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Excerpt from Historical Memorials of Canterbury
In July 1851, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, the future Dean of Westminster, was appointed a Canon of Canterbury. About a year before, on the death of his eldest brother Owen, he became the heir to a small landed property and had to give up his fellowship at University College, Oxford. This prepared the way for his Canterbury charge. He was much involved at this time in his exacting work on the Oxford University Commission (which engaged him till July 1852); but he threw himself whole-heartedly into his new work at Canterbury, and he felt the interest and immemorial charm of the place profoundly from his first real acquaintance with it. He had dreaded the change, when it was first proposed. In his days of parting with Oxford, he asked one of his pupils to think of him as lost in "that huge Cathedral." But once established he found the quiet, the rare and gentle antiquity, and the peace-giving associations of Canterbury healing to his mind. They were at the same time most quickening to his historical imagination.
He actually became Canon in residence towards the end of November. On December the 29th, the anniversary of Becket's death, he went at five o'clock, the fatal hour, to the spot which every Canterbury pilgrim visits. He found the great, solemn church full of "history and ghosts," as he put it.
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