the intellectual aristocracy revisited

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This article was downloaded by: [University of Chicago Library] On: 16 November 2014, At: 07:26 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Journal of Victorian Culture Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjvc20 The Intellectual Aristocracy Revisited William Whyte a a St John's College , Oxford Published online: 22 Dec 2011. To cite this article: William Whyte (2005) The Intellectual Aristocracy Revisited, Journal of Victorian Culture, 10:1, 15-45, DOI: 10.3366/jvc.2005.10.1.15 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/jvc.2005.10.1.15 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http:// www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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Page 1: The Intellectual Aristocracy Revisited

This article was downloaded by: [University of Chicago Library]On: 16 November 2014, At: 07:26Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: MortimerHouse, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Victorian CulturePublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjvc20

The Intellectual Aristocracy RevisitedWilliam Whyte aa St John's College , OxfordPublished online: 22 Dec 2011.

To cite this article: William Whyte (2005) The Intellectual Aristocracy Revisited, Journal of Victorian Culture, 10:1, 15-45,DOI: 10.3366/jvc.2005.10.1.15

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/jvc.2005.10.1.15

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) containedin the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose ofthe Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be reliedupon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shallnot be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and otherliabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Page 2: The Intellectual Aristocracy Revisited

The Intellectual Aristocracy Revisited

William Whyte

On 12 November 1955 a distinguished collection of academics gatheredin the hall of Christ’s College, Cambridge.1 They were there to celebratethe career of G.M. Trevelyan, to toast his birthday, and to present himwith his Festschrift. Trevelyan was – as David Cannadine puts it – ‘themost famous, the most honoured, the most influential and the mostwidely read historian of his generation’.2 He was also, without a doubt,the best-connected academic of his day. The son of Sir George OttoTrevelyan and great nephew of Thomas Babington Macaulay, his re-lations included Butlers and Darwins and Galtons and Booths. His wifewas equally well born. Her mother was Mrs Humphry Ward, her greatuncle was Matthew Arnold, and her cousins were Julian and AldousHuxley. Several of their relatives were present at the dinner. Many moreof them could be found in the Festschrift. For in the final chapter NoelAnnan wrote about a curious web of academic families; a network ofauthors and teachers: an intellectual aristocracy.3 Predictably perhaps,Trevelyan thoroughly approved of the project. ‘Whereas the best his-torical approach to the England of the eighteenth and early nineteenthcenturies is the territorial and political aristocracy’, he declared, ‘thebest approach to the last half of Queen Victoria’s reign is the intel-lectual aristocracy’.4 Subsequent readers seem to have agreed. Indeed,as Stefan Collini has commented, Annan’s essay must ‘by now havebroken all Citation Index records for an historical article’.5 Nonethe-less, ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy’ remains a problematic concept. EvenTrevelyan questioned whether ‘so very inexact a term’ was useful.6 It isthat question which this essay will seek to answer.

It is an important question: one that has exercised sociologists andhistorians for more than a century. From Gramsci to Mannheim, fromBauman to Bourdieu, the significance of intellectuals has been widelyaccepted. ‘Intellectuals,’ as Edward Shils put it, ‘are indispensable toany society.’7 The study of ‘culture in liberal society’ observed Karl

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Mannheim, ‘must begin with the life of those who create culture; i.e.the liberal intelligentsia and their position within society as a whole’.8

Yet despite this acknowledged importance, the issue of who the intel-lectuals are, or of what an intelligentsia is, remains unclear. ‘The prob-lem of the professionals and intellectuals is one of the most difficultof all those facing the analyst of class structure,’ W.D. Rubinstein hasnoted. ‘It is the gammy leg of class theory.’ ‘Intellectuals are not anindependent “class” – they may be members of any other class; they maybe spokesmen for any and every interest,’ he helpfully continues.9 Littlewonder, then, that the issue of the intellectuals has remained problem-atic, nor that writers like Zygmunt Bauman have gone so far as to arguethat no satisfactory definition of the intellectual can ever be produced.10

Even if we reject this approach, though, it is clear that the existence ofan intelligentsia is more often asserted than it is demonstrated; andmore often assumed than it is explored.

If this is true in general, then the English experience is particularlyproblematic – and especially confused. Whilst, for some, the late-nine-teenth century saw the birth of an intellectual elite,11 for others it sawits demise.12 Others regard the twentieth century as the period in whicha recognizable intellectual class developed.13 And yet others would denythe existence of such a social group at all. ‘Britain did not have an intel-ligentsia,’ Ross McKibbin has argued. ‘The education system was notdesigned to provide one.’14 Amidst this cacophony of competing ideas,most historians would surely sympathize with José Harris, who admitsthat she finds the term ‘intellectual’ unsatisfactory, and uses it onlybecause she ‘cannot think of a better one’.15

Even those who have sought to interrogate the intellectuals a littlefurther tend to come back to Annan. And that is entirely understand-able. His essay is a delightfully written and compelling piece. Annan’ssubjects form a close and well-defined class: ‘a new social group emerg-ing in society’; an aristocracy of both brains and blood. This intellectualaristocracy, he argued, was the product of family connexions. Theserious-minded children of Evangelical families – the Macaulaysand Trevelyans, the Arnolds and the Huxleys – met and married, andmarried again: creating intellectual dynasties. Occupying a dominantposition in Cambridge – and steadily expanding that influencethroughout the academic and administrative worlds – this new statusgroup was first propelled to public notice in the 1850s and 1860s, andreached a pre-eminent position from the 1870s onwards. ‘Thus theygradually spread over the length and breadth of English intellectuallife,’ Annan later wrote, ‘criticising the assumptions of the ruling classabove them and forming the opinions of the upper middle class to

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which they belonged’.16 This was not, of course, an alienated intel-ligentsia, but rather an intricate web of emotional and familial ties.

Annan’s insights have been sustained and developed by the work ofT.W. Heyck. In his Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian Englandand, latterly, in an article on the ‘Myths and Meanings of Intellectuals’,Heyck argues that the idea of the intellectual – and, indeed, the veryword itself – is a product of changes in late-nineteenth-century society.17

‘Down to the 1870s,’ he writes, ‘no one was called an “intellectual” …the concept of “the intellectuals” or “an intellectual” did not exist in theearly and mid-Victorian periods (prior to the 1870s) any more than didthe term.’18 Like Annan, Heyck sees the reform of the universities as acritical step toward the development of an independent intellectualclass. More than this, Heyck would point to the growing importance ofnatural science and the associated professionalization of academic life,and to the continuing and influential tradition of cultural criticism, askey factors in the development of the English intellectual. For him, theintellectual aristocracy is less a network of earnest and inter-related indi-viduals than a means of describing a new social reality; the acceptanceof a new social group. ‘The term “the intellectuals” … came backinto use in the late-nineteenth century,’ writes Heyck, ‘and from itsfirst continuous usage it had to do with the perceived formation of aseparate and learned class.’19

Ultimately, then, Annan and Heyck share a similar perception. Theyeach see the last generation of the nineteenth century as the periodin which the British intellectual elite was created. For Annan, it wasembodied in a few famous families; for Heyck it was expressed by a shiftin language. These are appealing and engaging ideas – and they doreflect a serious social change. Nonetheless, as the continuing con-fusion that surrounds the idea of the English intelligentsia suggests,neither is really wholly convincing. Peter Allen has convincinglyshown that Heyck’s etymology is inadequate. It is, Allen writes, simplyimpossible to prove whether his account is accurate or not.20 Annan’sprosopography is similarly problematic. His list of Cambridge familiesis simply too limited; his conclusions are just too provisional. As StefanCollini has observed, the ‘intellectual aristocracy’ is ‘at best a suggestivemetaphor’. At worst, it can seriously distort historical understanding.Collini himself prefers the concept of an intellectual ‘freemasonry’, buthe gives little indication of what exactly this would imply.21

The problem with both Annan’s and Heyck’s accounts – and, indeed,with the subsequent criticisms of them – is that neither etymology norprosopography can be, on its own, an adequate means of tracing theevolution of a social group. It is a start, but it is no more than a start.

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If the intellectual aristocracy is to be considered more than just a col-lection of inter-related individuals, then a broader investigation isneeded. Indeed, until it can be shown that the English intelligentsiaactually formed a real social fraction – a fraction, that is, beyond a fewCambridge families – its very existence will also remain in doubt. To gofurther, a variety of other approaches should be adopted. This meansmaking use of a wider range of evidence. It means looking beyond thepurely biographical or the merely semantic, and seeking other evidencefor the creation of an intellectual aristocracy: evidence of their patternsof consumption; of their clothes, their homes, their lives and theirlifestyles. How they were described and if they were related will be a partof this – but only a part. If the intellectuals are actually a genuine sub-class – the dominated fraction of the dominant class, as Bourdieu wouldput it – then they should be studied as such. More than anything thatmeans acknowledging that they had lives beyond their books. There isa real need to understand who they were and how they lived, as well ashow they wrote, what they wrote, and whom they married.22

That there was a desire to create an intellectual elite in the nine-teenth century is undeniable. From Coleridge’s clerisy to Wells’sSamurai, the ideal of a cultivated, disinterested and learned caste wascelebrated again and again.23 Clergymen like Frederick Temple,24

scientists like John Tyndall, conservatives like W.G. Ward and radicalslike Beatrice Webb, all agreed on the need for a ‘voluntary nobility’;25

an ‘aristocracy of talent’;26 a ‘real aristocracy of character and intel-lect’.27 Moreover, through reform of the schools, universities, andpublic services, just such a body was created. Arguably, this processbegan in Oxford and Cambridge, where reform created an exclusiveclass – a group of people who claimed a monopoly on thought and aresponsibility for engaging in public debate. As early as 1852, indeed,Benjamin Jowett declared

As university reformers we must appear to the world rather as seeking tomake an intellectual aristocracy or, to express it more coarsely, to formgood places for ourselves out of the revenues of the Colleges … Thisappears to me to be true of all of us – myself included of course.28

Jowett was in a good position to know. He was at the forefront of uni-versity reform in the 1850s. From 1871 he would be Master of BalliolCollege. Later still he would be vice-chancellor of Oxford.29 Jowettand his contemporaries created the environment in which an Englishintellectual class could come into being.

From the 1850s onwards the Oxford reformers united to remaketheir university. Many exclusively clerical appointments were abolished

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and open competition introduced. Non-conformists and Catholicsbegan to be matriculated. New subjects were introduced: history, law,medicine and the natural sciences.30 The university grew and grew;annual enrolments rose from an average of 389 in the 1850s to 905 inthe 1900s.31 These new subjects and new students needed new teachers.In the thirteen years between 1845 and 1858 alone there was a forty percent increase in the number of college fellows.32 Still more strikingly,the abolition of celibacy meant that these were likely to be permanentappointments. Unable to marry, the dons of previous periods tendedto regard a fellowship as a temporary job, a transitional phase beforemarriage and the acceptance of a clerical job outside Oxford. Or, as thedoggerel had it: ‘I can wed without misgiving / now I’ve got a Collegeliving.’33 Once it was possible both to hold a fellowship and raise afamily, the option of a lifetime’s teaching was opened up to many more.For the first time in Oxford’s seven hundred year history, it was legiti-mate to combine an academic career with family life. This was a momen-tous change. ‘In fact the marriage of fellows has worked together withmany other causes wholly to destroy the old conception of a college,’observed Edward Freeman in 1887.34 The position for women remainedsomewhat different, of course, but the foundation of Lady MargaretHall and Somerville from 1878 onwards provided employment for anew breed of scholarly spinsters.35 The university was reformed out ofall recognition: ‘The old college life’, complained Freeman, ‘is all butdestroyed’; Oxford was never to be the same again.36

Nor was this change confined to Oxford. In the last thirty years of thenineteenth century Cambridge also underwent a period of intensivereform and extensive expansion.37 In 1871 parliament abolished reli-gious tests. In 1872 a Royal Commission was established which recom-mended major changes to the character of Cambridge.38 Reform alsocame from within.39 In 1873 Eton lost its exclusive rights to King’sCollege, as the first open scholarship was awarded and the first non-Etonian elected as a fellow.40 At the same time, women came toCambridge, to Girton (1869) and to Newnham (1871). By 1900, J.W.Clark was able to celebrate a university

Accommodating itself with flexibility and readiness to requirements themost diverse, appointing new teachers in departments of study the mostremote … flinging open doors to all comers, regardless of sex, creed, ornationality, and thronged with students 41

It was a new university, with married dons and their families forming aclose-knit circle of friends and relatives; a ‘utopia of tea-parties, dinner-parties, boat-races, lawn-tennis, antique shops, picnics, new bonnets,

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charming young men, delicious food and perfect servants’.42 There wasopposition to this change, of course. Cambridge also had its party ofNon-Placets; those men ‘of principle’, whose one principle was oppo-sition to change.43 But no one could deny that change had happenedand was continuing. Like Oxford, Cambridge was made anew.

The result of this reform in the ancient universities was to create anew academic caste. This was precisely what Jowett had meant when hementioned the college revenues being used to endow an intellectualaristocracy. The expansion in the number of university teachers hadcreated a new profession and the abolition of celibacy had created a self-perpetuating class. And, as Annan indicates, it was a class that tendedto be endogenous in its marital preferences. Little wonder: there was avery small pool of suitable women for the newly professional dons tomarry. Mandell Creighton and Humphry Ward – each rising Oxfordfigures – both competed for the hand of Louise von Glehn in the springof 1870.44 Gwen Raverat’s mother was courted by no fewer than threefellows of Trinity in the Cambridge of 1883.45 This generation was alsothe first to encounter the idea of the academic couple. Eleanor Balfour,a sister of the philosopher (and future prime minister) Arthur Balfourmarried the moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick in 1876. A statisticianand educationalist in her own right, she was principal of NewnhamCollege from 1892. Similarly, Mary Paley Marshall, herself an economistof some repute, married Alfred Marshall in 1877. Two years later theirEconomics of Industry was jointly published.46 Later on dons’ childrentended to marry other dons’ children. Thus (to choose one of manyexamples) Julian Huxley, the distinguished zoologist (1887-1975), wasthe grandson of T.H. Huxley; great-nephew of Matthew Arnold; cousinof G.M. Trevelyan – and, through this connection, a distant relative ofJulian Trevelyan, who married Ursula Darwin. The Darwins were them-selves much married, with links to the Jebbs, the Venns, the Keynes’s,the Cornfords, and many other academic clans. As Noel Annan hasshown, this is a game that can be played ad infinitum – or perhaps adnauseam. In the world of the English intellectuals it can come to seemthat everyone is related to everyone else.

But of course the reality is really not that simple. There wereexceptions, complications and contradictions. The position of women,in particular, was especially precarious.47 Even Virginia Woolf fearedthat her education left her a member ‘not of the intelligentsia but ofthe ignorantsia’.48 More generally, although many members of thisintelligentsia were connected by birth or by marriage, many more werenot. In that sense, at least, Annan’s intellectual aristocracy was more asymptom than a first cause of change. The architects of the reforms in

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Oxford – men like Jowett and his colleague, the mathematician H.J.S.Smith – remained unmarried throughout their careers.49 John Percival,a thoroughly intellectual Oxonian; variously fellow of Queen’s andMaster of Trinity, was born out of wedlock to a provincial family of nogreat fame and little wealth.50 He was a scholarship boy, unconnected tothe great names of the academic world. Nor did his first marriageprovide any entrée to it. His wife had few intellectual pretensions andno intellectual connections. Only after her death, and only at the ageof sixty-four, would Percival marry into Annan’s aristocracy: choosinga cousin of John Addington Symonds, himself the brother-in-law of T.H. Green. For Percival, as for many others, a shared ethos was moreimportant than shared genes. The intermarriage of the intellectualaristocracy reflected their achievement. It did not dictate it.

And the process was not limited to the ancient universities alone. Thepublic school system was a similarly important influence on the intel-lectuals. It too experienced an unprecedented period of growth andreform in the late nineteenth century. ‘It would indeed be difficult toname any educational institution in any country which has undergoneso much active change in recent years,’ wrote one commentator in1906 – and his comments were echoed elsewhere.51 A widely-perceiveddemand for a ‘gentlemanly education’ drove the establishment ofdozens of new schools, and the effective re-foundation of still morethroughout the country.52 As in the universities, internal reform wasmatched by government intervention, with Royal Commissions becom-ing a critical influence on elite education from the 1860s onwards.53

The result was the creation of a new educational system: ‘a strong tieof brotherhood between our Great Public Schools’.54 And the numberof these schools just kept rising. In 1867 it was accepted that there were‘nine public schools’.55 By 1887, another well-placed writer declaredthat there were now 240.56 This was probably an exaggeration, but mosthistorians do now accept that between 1880 and 1902 there grew up agroup of around a hundred institutions that were widely accepted as‘public schools’.57 They had thousands of jobs to offer, and were keento employ graduates of the ancient universities. By 1910 more thanthree quarters of the masters at the top public schools were graduatesof Oxford and Cambridge.58

Moreover, although boundaries were beginning to be drawn, thedistinction between a fellow of an Oxford College and a master at oneof the great public schools had yet to be made. As College endowmentswere hit by agricultural decline, indeed, the comparatively high wagesof a schoolmaster could be a powerful inducement to move.59 EdmondWarre left his fellowship at All Souls’ to become a master at Eton in

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1860. Others made the move in the opposite direction. In 1873 HenryNettleship left his mastership at Harrow to take up a fellowship atCorpus Christi College, Oxford; though ‘he hesitated at first’, as hisprospects as a teacher seemed to offer ‘greater pecuniary advantages’.60

As late as 1912 Allison Peers resolved to abandon his hopes of remain-ing in Cambridge in favour of the tangible benefits of a career in thepublic schools. ‘The choice,’ he recalled,

seemed to be between a school post, comparatively easy to obtain, withlonger hours but more scope for climbing and (as a headmaster) a highersalary than a professor ever obtained, and an extremely hypotheticaluniversity post, where the work would be more interesting because thepupils would be more mature but there would be poor prospects.61

Peers later returned to academia, becoming professor of Spanish atLiverpool – and others made even more exalted moves. MontagueButler was headmaster of Harrow and master of Trinity CollegeCambridge. His father had been headmaster before him, and his sonsincluded a Cambridge professor of History and a master at Harrow,whilst a nephew was to become master of Pembroke College inCambridge. Butler’s second wife was an intellectual in her own righttoo: a daughter of the historian Sir J.H. Ramsay, she herself was a firstclass classicist. As Agnata Ramsay she had been placed at the top of theclassics tripos in 1887.62

Again, though, the point must be made that these kinds of connec-tions were not the pre-requisite for success. H.A. James, the unmarriedson of an obscure Welsh parson, was fellow of St John’s College, Oxford,then master at Marlborough, headmaster of Rossall, principal ofCheltenham, and headmaster of Rugby; finally returning to Oxford asPresident of St John’s.63 His achievements owed everything to ambitionand intellect – and nothing to nepotism. Indeed, his family was a sourceof some concern. On James’s appointment as head of Rugby, one of hisassistant masters was heard asking: ‘Tell me, is James a gentleman?Understand me, I don’t mean, Does he speak the Queen’s English? But– had he a grandfather?’64 The answer, in these terms, was no. But Jameswas proof that brains could over-come birth. Still more strikingly, ErnestBarker rose from a humble, provincial background to become suc-cessively fellow of Merton, St John’s and New College, Oxford, principalof King’s College, London, and professor of political science atCambridge. His mother’s determination that, despite her family’s re-lative poverty, he should be a ‘scholar’; his teachers’ commitment tohim; and the ‘educational ladder’ that took him to ManchesterGrammar School, to Balliol and beyond: all these forces propelled

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Ernest Barker into the intellectual elite.65 And although he was un-deniably exceptional he was not alone.

Together, the dons and schoolmasters were to create an intellectualaristocracy. This intelligentsia was not, however, confined to the insti-tutions of elite education. Rather, the values of these donnish mastersand school-masterly dons were to be broadcast throughout England bytheir pupils. The impact of a public school education was well under-stood at the time. ‘I want you, Sir, to assure me that the boys who cometo your school are the sons of gentlemen,’ said one prospective parentto the headmaster of Charterhouse. ‘Well, they always leave gentlemen,’replied the headmaster.66 This was precisely the point. Public schoolswere designed to shape and mould character. To transform the boyswho attended them, and to make them into an elite. School masterswere urged ‘so to educate boys that, when they leave school they are notEton, Harrow or Rugby boys, but only public-school boys’, and to aremarkable extent they were successful.67 Rupert Wilkinson, amongstothers, has maintained that ‘the public school system created … acentral pool of ruler-trainees’, who (like their teachers) saw ‘greaterprestige and pleasure in public service’ than in entrepreneurialactivity.68 A similar case can be made for the graduates of the ancientuniversities. Their degrees too were explicitly anti-vocational, designedto foster character and not to equip them with practical skills. RebaSoffer, in particular, has sought to show that subjects like ModernHistory were used by academics to ‘train morally responsible leaders’.In the late nineteenth century, she claims, the university evolved a‘licensing system for a national elite’.69 There are problems with boththese accounts, but they do reflect an essential truth: that the universityand public school system was intended to create a caste of educated,active citizens; a society of well-meaning gentlemen.

It was this system that perpetuated the intellectual aristocracy. Notall the products of the public schools became intellectuals, of course.Their athleticism in particular became notorious, with Alec Waugh’sLoom of Youth (1917) just one of many attacks on the philistinism of thepublic schools. ‘There’s nothing wrong with School House,’ arguesone of his characters, ‘Why only a quarter of an hour ago I came acrossCollins and Brown playing stump cricket in the cloisters instead ofstudying Thucydides. That’s what I call keenness.’70 Likewise, in theuniversities, all was not sweetness and light. Most undergraduates atOxford took pass degrees, which necessitated little work and still lessthought. The effortlessly cynical Mark Pattison once observed that theletters B.A. ‘denote no grade of intellectual cultivation, but … are anevidence that a youth has been able to afford not only the money, but,

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what is impossible to so many, the time, to live three years among gentle-men, doing nothing, as a gentleman should’.71 Nor indeed were all thecollege fellows committed to life as part of an enlightened liberal elite.Arthur Stanley – an archetypally intellectual product of Rugby andOxford – so bored the Senior Common Room of St John’s with hisaccount of the Holy Land that an elderly don was heard to exclaim,‘Jerusalem be damned. Give us wine, women and horses’.72 Nonethe-less, the evidence suggests that a small but vocal minority of under-graduates and pupils were prepared to listen to their masters. It was theywho perpetuated the intellectual elite.

These men were not exclusively academics. Others carried the valuesof the intellectual elite beyond the academy.73 They could hardly not:by the turn of the century, one in ten graduates from Oxford andCambridge went into the law. At the same time, three quarters of civilservice entrants were products of the ancient universities.74 Nor werethese lawyers and civil servants seen as second-rate minds. Indeed, thebest and brightest often left academia. The Cambridge ConversazioneSociety – otherwise known as the ‘Apostles’ – comprised an elite evenamongst the intellectuals. Yet its members went on to work as lawyersand vicars, merchants and manufacturers, as well as in the universitiesand public schools.75 In many ways, of course, the Apostles were suigeneris. Oxford produced no real equivalent. Nonetheless, the membersof Oxford’s Old Mortality Club included such influential figures as thephilosopher T.H. Green, the poet A.H. Swinburne, the politician JamesBryce, and Walter Pater, the critic and historian. Old Mortality lastedonly a decade, but had an impact well beyond this.

Considering we were utterly without any connection, to have producedone Cabinet Minister, & I think six Professors who perhaps in the aggre-gate may be taken as the equivalent to one C[abinet] M[inister], it is notbad. Oh, I forgot, we also have the best on the whole of living Englishpoets,

boasted A.V. Dicey of the society’s founding members.76 As the VinerianProfessor of Law in Oxford, he was presumably including himself on thelist as one-sixth of a cabinet minister. But the values implicit in his judge-ment, and the range of professions his old friends adopted transcendsthe merely autobiographical. Even beyond the academy, the networksof the intellectuals played an important part.

Dicey’s boasting reveals much more than this, however. In particularit exposes the importance of the undergraduate clubs in shaping thesenetworks and creating a topography of intellectual life. Both seriousand convivial, they allowed the unconnected to create connections:connections which would be maintained in later life. For this clubability

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was not confined to undergraduates; it was perpetuated well into adultlife.77 Even those like Sidney Colvin, who was never an Apostle, weredrawn into the world of dining societies and discussion groups whichcharacterized the late-nineteenth-century intelligentsia. Educated byprivate tutors and at Trinity College, Cambridge, Colvin was a classicintellectual aristocrat: Slade Professor of Fine Arts, Director of theFitzwilliam, and Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum.He was also at the centre of a social network which stretched far beyondthe university – although many of his friendships did originate inCambridge. As an undergraduate Colvin was close to Sidgwick thephilosopher, John Burnell Pain the journalist, and Basil Champneysthe architect. As a fellow of Trinity he lived in London and Cambridge,and his network of acquaintances grew still larger. In 1869, he joinedthe New Club, mixing with a wide variety of other intellectuals. Fellowmembers included the artist Simeon Solomon; the editors John Morleyand Leslie Stephen; the scientists Michael Foster and Norman Lockyer;the theologian R.H. Hutton, and the surgeon Andrew Clark.

As his career progressed Sidney Colvin became part of still moreexalted institutions. In 1886 he was elected a member of the LiterarySociety. This ‘company of authors, artists, statesmen, and men of intel-lectual activity, who met to dine together once a month’ included suchdiverse figures as Matthew Arnold, T.H. Huxley, Stafford Northcote,Gathorne Hardy, Fitzjames Stephen, Lord Lytton, and the Duke ofArgyll.78 It was all impressive stuff – but later still, Colvin went one betterand was elected to the Athenaeum. This was the apotheosis of the intel-lectual aristocracy. ‘Thither resort, day after day, as to a common focus,persons of intellect and of intellectual tastes, lovers and cultured adher-ents of art and letters’, as one contemporary put it.79 Certainly, themembership was impressive. In 1884 there were fifty-six judges, fifty-fiveprofessors, thirty-seven bishops, thirty-two fellows of the Royal Academy,290 fellows of the Royal Society and Society of Arts. Overwhelmingly,these were graduates of the ancient universities: their Scots, Irish andLondon competitors could claim 121 members between them. Oxfordhad 356, and Cambridge was not far behind on 302.80 Not all intel-lectuals were members of the Athenaeum; not all would have wanted tobe. But it provided a convenient base for those who needed it: a havenof like-minded thinkers. Sidney Colvin was just one of many.

These formal links were supported by more intangible associations.The architect and author Basil Champneys joined Sidney Colvin atTrinity, the New Club and the Athenaeum.81 And their relationshiptranscended these institutions. They were first introduced by Colvin’selder brother, and remained friends for well-over sixty years.82 A

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similarly unplanned encounter led to Champneys’s friendship withthe poet Coventry Patmore, whose biographer he was to become. Thetwo men met whilst walking through Hampstead.83 It was a fortuitousoccurrence, but this was scarcely chance. Hampstead was thick withthinkers.84 Here Champneys was a near neighbour of C.E. Appleton, afellow of St John’s College, Oxford, and editor of The Academy, one ofthe most serious-minded journals of the period.85 Here too was GeorgeGilbert Scott, junior, architect, writer, and former fellow of JesusCollege, Cambridge. Champneys introduced Coventry Patmore toT.J. Cobden-Sanderson, befriended George du Maurier, and joineda network of like-minded intellectuals.86 Nor was Basil Champneys’sexperience atypical. This was a pattern repeated all across London –and Oxford, and Cambridge. Hampstead, Holland Park, North Oxford,Newnham, and elsewhere all contained clutches of interconnectedindividuals: all living the lives of the intellectual aristocrats.87

Family and friends, schools, colleges and clubs, together produced anew class. Or, to be more exact, produced a social fraction, with its owncommon culture and shared identity. This was well understood at thetime. Works like P.G. Hamerton’s Intellectual Life (1873) reflected thenotion of a peculiarly cerebral lifestyle: characterized by plain-livingand hard-thinking; public-spirited and politically engaged.88 In manyrespects, of course, the intellectual aristocracy was simply a part of thelarge and sprawling Victorian middle class. They could hardly fail to be:their families included mill-owners and merchants as well as authorsand artists.89 A striking eighteen per cent of the Cambridge Apostleswere at some time involved in business.90 Nonetheless, the shared valuesof the intellectuals differentiated them significantly from the othermembers of the bourgeoisie. Many intellectuals were keen to dis-tinguish themselves from the ‘commercial classes’;91 from the ‘bour-geois spirit’ and its ‘timid, negative, and shuffling substitutes for activeand courageous well-doing’.92 Virginia Woolf, for one, developed animmensely patronizing attitude towards the middle-classes, whom shefound ‘provincial, smug, destitute of any character, hopelessly sub-urban, yet trying to live up to the metropolitan intellect (me I mean)which they can’t do’.93 It was an extreme reaction, but it does reflect arejection of the perceived conventionality of the bourgeoisie: the‘dowdiness of the middle class’.94

More important than the middle class, though, were the plutocrats.All the intellectuals – even those who praised the bourgeoisie; eventhose who exalted the working classes – drew a sharp and strikingcontrast between their own culture and that of the very rich. They wereappalled by the drawing together of the great landlords and millionaire

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capitalists into a new and influential group.95 They decried the way inwhich social distinctions between commercial and landed wealth werebeginning to be broken down, as new money entered old families.‘English society,’ wrote T.H.S. Escott in 1886, ‘once ruled by an aris-tocracy is now dominated mainly by a plutocracy … peer and parvenufrequently invert their rôles now-a-days.’96 It was phenomenon muchremarked upon at the time, and with little enthusiasm. Trollope’s TheWay We Live Now, Mallock’s The Old Order Changes, and Henry James’sAwkward Age all condemned the incursions of the nouveaux riches andthe pollution of blue blood by the merely wealthy. Nonetheless, this newclass was believed to have evolved its own identity. Both aristocrat andmillionaire, as Escott observed, ‘possess much the same aspirations, thesame tastes, have been similarly educated, display the same weaknesses,follow the same way of life’.97 The plutocrats were seen to value moneyand show over the knowledge and discrimination of the educatedelite.98

This was, of course, anathema to the intellectuals, and they re-sponded with contempt. In 1867 James Bryce attacked the plutocratsfor their ‘luxury and corruption’.99 In 1874 Goldwin Smith condemnedthe ‘odious plutocracy, with its colossal selfishness and its State-Churchhypocrisies’.100 The distinction between the intellectuals and the pluto-crats was made all the more powerful by the comparative poverty of theformer. For although, as observers indignantly noted, the intellectualaristocrats appeared to claim a monopoly over all aspects of thought,they were nonetheless relatively poorly paid.101 True, the head of anOxford college might earn £1,500 a year, and professors receivedaround £900 per annum, but few other academic jobs paid so well. Thetutorial fellows of Balliol complained in 1904 that they earned only £540a year, whilst the annual salary of their colleagues at Pembroke was fixedat £375.102 Of course, it was possible to make more by taking on outsidetuition: Charles Oman recalled a forty-one hour teaching week in the1870s.103 Some others could rely on a private income, but this was rarelya king’s ransom. Exceptions, like Lord Rayleigh, who combined a life asa landlord and milk-magnate with a career as a Cambridge physicist,only made the point more forcefully.104 Outside the universities, school-masters saw their salaries decline as the century ended, and some wereunable to support a family on their diminished stipend.105 Senior civilservants, highly successful doctors, some clerics and a very few artists,writers and architects might approach £1,000 a year, but even thesefortunate few were scarcely rich.106 Certainly, in comparison to many oftheir pupils, readers, clients, and patients, they were distinctly down atheel.

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Put simply, their problem was this: the intellectual aristocracy was richin learning but poor in wealth. Or, as Pierre Bourdieu would assert, theypossessed large quantities of intellectual capital, but held much lowerlevels of economic capital.107 It was a paradox acknowledged at the time,and often in the same terms.108 Unable to challenge others economi-cally, the intelligentsia claimed the right to dominate intellectually.Academic achievement, they argued, was far superior to the mereamassing of cash. In 1876 William Loftie eulogised a typical intellectual,who had made ‘Judgement and taste, not money … [his] capital’.109

Indeed, many went still further: not simply condemning greed andphilistinism, but attacking wealth and the wealthy themselves. AsHamerton observed, this soon became a hackneyed tack to take.Addressing himself to ‘a Genius Careless in Money Matters’, he wroteof the ways in which

We come to hate money-matters when we find that they exclude allthoughtful and disinterested conversation … Our happiest hours havebeen spent with poor scholars, and artists, and men of science, whosewords make us rich indeed. Then we dislike money because it rules andrestrains us, and because it is unintelligent and seems horrible.110

It was an acute observation to make. The late-nineteenth-century intel-lectuals did indeed define themselves in opposition to the rich. In theirlifestyle, their conversation, and their opinions, the educated elite re-inforced the distinction between an aristocracy of wealth and one ofbrains. It was a situation repeatedly satirized in a series of cartoons byGeorge Du Maurier. In his drawings ‘Intellectual Culture’ was sharplycontrasted with ‘Aristocratic Barbarism’; Sir Georgius Midas set againstpale creatures living beautifully in South Kensington, where peacockfeathers were only a penny apiece (fig. 1).111

In 1869 Matthew Arnold set out the classic statement of their positionin his Culture and Anarchy. Contrasting the ‘men of culture and poetry’with the ignorant ‘populace’, bourgeois ‘philistines’ and aristocratic‘barbarians’, he called for ‘sweetness and light’; for ‘Hellenism’,‘humanity’ and a search for human perfection.112 These were abstractvalues, and not confined to a particular class, but Arnold implied thatthe rich were now so wholly corrupted that a new group would haveto instil them.113 The narrow materialism of the plutocrats must berejected in favour of cultured good taste, knowledge and discernment.Naturally, this was not an argument for bourgeois values. On this at leastArnold agreed with William Morris. Each condemned the ‘dullness andvulgarity of ... the middle class, and the double-distilled dullness andscarcely less vulgarity of the upper classes’.114 By contrast, the educated

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Fig. 1. ‘Intellectual Culture v. Aristocratic Barbarism’ (1886).

(Mrs de Montmorency Jones calls upon Lady Clara Robinson (née Vere de Vere) about the characterof a Nursery Governess.)Mrs. de Montmorency Jones: ‘And may I inquire if you consider Miss Wilkinson thoroughlycompetent to impart instruction to the younger female members of my family, agedrespectively five and three?’Lady Clara: ‘What, teach your two little girls? Oh, yes!’George du Marurier, Society Pictures (2 vols; London: Bradbury, Agnew and Co.,1890-91), vol. i, p. 220.

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elite saw themselves as a specific group, rejecting both bourgeois and –especially – plutocratic values. They were Arnold’s ‘aliens’: ’personswho are mainly led, not by their class spirit … but by a love of humanperfection’.115 They were the intellectual aristocracy.

Arnold’s ideal was expressed in a lifestyle. The intellectuals’ clothesand houses, lives and careers, all embodied this distaste at the excessesof plutocratic taste. They especially abhorred the homes of the super-rich. Unrestrained by cost or convention, the newly wealthy had atendency to ‘gild every possible lily’.116 As Morris put it in 1879, ‘I fearthat at present the decoration of rich men’s houses is mostly wroughtout at the bidding of grandeur and luxury.’ The overall effect, he main-tained, was ‘simply meant to say, “This house is built for a rich man”’.117

It was a common complaint and in that respect Bernard Shaw’s fictionalaesthetes are similarly archetypal. Visiting the mansion of a rich col-lector, they attack his house and his ostentation. The golden dome ofthe hall; the crimson velvet of the saloons; the flowered damask anddecorated dadoes: all stood condemned. ‘It stinks,’ shouts one, ‘ofmoney.’118 In contrast to the ‘gold and grandeur, pomatum, powderand pride’119 of the plutocrats, the intellectual aristocracy sought whatRhoda and Agnes Garrett called ‘an atmosphere of refinement andcultivation’.120 It was not expensive, nor showy, nor ostentatious. But itwas original, modern and totally distinct (fig. 2).

This dream of cultivated living and intellectual life was hugely influ-ential. Arnold’s message was enthusiastically embraced – and by no-onemore than his niece, Mrs Humphry Ward. Granddaughter of ThomasArnold, sister-in-law of Leonard Huxley, mother-in-law of GeorgeTrevelyan, and wife of a tutor at Brasenose, Mary Ward was Annan’sintellectual aristocracy incarnate. Her early life, at least, reflected theseorigins. With her commitment to social reform, her agnosticism, andher liberalism, her disposition was entirely cerebral. With her delicatelydecorated home, her reformed dress, and love of blue china, shereflected her class’s aesthetic too. The young Mary Ward’s ideals wereentirely opposed to those of the plutocrats. Recalling her time in theOxford of the 1870s, surrounded by scions of the educated elite, shedescribed their attempts to lead a life of sweetness and light. ‘Most ofus,’ she wrote,

were very anxious to be up-to-date, and in the fashion, whether in aes-thetics, or housekeeping, or education. But our fashion was not that ofBelgravia or Mayfair, which indeed was scorned! It was the fashion of themovement which sprang from Morris and Burne Jones.121

She was not alone and she was not the last. The ‘circle of married

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Fig. 2. ‘A Comfortable Corner’.

‘There are plenty of errors in taste to be found in the mansions of the rich, and if wealthcannot do what we require, neither can intellect, without special culture’ (p. 3).Mrs Orrinsmith, The Drawing-Room (London: Macmillan, 1877), 57.The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford: 25250 e.3.

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professors and tutors’ which Goldwin Smith found in Oxford in the1890s continued to combine ‘intellectuality with simplicity of living’ toproduce a ‘society about as pleasant as any in the world’.122

Nor was this society – and the aesthetic it embraced – confined to theuniversity towns. Helen Black’s survey of Notable Women Authors revealsa close-knit group of women intellectuals who shared a strikingly simi-lar taste. All across England, in metropolis and market town, Persiancarpets, Japanese screens and Dutch china were apparently ubiquitousin the homes of those with a ‘refined and artistic taste’.123 Even radicalintellectuals were attracted by the idea of this striking and eclecticapproach to interior design. When, in 1893, Beatrice Webb set up housein London she wrote that

The ideal to be aimed at is strict economy in weekly expenditure, no self-indulgence and show, but beautiful surroundings – i.e. the best tack andthe best workmanship in the things you have. So I have gone to Morris’sfor papers and spent days over my curtains and in looking up charmingold bits of furniture in second-hand furniture shops.124

Implicitly, Webb was contrasting her good taste, her connoisseurship,and her eye for a bargain with the poor taste and profligacy of the rich.Sub-consciously, too, she may have been comparing her house with thatof Joseph Chamberlain; a house she found oppressive in its grandeurand repulsive in its ostentation. ‘No books, no work, no music, not evena harmless antimacassar, to relieve the oppressive richness of the satin-covered furniture’, she wrote.125 It was all a world away from the dis-tinctive décor of the intellectuals (fig. 3).

This demonstration of distinctiveness – of the good taste of the intel-lectuals – was not confined to interior design. In their clothes too, theintelligentsia advertised their good taste; their attempt to balance arejection of convention and a dislike of ostentation.126 The effect couldbe striking. Sidney Colvin, for one, recalled Robert Louis Stevenson’s‘odd garments’, which were the result ‘partly of a genuine carelessness,certainly of a genuine lack of cash … [and] partly of deliberate detach-ment from any particular social class or caste’.127 Inevitably, perhaps,this intellectual aesthetic was most pronounced in women’s clothing. Inthe 1870s, as Alison Gernsheim has noted, ‘many English intellectualsturned against conventional fashions and, aiming at Pre-Raphaelitismin dress, pursued the artistic in a rather self-conscious way’.128 Indeed,Pre-Raphaelitism was a style that became something of a cliché in theperiod.129 Elizabeth Wordsworth, the first principal of Lady MargaretHall and founder of St Hugh’s College, Oxford, described

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Fig. 3. ‘In the Corner’.

From J.G. Sowerby and Thomas Crane, At Home (London: Marcus Ward and Co.,1881), 50.The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford: 175.g.57.

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the days of green serge gowns, and Morris papers, depicting miniatureorange trees and pomegranates, daisies, and sunflowers. Every lady oftrue culture had an amber necklace, sleeves tight below the elbow andpuffed up above it; any scraps of yellowish old lace she could lay her handsupon to trim her dress, mittens in the evening, and in fact attired herselfas like one of Du Maurier’s aesthetic women as she could.130

As the century went on, the cleavage between fashion and the intel-lectual style became yet more obvious. In the 1880s ‘Aesthetic dress’became still more advanced. Newnham soon seemed full of women inshapeless garments of sage and olive green.131 Importantly, these styleswere rejected by both the plutocracy – whose dress was distinctly differ-ent – and by the mass of the middle class. ‘It is significant,’ as C. WillettCunningham observed, ‘that in those fashion magazines intendedmainly for the middle-class there is no mention of the aestheticstyles, while in those for the smart folk it is equally ignored.’132 Pre-Raphaelitism was for the intelligentsia alone.

Fashion changed of course – even for the intellectuals. Increasingly,there was a tendency towards individualism.133 They retained someelements of the Aesthetic style: G.M. Trevelyan remembered Mary PaleyMarshall in the 1920s still wearing ‘the sandals which were a legacy ofher Pre-Raphaelite period sixty years before’.134 But those women whowere continuing to affect Pre-Raphaelitism tout court were exceptional.In 1898 Beatrice Webb found Ada Radford’s wardrobe almost unfor-givable. ‘As a matter of principle she dresses in yellow-green sloppygarments, large garden hat with bows of green silk – her hair is alwayscoming down’, she wrote, ‘my distaste is really for her clothes. I couldforgive them if they were not worn on principle.’135 Individuality, though,did not mean conformity to the canons of contemporary taste. Manyintellectuals, in their ‘curious aristocratic way’, simply wore the lastfashion but one.136 Most – like the professor’s clothes in The Old OrderChanges – mixed ‘deference for convention and contempt for it’.137 Theresult was the development of a distinctive, and distinctively intellectual,style. So that when, in 1907, the Master of Caius travelled to America,his wife found that ‘University ladies dressed much the same the worldover’ and that her ‘simple garments did well enough’.138

As with interior design, the critical point was a rejection of the vul-garity of the rich. Beatrice Webb, again, is an important exemplar ofthis attitude. She may have found Ada Radford’s eccentricity offensive,but this was nothing compared to her disgust at the excesses exhibitedby the wife of a millionaire. Mrs Julius Wernher was, Webb wrote

both in person and manners and speech … essentially ugly: her dresscrude in colour and outré in form, covered with extravagant and ill-

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assorted jewels, her talk of nothing else but herself and her possessions,and her expression a curious mingling of boldness and uneasiness.139

It was this tastelessness that the intellectuals rejected – this ostentatiousdisplay of wealth. With their William Morris wallpaper, peacockfeathers, blue china and fans; with their idiosyncratic clothes andeccentric sense of style: the intellectual aristocracy was instantlyrecognizable.140 It was a distinct aesthetic and it reflected ‘the union ofpersons of cultivated tastes to define, and to decide upon what is to beadmired … Vulgarity, however wealthy it may be, can never be admittedinto this exclusive brotherhood’.141 In these ways, the intellectuals wereable to stress their independence; to strike a stylish pose: and to do soappropriately.

This deliberate distinction was also stressed in the lifestyles of theintellectuals: in their hobbies and holidays; their politics and theirchosen careers. Their pastimes, in particular, were strikingly similar. Tosome extent this is predictable. It is not a surprise to learn that reading,for example, was an important part of intellectual life. Alfred Marshall,who took ‘3 cwt of books’ with him on holiday in 1893 is in that respectarchetypal.142 Equally, the fact that Trollope should recommend chessas a diversion for ‘intellectual persons’ is unremarkable – although hedid go on to counsel that ‘to be pre-eminent at chess is generally to bethat and nothing else’.143 But what is more remarkable is the way inwhich walking, and cycling, rowing and mountaineering became thecharacteristic – and self-consciously characteristic – occupations of theintellectual aristocracy. The academic origins of the Alpine Club arewell known.144 Founded in 1857 by a group of predominantlyCambridge dons, it remained dominated by ‘the leaders of thought’,‘the hard-worked barristers, the men of science, the Cambridge tutors’throughout the century.145 Not all its members were intellectuals, ofcourse, but the contemporary assumption that they were is significant.‘In those days’, wrote one, describing the 1850s and 1860s, ‘If you meta man in the Alps it was ten to one that he was an University man, eightto one (say) that he was a Cambridge man, and about even betting thathe was a fellow of his college.’146

Organized walking, too, was colonized by intellectuals. LeslieStephen – already an important member of the Alpine Club – estab-lished the Sunday Tramps in 1879. It was an exclusively intellectualoutfit: one that Avner Offer has explicitly associated with Wells’sutopian Samurai.147 And its members’ own sense of their social positionis wonderfully captured in A.J. Butler’s ‘Ballade of the Sunday Tramps’of 1881:

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If weary you grow of your booksOr dyspeptical after you’ve dined,If your wife makes remarks on your looks,If in short you feel somewhat inclinedFor fresh air and a six hours’ grindAnd good metaphysical talk – With a party of writers in MindYou should go for a Sabbath’s day walk.148

Nor did the walking and talking consume all their energy. As James Sullylater recalled, the Tramps would call for lunch at the homes of other,equally distinguished thinkers: men like Darwin, Tyndall and Meredith.At the same time, too, diversions would be made to visit sites of specialhistorical or literary interest.149

The combination of physical and mental exertion found in moun-taineering and in hiking was also stressed in the intellectuals’ involve-ment in other sports. Rowing – that increasingly important universitysport – was practised as much by graduates as undergraduates. Wellinto his seventies, the architect, author, and Oxford don T.G. Jacksonwas still regularly rowing up the Thames. Moreover, he was joined onhis excursions by other academics – including the Principal of HertfordCollege, Henry Boyd.150 Cycling could be similarly cerebral. GrahamWallas and C.P. Trevelyan taught the Webbs, Bernard Shaw, andHerbert Samuel how to do it.151 Alfred Marshall and his wife used tofill their holidays with walking and cycling round England, whilstM.R. James made thirty circling tours of East Anglia and the continentbetween 1895-1914.152 Cycling, like walking, climbing, and rowing, wasan ideal intellectual pastime. It was relatively inexpensive, yet it alsorequired some skill. It was physically demanding, yet it could alsobe combined with some more obviously highbrow activity. Just asmountaineers legitimated their hobby with scientific measurement andmetaphysical reflection, so rowers went sketching and cyclists wentchurch-spotting. All these hobbies can be understood as a counterpointto plutocratic sport. Indeed, the Alpine Club Journal drew precisely thedistinction between the horrors of blood sports and the superior moralqualities of climbing.153 It was a distinction made literally by ArthurBalfour in 1896. Striking an ostentatiously intellectual pose, he aban-doned the Prince of Wales and a Blenheim shooting party in order tocycle round the countryside in communion with nature.154 By the late1890s, this was a much a trope as a trip.

This intellectual lifestyle – this common culture – was more thanmerely ephemeral, though. The values it embodied were also expressedin the political and cultural activities of the English intelligentsia. It led

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them to become ‘public moralists’; spokesmen for no one interest, butadvocates for disinterested reform.155 It could not, however, producehomogeneity or unanimity. Indeed, they were riven by disputes. Howcould it be otherwise? A group whose existence was predicated on theexploration of ideas was bound to quarrel – and it did, vociferously. Inthe Oxford of the 1870s dinner parties were arranged on party lines.Care had to be taken in matching guests, because evenings were ruinedby political disagreements.156 In the mid-1880s, Home Rule was a par-ticularly troublesome issue: separating friends and families, and threat-ening the clubbable life of the intelligentsia. Certainly, as Tom Dunneand John Roach have shown, many of the leading liberal intellectualsabandoned Gladstone at this point, becoming Liberal Unionists andeven Conservatives.157 Nor did the battles stop there. As ChristopherHarvey has demonstrated, the ‘challenge of democracy’ divided thedons – and their intellectual allies. Questions of mass culture, of stateintervention, of ‘liberty’ and ‘licence’, divided common room and clubalike.158 Nonetheless, the fundamental unity of the intelligentsia was notseriously shaken by these fights. Social convention and class loyalty over-came political difference. Not even the Home Rule crisis could seriouslydisturb the ‘even tenor of Oxford society’, recalled George Brodrick,the Warden of Merton.159 Political difference could not destroy theintellectual aristocracy.

Their common culture even survived what some historians havetermed the fragmentation of the common context.160 True, there wasincreasingly specialization in the universities, in the schools, and profes-sional life more generally. True too, this specialization also led to secu-larization, as the number of dons or schoolmasters who were alsoclergymen declined.161 But it is easy to overstate the extent to which thisdestroyed a common set of ideals or ideas. College life and club-lifetended to throw representatives of different disciplines together. TheApostles and Old Mortality, the New Club and the Athenauem: allincluded scientists, philosophers, classicists, and clerics. The SundayTramps numbered amongst their members the lawyer Sir FrederickPollard, the doctor Sir George Savage, the engineer Sir AlexanderKennedy, and the artist John Collier.162 Some clubs were even intendedto overcome disciplinary differences. The Metaphysical Society of the1870s and Synthetic Society of the 1890s both brought together scien-tists, theologians, and humanists to discuss the relationship betweenreligion and science. The former, modelled on the CambridgeApostles, grew to include Ruskin and Huxley, Gladstone and Balfour,John Lubbock, Mark Pattison, and Dean Church.163 The latter, inspiredby the Metaphysical Society, had a narrower focus, but still numbered

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amongst its members Richard Haldane, Hastings Rashdall, CharlesGore, and Frederick Myers. Perspectives differed – and conclusionsdiffered too – but the bringing together of such disparate individualsinto a single forum did, as Henry Sidgwick observed, promote thedevelopment of ‘a mutual understanding’.164 That this was possible wasdue the shared culture of the participants.

Within the universities, too, specialization did not always meanseparation. Even the ever-pessimistic George Brodrick acknowledgedthat ‘the craze for specialism’ was strongly resisted by many aca-demics.165 Individuals like W.H.R. Rivers moved across disciplines: fromphysiology to psychology to anthropology – and then into politics.166

Others sought to keep a foot in each camp. Oliver Lodge, a physicistand member of the Synthetic Society, counted amongst his friendstheologians, philosophers, journalists and politicians. As a youngscientist in the 1870s, he had even exchanged his prize from the Societyfor Telegraph Engineers for the Works of John Ruskin and a registeringbarometer.167 He, like others, felt able to transcend narrow academicdivisions. Yet historians have tended to underestimate this sense:picking up on the intellectuals’ disciplinary differences and ignoringbroader cultural similarities. Thus, for example, the greeting offered toA.E.H. Love on his arrival in Oxford as professor of Natural Philosophyis seen by some as reflecting the natural tendency of arts dons to ‘putthe Greekless scientist down’.168 In fact the response to his introduction– ‘I’m Love’, ‘Oh indeed, Eros or Agape?’ – represented a shared jokeby two men who spoke the same scholarly language. Love was a giftedclassicist, who would have understood the pun immediately.169 It isa minor example, but it illustrates a general truth. The shared experi-ences and common values of the intelligentsia transcended the pro-fessional distinctions which threatened to destroy it. Fellows ofOxbridge colleges remained part of the same milieu despite theiracademic specialities. Schoolmasters were schoolmasters before theywere classics, maths or science teachers. Writers were writers whatevertheir subject. In the end, they spoke the same language, they lived thesame lifestyle; they were all intellectuals together.

‘British historians,’ as Lawrence Goldman has observed, ‘are gener-ally rather shy of the word “intellectual”.’170 They should not be. Theperiod between 1860 and 1920 saw, in fact, the creation of an Englishintellectual elite; a ‘social class or caste of a remarkable and peculiarkind which established itself as a powerful section of the ruling classin Britain in the nineteenth century … an intellectual aristocracy’,as Leonard Woolf later recalled.171 This was not just a collection offamilies, but a distinct social group. Formed by changes in elite edu-

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cation and fostered by the growth of the professions, the English intel-ligentsia was a product of what Gladstone identified as that ‘antagonismwhich is offered to wealth by mental cultivation’.172 This new classfraction produced a new way of living. It can be traced through itsbooks and its family trees; its writings, its paintings, its ideas. Most of all,though, it can be identified through its material culture and through itslifestyle: through the clubs and colleges; the homes and clothes andtastes it fostered. Trevelyan, as the son, grandson, husband and fatherof high-brows is an excellent example of this intellectual aristocracy.He even refounded the Sunday Tramps.173 And with his ‘austerely intel-lectual life style’, his uncomfortable house and his ‘uncouth’ dress, hewas representative too of a wider community of intellectuals.174 Thisintellectual aristocracy was larger and more influential than Annan’scatalogue of families. It is more tangible than Collini’s freemasonry orRubinstein’s gammy leg. It was a real social group and a social groupthat repays revisiting.

(St John’s College, Oxford)

Endnotes1. This paper was first presented to the Oxford Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century

British History Seminar, and I am very grateful to all the participants for theircomments. I must also thank Professor Lyn Pykett and the anonymous readers ofthe Journal of Victorian Culture for their helpful and constructive criticism. Aboveall, I am indebted to Jane Garnett, Robert Tobin, and Zoë Waxman, who read andcommented on early drafts of this piece.

2. David Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (1992; Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1997), xii.

3. N.G. Annan, ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy’, in J.H. Plumb, ed., Studies in SocialHistory (London: Longmans, 1955), 241-87; reprinted in Noel Annan, The Dons(London: HarperCollins, 1999), 304-41.

4. Quoted in Cannadine, Trevelyan, 236.5. Stefan Collini, English Pasts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 298.6. Quoted in Cannadine, Trevelyan, 236.7. Edward Shils, The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (Chicago and London:

University of Chicago Press, 1972), 21.8. Quoted in T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber, 1948),

37.9. W.D. Rubinstein, Elites and the Wealthy in Modern British History (Brighton and New

York: Harvester, 1987), 80. 10. Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: on Modernity, Post-Modernity and

Intellectuals (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 2, 18-19.11. Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London and New

York: Routledge, 1989), especially xii. F.M.L. Thompson, English Landed Society inthe Nineteenth Century (London and Toronto: Routledge, 1963), 300.

12. Christopher E. Mauriello, ‘The Strange Death of the Public Intellectual: LiberalIntellectual Identity and the ‘Field of Cultural Production’ in England, 1880-1920’,

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Journal of Victorian Culture 6 (2001): 1-26.13. Maurice Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (3 vols; Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1980-2001), vol. i., p. xiii.14. Ross McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 33.15. José Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870-1914 (London: Penguin, 1994),

222.16. Annan, The Dons, 11.17. T.W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (London and

Sydney: Croon Helm, 1982), 13-21 and n.22.18. Heck, Transformation, 13.19. Ibid., 237.20. Peter Allen, ‘The Meanings of ‘An Intellectual’ in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-

Century English Usage’, University of Toronto Quarterly 55 (1986): 342-58, 347.21. Stefan Collini, Public Moralists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 14.22. As Richard B. Sher has noted in his fascinating Church and University in the Scottish

Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UniversityPress, 1985), 9.

23. Ben Knights, The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1978); Christopher Kent, Brains and Numbers: Elitism, Comtism andDemocracy in Mid-Victorian England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978).

24. Simon Green, ‘Archbishop Frederick Temple on Meritocracy, Liberal Educationand the Idea of a Clerisy’, in Michael Bentley, ed., Public and Private Doctrine (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 149-67.

25. H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (London: Chapman and Hall, 1905), 259.26. H.R. Haweis, The Art of Beauty (London: Chatto and Windus, 1878), 211.27. Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, eds, The Dairy of Beatrice Webb (4 vols; London:

Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982-5), vol. ii, p. 108.28. Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell, Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett (2 vols;

London: John Murray, 1897), vol. ii., 212-13.29. Geoffrey Faber, Jowett: A Portrait with Background (London: Faber, 1957).30. Christopher Harvie, ‘Reform and Expansion, 1854-1871’, in M.G. Brock and

M.C. Curthoys, eds, The History of the University of Oxford VI: Nineteenth-CenturyOxford, Part 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) and idem., The Lights ofLiberalism: University Liberals and the Challenge of Democracy (London: Allen Lane,1976).

31. Lawrence Stone, ‘The Size and Composition of the Oxford Student Body, 1580-1909’, in Lawrence Stone, ed., The University in Society (2 vols; London: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1975), vol. i, 65.

32. A.J. Engel, From Clergyman to Don: The Rise of the Academic Profession in Nineteenth-Century Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 87.

33. Tuckwell, op. cit., 279.34. E.R. Freeman, ‘Oxford After Forty Years: I’, Contemporary Review 51 (1887): 604-22,

615.35. Janet Howarth, ‘“In Oxford But … Not of Oxford”: the women’s colleges’, in Brock

and Curthoys, vol. VII, 237-307.36. Freeman, op. cit., 612.37. Christopher N.L. Brooke, A History of the University of Cambridge (4 vols; Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1993) vol. iv, 2-90; Sheldon Rothblatt, The Revolutionof the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (London: Faber and Faber,1968).

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38. D.A. Winstanley, Later Victorian Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1947), 57-89; 264-70.

39. R. St John Parry, Henry Jackson O.M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1926), 26.

40. L.P. Williamson, A Century of King’s, 1873-1972 (Cambridge: King’s College, 1980),4.

41. John Willis Clark, Old Friends at Cambridge and Elsewhere (London and Cambridge:Macmillan, 1900), 13.

42. Gwen Raverat, Period Piece (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 16.43. F.M. Cornford, ‘Microcosmographica Academica’, in Gordon Johnson, University

Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 95.44. John Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990),

51-3.45. Raverat, op. cit., 19.46. Mary Paley Marshall, What I Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1947). She was later to be librarian of the Marshall Library of Economics.47. Fernanda Perrone, ‘University Teaching as a Profession for Women in Oxford,

Cambridge and London, 1870-1930’ (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1991)and ‘Women Academics in England, 1870-1930’, History of Universities XII (1993),339-68; Carol Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex? Women at British Universities 1870-1939(London: UCL Press, 1995).

48. Virginia Woolf, ‘Three Guineas’, in A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas (1938;London, Penguin, 1993), 212.

49. Keith Hannabuss, ‘Henry Smith’, in John Fauves, Raymond Flood and RobinWilson, eds, Oxford Figures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 203-17.

50. The best account of Percival remains William Temple, Life of Bishop Percival(London: Macmillan, 1921).

51. T.E. Page, ‘Classics’, in idem, ed., The Public Schools from Within (London: Sampson,Low Marston and Co., 1906), 4.

52. T.W. Bamford, The Rise of the Public Schools (London: Nelson, 1967); Edward C.Mack, Public Schools and British Opinion since 1860 (London: Methuen, 1941) and –especially – David Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning (London: Cassell, 1961).

53. David Ian Allsobrook, Schools for the Shires (Manchester and New York: ManchesterUniversity Press, 1986).and Colin Shrosbree, Public Schools and Private Education(Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press,1988).

54. H. Montague Butler, Public School Sermons (London: Ibbister and Co., 1899), 7. Seealso John Roach, Secondary Education in England, 1870-1902 (London and NewYork: Routledge, 1991), 153.

55. E.E. Bowen, ‘Teaching by Means of Grammar’, in D.W. Farrar, ed., Essays on aLiberal Education (London: Macmillan, 1867), 198.

56. Clement Dukes, Health at School Considered in its Mental, Moral, and Physical Aspects(London: Cassell, 1887), 19.

57. J.R. deS. Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe: The Development of the Victorian Public School(London: Millington, 1977), 264-8.

58. M.C. Curthoys, ‘The Careers of Oxford Men’, in Brock and Curthoys, vol. 6,477-510, at 494.

59. J.P.D. Dunbabin, ‘Oxford and Cambridge College Finances 1871-1913’, EconomicHistory Review, 2nd ser., 28 (1975): 631-47.

60. Mrs Nettleship, A Memoir of Henry Nettleship (Oxford: privately printed, 1895), 17.61. E.A. Peers, ‘Autobiography’, in A.L. Mackenzie and A.R. Adrian, eds, Redbrick

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University Revisited (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996), 86.62. Edward Green, The Harrow Life of Henry Montague Butler (London: Longmans,

1920). The Butlers were also relatives of Professor J.R.M. Butler who attended thelaunch of Trevelyan’s Festschrift.

63. H.A. James, School Ideals: Sermons Preached in the Chapel of Rossall School (London:Macmillan, 1887).

64. Quoted in Honey, op. cit., 326. 65. Ernest Barker, Age and Youth (London: Oxford University Press, 1953).66. Quoted in Noel Annan, Roxburgh of Stowe (London: Longmans, 1965), 10.67. Dukes, op. cit., 19.68. Rupert Wilkinson, The Prefects (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 9, 12.69. Reba N. Soffer, Discipline and Power: The University, History, and the Making of an

English Elite (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 5, 8.70. Alec Waugh, The Loom of Youth (London: G. Richards, 1917), 70.71. Mark Pattison, Suggestions on Academical Organisation (Edinburgh: Edmonston and

Douglas, 1868), 236.72. V.H.H. Green, Oxford Common Room (London: E. Arnold, 1957), 129. St John’s was,

of course, notoriously conservative. See W.H. Hutton, S. John the Baptist College(1898; London: Routledge, 1998).

73. R.W. Macan, ‘Oxford in the ’Seventies’, in Harley Granville-Barker, ed., TheEighteen-Seventies (Cambridge: University Press, 1929), 210-48 at 239.

74. Curthoys, ‘The Careers of Oxford Men’, 490, 496.75. W.C. Lubenow, The Cambridge Apostles: Liberalism, Imagination, and Friendship in

British Intellectual and Professional life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1998).

76. Quoted in Gerald Monsman, Oxford University’s Old Mortality Society: A Study inVictorian Romanticism (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998), 1-2.

77. Kent, Brains and Numbers, 21-33.78. E.V. Lucas, The Colvins and Their Friends (London: Methuen, 1928), 190. 79. Francis Gledstanes Waugh, The Athenaeum Club and Its Associations (privately

printed, 1900), 117.80. Humphry Ward, History of the Athenaeum (privately printed, 1926), 87. These

figures are approximate totals. Nonetheless, the numbers given in F.R. Cowell, TheAthenaeum: Club and Social Life in London, 1824-1974 (London: Heinemann, 1975),47, differ in no substantial respect.

81. Alain Jerome Coignard, ‘Basil Champneys, Architecte, 1842-1935’ (Memoire deMaitrise, University of Paris IV, 1984). Esp. 12-18.

82. Lucas, op. cit., 8. 83. Basil Champneys, Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore (2 vols; London:

G. Bell and Sons, 1900), vol. i, 351. 84. Giles Walkley, Artists’ Houses in London, 1764-1914 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994),

ch. 6.85. Basil Champneys, in John H. Appleton and A.H. Sayce, eds, Dr Appleton: His Life

and Literary Relics (London: English and Foreign Philosophical Library, vol. 13,1881), 86-8; Diderick Roll-Hansen, The Academy 1869-1879: Victorian Intellectuals inRevolt (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1957).

86. See Reginald Blomfield, ‘Basil Champneys’, Journal of the R.I.B.A. 42 (1935),737-8.

87. See esp. Caroline Dakers, The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society (NewHaven and London: Yale University Press, 1999).

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88. P.G. Hamerton, The Intellectual Life (London: Macmillan, 1873).89. Elizabeth Crawford, Enterprising Women: The Garretts and Their Circle (London:

Francis Boutle, 2002).90. Lubenow, The Cambridge Apostles, 123.91. R.H. Hutton, in Essays on Reform (London: Macmillan, 1867), 29.92. Sidney Colvin, ed., The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to His Family and Friends

(2 vols; London: Methuen, 1899), vol. i, p, xxxi.93. Nigel Nicholson, ed., The Letters of Virginia Woolf (5 vols; London: Hogarth Press,

1975-9), vol. ii, p. 458.94. Diary of Beatrice Webb, vol. i, p. 105.95. David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (London: Picador,

1992), 298, 342; Perkin, Professional Society, 27, 62-9; Rubinstein, Elites, and theWealthy 62-70; Thompson, op. cit., 292-9.

96. [T.H.S. Escott], Society in London (London: Chatto and Windus, 1886), 43, 161.97. Escott, Society in London, 163.98. F.M.L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society (London: Fontana, 1988), 267.99. James Bryce, ‘The Historical Aspect of Democracy’, in Essays on Reform, 270.

100. Quoted in Elizabeth Wallace, Goldwin Smith: Victorian Liberal (Toronto: Universityof Toronto Press, 1957), 51.

101. [J.H.Millar], ‘Mr. Jowett and Oxford Liberalism’, Blackwood’s Magazine 161 (1897):721-32 and [Julia Wedgwood], ‘The Moral Influence of George Eliot’, ContemporaryReview 39 (1881): 173-85, at 177-9.

102. J.P.D. Dunbabin, ‘Finance and Property’, in Brock and Curthoys, vol. iv, 375-437,at 397, 406, 411-13.

103. Charles Oman, Memories of Victorian Oxford (3rd edn; London: Methuen 1942), 136.104. By 1913 he had an annual income of £17,000: Perkin, Professional Society, 68.105. Curthoys, ‘Careers of Oxford Men’, 494-5.106. Perkin, Professional Society, ch. 3.107. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (trans. Richard Nice; London: Routledge, 1996), 176,

254, 261, 287, 292-3; Homo Academicus, 178; Rules of Art (trans. Susan Emmanuel;Oxford: Polity, 1996), 48-55, 11, 129; Bourdieu and J-C. Passeron, Reproduction(trans. Richard Nice; London: Sage, 1990), 201.

108. George Eliot, for one, was blessed with ‘Intellectual wealth’. Wedgwood, op. cit.,179.

109. W.J. Loftie, A Plea for Art in the House (London: Macmillan, 1876), 46.110. Hamerton, Intellectual Life, 186111. George Du Maurier, Society Pictures (2 vols; London: Bradbury, Agnew and Co.,

1891), vol. i, p. 220; vol. ii, p. 239112. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869; Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1993), 64-181.113. See also Arnold, ‘Democracy’ (1861), in Culture and Anarchy.114. Morris, ‘The Beauty of Art’ (1880), in Collected Works (ed. May Morris, 24 vols;

London, 1910-15), vol. 22, 62-3.115. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 110.116. J. Mordaunt Crook, The Rise of the Nouveaux Riches (London: John Murray, 1999),

58-67, 167-74, 70.117. William Morris, Works, vol. 22, 113, 94.118. G.B. Shaw, Immaturity (written 1879: London: Constable, 1930), 105-11, 164.119. Trollope, The Way We Live Now, vol. i, 296.120. Rhoda and Agnes Garret, Suggestions for House Decoration (London: Macmillan,

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1876), 7.121. Mrs Humphry Ward, A Writer’s Recollections (London: William Collins, 1918),

190-20.122. Goldwin Smith, A Trip to England (Toronto: Copp, Clark Company, 1891), 47.123. Helen C. Black, Notable Women Authors of the Day (Glasgow: David Bryce and Son,

1893), 68.124. The Dairy of Beatrice Webb, vol. ii, p. 38.125. Ibid., vol. i, p. 105.126. Haweis, The Art of Beauty.127. Colvin, Stevenson, vol. i, p. xl.128. Alison Gernsheim, Victorian and Edwardian Fashion: A Photographic Survey (New

York: Dover, 1963), 65.129. W.S. Gilbert, Patience (London, 1881), 10-12, at 30 and H.R. Haweis, The Art of Dress

(London: Chatto and Windus, 1879), ch. 10.130. Elizabeth Wordsworth, Glimpses of the Past (London and Oxford: A.R. Mowbray and

Co., 1912), 140.131. Hamilton, Newnham, 139; Raverat, Period Piece, 26, 201.132. C. Willett Cunningham, English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century (London:

Faber and Faber, 1937), 290.133. Ibid., 343.134. G.M. Trevelyan in Marshall, What I Remember, xii.135. Diary of Beatrice Webb, vol. ii., p. 129.136. Carola Oman, An Oxford Childhood (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1976), 43.137. Mallock, Old Order, vol. iii, p. 260.138. E.S. Roberts, Sherborne, Oxford and Cambridge (London: M. Hopkinson, 1934), 197.139. Diary of Beatrice Webb, vol. iii, p. 42.140. Marshall, What I Remember, 20; Raverat, Period Piece, 125-8; M.J. Loftie, The Dining

Room (London, 1878), 13.141. Walter Hamilton, The Aesthetic Movement (London, 1882), vii.142. John K. Whistler, ed., The Correspondence of Alfred Marshall, Economist (3 vols;

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), vol. ii, p. 95.143. Anthony Trollope, British Sport and Pastimes (London: Virtue and Co., 1868), 5.144. Peter H. Hansen, ‘Albert Smith, the Alpine Club, and the Invention of Moun-

taineering in Mid-Victorian Britain’, Journal of British Studies 34 (1995): 300-24.145. G.W. Young, ‘Mountain Prophets’, in Walt Unsworth, ed., Peaks, Passes and Glaciers:

Selections From the Alpine Club Journal (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982): 126-47,126; H. Preston-Thomas, ‘The Alpine Club’, Blackwood’s Magazine 182 (1907), 162.

146. Quoted in David Robertson, ‘Mid-Victorians amongst the Alps’, in U.C. Knoepfl-macher and G.B. Trevelyan, eds, Nature and the Victorian Imagination (Berkley andLondon: University of California Press, 1977), 120.

147. Avner Offer, Property and Politics: 1870-1914, Landownership, Law, Ideology, and UrbanDevelopment in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 334.

148. Quoted in F.W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (London: Duckworth,1906), 358.

149. James Sully, ‘Reminiscences of the Sunday Tramps’, Cornhill Magazine 24 (1908):76-88.

150. Richard Norton, ‘Henry Boyd and Thomas Graham Jackson: Their RowingExploits’, Hertford College Magazine 82 (1995-7): 106-11.

151. Offer, Property and Politics, 348.152. Correspondence of Alfred Marshall, vol. 2, pp. 182, 199; John Lowerson, Sport and the

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English Middle Classes, 1870-1914 (Manchester and New York: Manchester Univer-sity Press, 1993), 120.

153. David Robbins, ‘Sport, Hegemony and the Middle Class: The Victorian Moun-taineers’, Theory, Culture and Society 4:4 (1987): 579-601, 585.

154. Lowerson, Sport and the English Middle Classes, 120155. Lawrence Goldman, ‘Intellectuals and the English Working Class 1870-1945: The

Case of Adult Education’, History of Education 29:4 (2000): 281-300; J.P.C. Roach,‘Victorian Universities and the National Intelligentsia’, Victorian Studies 3 (1959):131-50.

156. Christina Colvin, ‘A Don’s Wife a Century Ago’, Oxoniensia 50 (1985): 267-78, at272.

157. Tom Dunne, ‘La trahison des clercs: British Intellectuals and the First Home RuleCrisis’, Irish Historical Studies 23 (1982): 134-73; John Roach, ‘Liberalism and theVictorian Intelligentsia’, Cambridge Historical Journal 13 (1957): 58-81.

158. Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism. 159. G.C. Brodrick, Memories and Impressions, 1831-1900 (London: James Nisbet, 1900),

361.160. Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 49, 72, 137, 159, 170, 200; RobertM. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1985), ch. 5.

161. Curthoys, ‘Careers of Oxford Men’, 503; Bamford, Public Schools, 55.162. Sully, ‘Sunday Tramps’, 76-7.163. Alan Willard Brown, The Metaphysical Society: Victorian Minds in Crisis, 1869-80 (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1947).164. [A.J. Balfour, ed.], Papers Read Before the Synthetic Society 1896-1908 (London:

Spottiswood, 1909), 275.165. G.C. Brodrick, ‘The University of Oxford in 1898’, Nineteenth Century 44 (1898):

208-23, 211-12.166. Richard Slobodin, W. H. R. Rivers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978).167. Oliver Lodge, Past Years (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1931), 105.168. Janet Howarth, ‘Science Education in Late-Victorian Oxford: A Curious Case of

Failure?’, English Historical Review 102 (1987): 334-71, 367.169. E.A. Milne, ‘Augustus Edward Hough Love’, Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal

Society 3 (1939-41), 467-82, at 469-70. Significantly, the Greek is untranslated in thisversion.

170. Lawrence Goldman, Dons and Workers: Oxford and Adult Education since 1850(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 8-9.

171. Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography: I, 1880-1911 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1980), 119. See also R.D. Anderson, European Universities from the Enlightenment to1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 149.

172. Quoted in E.L. Ellis, The University College of Wales, Aberystwyth 1872-1972 (Cardiff:University of Wales Press, 1971), 120.

173. Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian (London: Weidenfeld andNicholson, 1984), 97.

174. Cannadine, Trevelyan, 49-50.

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