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A Crisis of Authority: Early Nineteenth-Century British Thought
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
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This talk represents a crisis of principle. I have long held that a presidential address to a learned society should not belabor that society with laments or summonses, nor should it ask whither the discipline; rather, it should be a serious scholarly or interpretive effort. But it is an equally compelling principle with me that an after-dinner talk should suit the mood of relaxed good feeling that is likely to characterize the occasion. To answer both requirements is no easy task. In defining a genre new to the North American Conference on British Studies, my two predecessors have admirably fulfilled my criteria, combining the serious scholarship one would expect from their distinguished careers with the precise lightness of touch called for on such an occasion.
I will not, I fear, follow their example in either respect. The grand, refractory subject I have chosen has interested me for many years, but I have not earlier addressed it in either research or writing: it has been rather like the unheard theme that Elgar said was present in his Enigma Variations. In now making the theme explicit, as Elgar wisely never did, I shall begin by calling attention to some concerns and perceptions among the English Unitarians over a hundred years, concerns and perceptions that I think reflect a crisis of authority. I shall then suggest ways in which that same analysis might be applied to larger, more important and familiar, segments of nineteenth-century intellectual life.
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References
1 Note should be taken of a persuasive circumstantial claim by the pianist Joseph Cooper that the theme is to be found in the Andante of Mozart's Symphony No. 38 (Prague). Whitney, Craig R., New York Times, November 7, 1991Google Scholar.
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11 The study of Priestley's accomplishment has taken a giant leap in the past quarter century. See Schwartz, A. Truman and McEvoy, John, Motion Toward Perfection: The Achievement of Joseph Priestley (Boston, 1990)Google Scholar, and works there cited.
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16 Hymns for the Christian Church and Home (London, 1840)Google Scholar, preface: “Worship is an attitude which our nature assumes, not for a purpose, but from an emotion.
17 “Martineau made his own visit to Germany late, in the late 1840s, and on his return shocked the elderly Germanophile literary light (and celebrated diarist) Henry Crabb Robinson by his criticisms of what he had found there. Crabb Robinson's Travel Diary, October 18, 1849, Dr. Williams's Library.
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19 Philip Doddridge's academy at Northampton was not the first to adopt the technique, but it was the most celebrated. Priestley entered the successor academy at Daventry in 1752, the year following Doddridge's death, and his often-quoted description bears repeating: “In my time, the academy was in a state peculiarly favourable to the serious pursuit of truth, as the students were about equally divided upon every question of importance, such as Liberty and Necessity, the sleep of the soul, and all the articles of theological orthodoxy and heresy; in consequence of which, all these topics were the subject of continual discussion. Our tutors were also of different opinions; Dr. Ashworth taking the orthodox side of every question, and Mr. Clark, the sub-tutor, that of heresy, though always with the greatest modesty.” Memoirs of the Rev. Dr. Joseph Priestley, to the year 1795, written by Himself (London, 1809), pp. 115–16Google Scholar.
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22 “Spirit of the Age,” Himmelfarb, , Essays, pp. 45–46Google Scholar; “Civilization,” ibid., p. 62. Compare Hole, Robert, Pulpits, Politics and Public Order in England, 1760–1832 (Cambridge, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which argues that the Church's political argumentation shifted at the time of the French Revolution from constitutional and dynastic defenses to defenses of the social order.
23 Fifoot, C. H. S., Judge and Jurist in the Reign of Victoria (London, 1958)Google Scholar. Robson, Robert, The Attorney in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1959)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The history of the expert witness in England has apparently not yet been written, but I am indebted to my colleague Professor James C. Mohr for an early view of his history of medical jurisprudence in the United States, in which controversy over the role and authority of professional experts plays a very large part.
24 The best and most temperate introduction to all this is Peterson, M. Jeanne, The Medical Profession in Mid-Victorian London (Berkeley, 1978)Google Scholar. See also Bynum, W. F. and Porter, Roy, eds., Medical Fringe and Medical Orthodoxy, 1750–1850 (London, 1987)Google Scholar. The headiness of these bitter battles is well conveyed in Desmond, Adrian, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago, 1989)Google Scholar.
25 Blaug, Mark, Ricardian Economics (New Haven, 1957)Google Scholar.
26 “Spirit of the Age,” pp. 12–13. Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution is also relevant here. Of the vast literature on the subject some useful titles—the more recent additionally valuable for their references—are Gillispie, C. C., Genesis and Geology (New York, 1951)Google Scholar; Porter, R. S., The Making of Geology: Earth Science in Britain, 1660–1815 (Cambridge, 1977)Google Scholar; Morrell, Jack and Thackray, Arnold, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford, 1981)Google Scholar; and the valuable and wide-ranging articles in Inkster, Ian and Morrell, Jack, eds., Metropolis and Province: Science in British Culture, 1780–1850 (Philadelphia, 1983)Google Scholar. The most remarkable contemporary indictment of established science was Babbage, Charles, Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (London, 1830)Google Scholar.
27 The question of authority recurs again and again in William Robbins's splendid essay in comparative biography, The Newman Brothers (Cambridge, Mass., 1966)Google ScholarPubMed. Vargish, Thomas, Newman: The Contemplation of Mind (Oxford, 1970)Google Scholar, is a fine study of Newman's “grammar of assent.” Murphy, Martin, Blanco White: Self-banished Spaniard (New Haven, 1989)Google Scholar.
28 SirTaylor, Henry, The Statesman (1836), ch. 22Google Scholar. It is tempting to think that Coleridge's idea of the clerisy is in some respect obligated to William Paley, whom Coleridge so thoroughly disparaged. Paley's most original and most emphasized argument for establishment is the maintenance of a class of learned men to sustain and enlarge religious knowledge. These scholars will always be a small part of the whole, but “we sow many seeds to raise one flower. In order to produce a few capable of improving and continuing the stock of Christian erudition, leisure and opportunity must be afforded to great numbers. Original knowledge of this kind can never be universal; but it is of the utmost importance, and it is enough that there be, at all times, found some qualified for such inquiries and in whose concurring and independent conclusions upon each subject, the rest of the Christian community may safely confide; whereas, without an order of clergy educated for the purpose, and led to the prosecution of these studies, by the habits, the leisure, and the object of their vocation it may well be questioned whether the learning itself would not have been lost, by which the records of our faith are interpreted and defended.” Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1786), ch. 10.
29 “Civilization,” Himmelfarb, , Essays, p. 73Google Scholar. Of Herr Teufelsdröckh's chair of Things in General, Carlyle wrote: “To all appearance, the enlightened Government of Weissnichtwo, in founding their New University, imagined they had done enough, if ‘in times like ours,’ as the half-official Program expressed it, ‘when all things are, rapidly or slowly, resolving themselves into Chaos, a Professorship of this kind had been established, whereby, as occasion called, the task of bodying somewhat forth again from such Chaos might be, even slightly, facilitated.’” Sartor Resartus (1834; New York, 1937), p. 18Google Scholar.
30 Green, Joseph Henry, Vital Dynamics. The Hunterian Oration before the Royal College of Surgeons in London, 14th February, 1840 (London, 1840)Google Scholar; An Address delivered in King's College, London, at the Commencement of the Medical Session, October 1, 1832 (London, 1832)Google Scholar. See also Distinction without Separation, in a Letter to the President of the College of Surgeons on the Present State of the Profession (London, 1831)Google Scholar; The Touchstone of Medical Reform; in three letters, addressed to Sir Robert Harry Inglis, Bart., M.P. (London, 1841)Google Scholar; Suggestions respecting the Intended Plan of Medical Reform, respectfully offered to the Legislature and the Profession (London, 1834)Google Scholar; and Mental Dynamics, or Groundwork of a Professional Education. The Hunterian Oration…15th February, 1847 (London, 1847)Google ScholarPubMed. Crabb Robinson's Diary, February 14, 1840, Dr. Williams's Library. Robinson also commented, April 14, 1847, on the second Hunterian Oration, that it was “a more luminous exposition of some of Coleridge's principles than has yet appeared.” Green, J. H., Spiritual Philosophy: founded on the Teachings of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited, with a memoir, by John Simon, 2 vols. (London, 1865)Google Scholar. Green and his gentlemanly colleagues are anathema to Adrian Desmond (The Politics of Evolution, passim).