Nineteenth-century England possessed very few long-standing public institutions. By 1851, Oxford University could already claim six hundred years since its first college's royal charter, had stood fast through changing monarchies, civil war and threats of invasion, and must have seemed the epitomy of stability in a century of great social and economic upheaval. Small wonder the Victorians of Mundus Caecus considered it a safe hiding place.

Although neither features in the story, both the Pitt Rivers Museum, tucked away behind the Museum of Natural History on Parks Road, and the redeveloped Ashmolean on Beaumont Street, with its expanses of glass and marble, are wonderful places to wander.