described for the Illustrated London News the extensive work of draining Whittlesey Mere, then being carried out by William Wells of Holmewood.

To raise the funds he gave lectures in Midland towns, and was much in demand as an authority upon Modern Humourists, Wit and Humour and Light Literature.

[1] Bradley was a friend and associate of George Cruikshank, Frank Smedley, Mark Lemon, and Albert Smith (for whose serials, The Month, The Man in the Moon and The Town and Country Miscellany, he began to write about 1850).

Bradley had the greatest difficulty in finding a publisher, but part i. was eventually issued by Nathaniel Cooke of the Strand as one of his shilling Books for the Rail in October 1853.

The three parts were then bound in one volume, of which 100,000 copies had been sold by 1870; subsequently the book was issued in a sixpenny form, and the sale was more than doubled.

[1] The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green contains portraits of Dr. Plumptre, vice-chancellor 1848–62, Dr. Bliss, registrar of the university, and 'the waiter at the Mitre,' while Mr. Bouncer reproduces many traits of the Rev.

When we regard the difficulty of the subject, the general fidelity with which one side of university life is depicted, and the fact that Bradley was not himself an Oxford man, we can scarcely refuse a certain measure of genius to the author.

Hippolyte Taine used it effectively (together with Pendennis and Tom Brown at Oxford) as material for his tableau of an English university in his Notes sur l'Angleterre.

A sequel by Bradley, produced many years later as Little Mr. Bouncer and his friend Verdant Green (1878), did not approach the original in vigour, nor can much success be claimed for the Cambridge rival of Verdant Green, The Cambridge Freshman, or Memoirs of Mr. Golightly (1871), by Martin Legrand (i.e. James Rice), with illustrations by 'Phiz'.

There, as elsewhere, he was indefatigable as a parochial organiser, establishing a free library, a school bank, winter entertainments, and improvement societies.