Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T05:37:57.493Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

From Men of Letters to Intellectuals: The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Nineteenth-Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

T.W. Heyck
T.W. Heyck*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

One of the strangest facts about intellectual life in the Victorian years in England is that for most of the period there does not seem to have been any intellectuals. There was no group of people designated as “the intellectuals” or even “the intellectual elite.” Only if one chooses to take a functional definition of intellectuals—for instance, people “who create, distribute, and apply culture, that is, the symbolic world of man”—then can it be said that Victorian England had “intellectuals.” However, Egyptian temple priests, medieval monks, and modern university professors can all be grouped this way. Thus this definition is misleading, for not all thinkers have stood in the same relation to their own societies, nor have societies looked upon their thinkers in the same way, or even considered that the various kinds of thinkers should be considered as a group or class. In the Victorian period, from about 1830 to 1870, the English almost never used phrases such as “an intellectual” or “the intellectuals” as nouns to denote a particular kind of person or group of persons. Such phrases had been used in the romantic period, and they were readopted with increasing frequency from the 1870s on; but in the early and mid-Victorian years, the English used terms such as “men of letters,” literary men, poets, prophets, scientists to denote those who gave symbolic interpretation to experience.

The change in usage from “men of letters” and other such terms to “intellectuals” was no trivial change in linguistic style; rather, it marked a profound transformation of the economic, social, and conceptual relations in which the writers and thinkers stood.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , Fall 1980 , pp. 158 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1980

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 The quotation is from Lipset, Seymour Martin, Political Man: The Social Basis of Politics (Garden City, N.Y., 1963), p. 333Google Scholar. See also Shils, Edward, “Intellectuals,” Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1968), Vol. 7, pp. 399–415Google Scholar; and “The Intellectual as Participant in and Critic of Society,” Spectrum, Udin, S. (ed.), (Jakarta, 1978), pp. 499–531Google Scholar.

2 English dictionaries did not carry “intellectual” as a noun designating a particular kind of person until the 1880s. See, for example, Samuel Johnson's, A Dictionary of the English Language (many editions), or Richardson, Charles, A New Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1858)Google Scholar. The O.E.D. records no use of “intellectual” as a noun denoting a particular kind of person between 1813 and 1884. Byron used the term in his Journal in 1813, according to the O.E.D. Thomas De Quincey used the phrase “an intellectual woman” in Confessions of an English Opium Eater (New York, 1899; first publ. 1822), p. 26Google Scholar. George Eliot referred to an “assemblage of intellectuals” in a letter in 1852; Haight, Gordon, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford, 1968), p. 110Google Scholar. Newman used “intellectual man” in On the Scope and Nature of University Education (London, 1915; first publ. 1852), p. xxxixGoogle Scholar. There are a few other examples of the use of phrases like “intellectual classes” to designate educated people. Steven Marcus has also noted that the term “intellectual” was not in use in the middle of the nineteenth century in Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class (New York, 1975), p. viiGoogle Scholar.

3 See Gross, John, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (London, 1969)Google Scholar. My own account of the men of letters seeks both to broaden the context in which their work should be understood and to make more precise the causes of their decline.

4 This link is discussed in Dudek, Louis, Literature and the Press: A History of Printing, Printed Media, and Their Relation to Literature (Toronto, 1960)Google Scholar, passim. But it can best be seen in biographies of Victorian men of letters, of which a marvelous example is Johnson, Edgar, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph 2 Vols. (New York, 1952)Google Scholar.

5 Gross, , Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, p. 88Google Scholar; Saunders, J. W., The Profession of English Letters (London, 1964)Google Scholar, Chaps. IX and X; and Altick, R.D., The English Common Reader (Chicago, 1957), pp. 85–94Google Scholar and Chaps. 12 and 14.

6 Griest, Guinevere, Mudie's Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel (Bloomington, Ind., 1970)Google Scholar; Gettmann, Royal A., A Victorian Publisher: A Study of the Bentley Papers (Cambridge, 1960)Google Scholar; and Nowell-Smith, Simon (ed.), Letters to Macmillan (New York, 1967)Google Scholar.

7 Holloway, John, The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (New York, 1965)Google Scholar, passim.

8 There are many discussions of this point: Holloway, Victorian Sage; Tillotson, Kathleen, Novels of the Eighteen Forties (Oxford, 1954)Google Scholar; Stang, Richard, The Theory of the Novel in England, 1850-1870 (New York, 1959)Google Scholar; and Warren, Alba H. Jr., English Poetic Theory, 1825-1865 (Princeton, 1950)Google Scholar.

9 Carlyle, Thomas, On Heroes and Hero Worship (Everyman's Library ed., London, 1908), pp. 383–84Google Scholar.

10 Mill, J.S., Autobiography (Library of the Liberal Arts, New York, 1957), pp. 144–45Google Scholar; Packe, Michael St. John, The Life of John Stuart Mill (New York, 1970), pp. 251–72Google Scholar.

11 Macaulay, T.B., The Works of Lord Macaulay, Trevelyan, Margaret (ed.), 8 Vols. (London, 1866), V, p. 155Google Scholar.

12 Lewes, G.H., “The Principles of Success in Literature,” Fortnightly Review (May 1865), p. 90Google Scholar.

13 Bulwer, Edward Lytton, England and the English, 3rd ed., 2 Vols. (London, 1834), II, p. 97Google Scholar.

14 Aytoun, W.E., “The Royal Scottish Academy,” Blackwood's (May 1869), p. 592Google Scholar.

15 Cannon, Susan Faye, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (New York, 1978)Google Scholar; Foote, George A., “Science and Its Function in Early Nineteenth-Century England,” Osiris (1954), pp. 438–54Google Scholar; and Thackray, Arnold, John Dalton: Critical Assessments of His Life and Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Cannon, Science in Culture, Chaps. 1 and 2; Gillispie, C.C., Genesis and Geology (New York, 1959)Google Scholar, esp. Chap. I; Shapin, Steven and Thackray, Arnold, “Prosopography as a Research Tool in the History of Science: The British Scientific Community, 1700-1900,” History of Science (1974), pp. 1–28Google ScholarPubMed, esp. p. 11.

17 Cannon, . Scince in Culture. pp. 17–20Google Scholar; Evans, Joan, John Ruskin (London, 1954). pp. 30–31Google Scholar. For Arnold, see p. 175.

18 For a few examples of the kind of scientific articles that appeared in the leading reviews, see Herschel, John, Essays from the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, with Addresses and Other Pieces (London, 1857)Google Scholar; Brewster, David, “Memoir and Correspondence of the Late Sir James Edward Smith,” Edinburgh Review (April 1833), pp. 39–69Google Scholar; Crosse, John, “Review of A. von Humboldt's Kosmos and the fourth edition of Chambers' “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,” Westminster Review (September 1845), pp. 152–203Google Scholar.

19 For evidence that the men of letters recognized differences between their activities and those of science, see Evans, Joan, Ruskin, p. 182Google Scholar; Trevelyan, G.O., Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, 2 Vols. (New York, 1875), I, p. 659Google Scholar.

20 Babbage, Charles, Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (London, 1830)Google Scholar.

21 Cannon, , Science in Culture, p. 249Google Scholar.

22 Cannon, Science in Culture, Chap. 2; Svidrys, Romualdas, “The Rise of Physical Science at Victorian Cambridge,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, Vol. 2 (1970), pp. 127–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, F. Sherwood, “The Teaching of Science at Oxford in the Nineteenth Century,” Annals of Science (March 1952), pp. 82–112Google Scholar.

23 Kargon, Robert H., Science in Victorian Manchester (Baltimore, 1977)Google Scholar, Chap. 1; Morrell, J.B., “Individualism and the Structure of British Science in 1830,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, Vol. 3 (1971), pp. 183–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shapin, and Thackray, , “Prosopography as a Research Tool in the History of Science,” pp. 6–8Google Scholar; Thackray, , Dalton, pp. 58–59Google Scholar.

24 Morrell, J.B., “London Institutions and Lyell's Career: 1820-41,” The British Journal for the History of Science (July 1976), p. 136Google Scholar; Rudwick, M.J.S., “The Foundation of the Geological Society of London: Its Scheme for Cooperative Research and Its Struggle for Independence,” The British Journal for the History of Science (December 1963), pp. 325–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 For the competing philosophies of science, see Ellegard, Alvar, Darwin and the General Reader (Göteborg, 1958)Google Scholar, Chap. 9, Cantor, G.N., “Henry Brougham and the Scottish Methodological Tradition,” Stadies in the History and Philosophy of Science (May 1971), pp. 69–89Google Scholar; Whewell's, WilliamTheory of Scientific Method, Butts, Robert E. (ed.), (Pittsburgh, 1968)Google Scholar; Mill, J.S., A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, (Used here is New York, 1867)Google Scholar; Strong, E.W., “William Whewell and John Stuart Mill: Their Controversy about Scientific Knowledge,” Journal of the History of Ideas (April 1955), pp. 209–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Whewell, William, Novum Organon Renovatum, 3rd ed. (1858), in Butt's, (ed.)Google Scholar, Whewell's, Theory of Scientific Method, esp. pp. 148, 155–64, 171, 269–70Google Scholar; Herschel, John, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (London, 1832), pp. 10–11, 14, 76, 79–80Google Scholar, and Chap. IV; Brougham, Henry, A Discourse on the Objects, Advantages, and Pleasures of Science (New York, 1855), pp. 56–57Google Scholar.

27 Herschel, Preliminary Discourse, Part III; Whewell, , Novum Organon Renovatum, pp. 166–67Google Scholar; Prince Albert, Presidential Address to the BAAS, in 1859, in Basalla, George, Coleman, William, and Kargon, Robert (eds), Victorian Science (Garden City, N.Y., 1970), p. 51Google Scholar.

28 Orange, A.D., “The Origins of the British Association for the Advancement of Science,” British Journal for the History of Science (December 1972), pp. 152–76CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Cannon, , Science in Culture, Chap. 7, esp. pp. 208–09Google Scholar.

29 Babbage, , Decline of Science in England, pp. 14–23Google Scholar; Bulwer, , England and the English, II, pp. 171–75Google Scholar; Herschel, , Preliminary Discourse, pp. 10–11Google Scholar.

30 Brougham, , Pleasures of Science, pp. 114–30Google Scholar; Herschel, , Preliminary Discourse, pp. 10–11, 14–15Google Scholar; Herschel, , “Review of Mrs. Somerville's Mechanism of the Heavens,” in Essays from the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, pp. 46–47Google Scholar; Whewell, , Novum Organon Renovatum, pp. 108, 167Google Scholar. See also the quote from Darwin's note-book in Himmelfarb, Gertrude, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.), 1962, p. 153Google Scholar.

31 The position of the universities in Victorian life is discussed by Roach, J.P.C., “Victorian Universities and the National Intelligentsia,” Victorian Studies (December 1959), pp. 131–50Google Scholar. See also Kent, Christopher, Brains and Numbers: Elitism, Comtism, and Democracy in Mid-Victorian England (Toronto, 1978)Google Scholar, Chaps. 1-3; and Harvie, Christopher, The Lights of Liberalism (London, 1976)Google Scholar, Chaps. 1-3.

32 For analysis of the universities, see: Rothblatt, Sheldon, Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (London, 1968)Google Scholar; Rothblatt, Sheldon, Tradition and Change in English Liberal Education (London, 1976)Google Scholar; Ward, W.R., Victorian Oxford (London, 1965)Google Scholar; The Universities in the Nineteenth Century, Sanderson, Michael (ed.), (London, 1975)Google Scholar; Campbell, Lewis, The Nationalization of the Old English Universities (London, 1901)Google Scholar; and Bill, E.W.G., University Reform in Nineteenth-Century Oxford: A Study of Henry Halford Vaughan, 1811-1885 (Oxford, 1973)Google Scholar.

33 Pattison, Mark, Memoirs (London, 1885), p. 70Google Scholar.

34 See, for example, Thackeray, W.M., Pendennis (1848)Google Scholar; Hughes, Thomas, Tom Brown at Oxford (1861)Google Scholar; Bede, Cuthbert [Rev. Bradley, Edward], Verdant Green (1854–1857)Google Scholar; Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers and The Last Chronicle of Barset. The most devastating portrait of a scholar is Casaubon in George Eliot's Middlemarch. See also Brightfield, Myron, Victorian England in the Novel, 4 Vols. (Los Angeles, 1968), III, pp. 397–409Google Scholar; and esp. Proctor, Mortimer R., The English University Novel (Berkeley, 1957)Google Scholar.

35 The literature by and about the institutional claims of Victorian scientists is enormous. See, for example, Babbage, Decline of Science in England; Brougham, Pleasures of Science; and Huxley, T.H., “On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences,” Collected Essays (New York, 1894), III, pp. 38–65Google Scholar; and “Scientific Education: Notes of an After-Dinner Speech,” Collected Essays, III, pp. 111–33Google Scholar. For secondary accounts, see Crowther, J.G., Statesmen of Science (London, 1965)Google Scholar; Cardwell, D.S.L., The Organisation of Science in England (London, 1957)Google Scholar, Chaps. III-V; and Jensen, J. Vernon, “The X Club: Fraternity of Victorian Scientists,” British Journal for the History of Science (June 1970), pp. 63–72CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

36 Brougham, , Pleasures of Science, pp. 114–29Google Scholar.

37 Stanley, Oma, “T.H. Huxley's Treatment of ‘Nature’,” Journal of the History of Ideas (January-May 1957), pp. 120–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Irvine, William, Apes, Angels, and Victorians: Darwin, Huxley, and Evolution (Cleveland, 1959)Google Scholar, Part I esp. Chaps. III and IX. I have benefited from many conversations with David Roos on this subject.

38 Babbage, Decline of Science, passim.

39 Quoted in Huxley, Leonary, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, 2 Vols. (New York, 1901), I, pp. 74–75Google Scholar.

40 Bulwer, , England and the English, II, p. 175Google Scholar.

41 Kargon, Science in Victorian Manchester, Chap. 5; Sanderson, Michael, The Universities and British Industry, 1850-1970 (London, 1972)Google Scholar, Chaps. 3 and 4.

42 Quoted in Kargon, , Science in Victorian Manchester, p. 92Google Scholar.

43 Huxley, T.H., “A Liberal Education; and Where to Find It,” Macmillan's Magazine (March 1868), pp. 367–78Google Scholar; and “Universities Actual and Ideal,” Collected Essays, III, pp. 189–234Google Scholar. Col. Alexander Strange wanted the state to establish national laboratories for scientific research, but Huxley preferred to aim at Oxbridge. See Strange's, testimony and Huxley's, questions in Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science: Minutes of Evidence, Vol. II (1874, c. 958), pp. 75–92, 348–49Google Scholar.

44 Jensen, “The X Club: Fraternity of Victorian Scientists.” For an exposition of the ideology of scientism, or “scientific naturalism,” see Turner, Frank Miller, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven, 1974)Google Scholar, Chap. 2.

45 For the ideal of liberal education and its role in the universities, see Rothblatt, Sheldon, Tradition and Change in English Liberal Education (London, 1976)Google Scholar; McPherson, Robert G., Theory of Higher Education in Nineteenth Century England (Athens, Ga., 1959)Google Scholar; and Gillispie, C.C., “English Ideas of the University in the Nineteenth Century,” in Clap, Margaret (ed.), The Modern University (Ithaca, 1950), pp. 27–55Google Scholar.

46 Huxley, , “A Liberal Education; and Where to Find It,” p. 377Google Scholar.

47 The history of the emergence of these professional disciplineś remains to be written, but several accounts can be recommended: Burrow, J.W., Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge, 1970)Google Scholar; Soffer, Reba N., Ethics and Society in England: The Revolution in the Social Sciences, 1870-1914 (Berkeley, 1978)Google Scholar; and Abrams, Philip, The Origins of British Sociology, 1834-1914 (Chicago, 1968)Google Scholar, all of which emphasize the applied orientation of the social sciences. For the discipline of history, see the excellent unpublished PhD thesis by Jann, Rosemary, “The Art of History in Nineteenth-Century England” (North-western University, 1975)Google Scholar; Gilbert, Felix, “The Professionalization of History in the Nineteenth Century,” in Higham, John, Krieger, Leonard, and Gilbert, Felix (eds.), History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965), pp. 320–39Google Scholar; and Goldstein, Doris S., “J.B. Bury's Philosophy of History,” American Historical Review (October, 1977), pp. 896–919Google Scholar.

48 For the development of philosophy as a discipline, which occurred in part as a reaction against scientific and empiricist claims, see Richter, Melvin, The Politics of Conscience: T.H. Green and His Age (London, 1964)Google Scholar; and “Intellectual and Class Alienation: Oxford Idealist Diagnoses and Prescriptions,” Archives Européenes de Sociologie, Vol. VII (1966), pp. 1–26Google Scholar; and Muirhead, J.H., “The Oxford Chairs of Philosophy: The Need of Reform,” Contemporary Review (November 1898), pp. 724–36Google Scholar. For the claims of literary study to be a scientific profession, see Palgrave, Francis, “The Province and Study of Poetry,” Macmillan's Magazine (March 1886), pp. 332–47Google Scholar; and Dowden, Edward, “Hopes and Fears for Literature,” Fortnightly Review (January 1889), pp. 166–83Google Scholar. Also see Gross, Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, Chap. 6.

49 Herschel, , Preliminary Discourse, p. 18Google Scholar; Whewell, , Novum Organon Renovatum, pp. 103–04Google Scholar; and Whewell, , Of Induction, with Especial Reference to Mr. J. Stuart Mill's System of Logic (London, 1849)Google Scholar, in Butt's, edition, Whewell's Theory of Scientific Method, pp. 265–66Google Scholar; Huxley, , “On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences,” Collected Essays, III, p. 45Google Scholar; Tyndall, John, Faraday as a Discoverer (London, 1868)Google Scholar; and Appleton, C.E., Pattison, Mark, et al., Essays on the Endowment of Research (London, 1876)Google Scholar, esp. Chaps. VII-X.

50 For the movement to endow research in the universities, see Appleton, et al., Essays on the Endowment of Research; Pattison, Mark, Suggestions on Academical Organisation (Edinburgh, 1868)Google Scholar; and Colvin, Sidney, “Fellowships and National Culture,” Macmillan's Magazine (June 1876), pp. 136–42Google Scholar. Also see pp. 175-76.

51 Pattison, , Memoirs, p. 305Google Scholar.

52 Anon., “Present System of Education,” Westminster Review (July 1825), pp. 147–76Google Scholar; Hogge, T.J., “The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge,” Westminster Review (July 1831), pp. 56–69Google Scholar.

53 Adamson, J.W., English Education, 1789-1902 (Cambridge, 1930), p. 81Google Scholar; Campbell, Lewis, On the Nationalisation of the Old English Universities (London, 1901)Google Scholar, Chaps. I-VIII; New, Chester, The Life of Henry Brougham, to 1830 (Oxford, 1961)Google Scholar, Chaps. XIX, XX.

54 SirHamilton, William, “On the State of the English Universities, with More Especial Reference to Oxford,” and “On the Right of Dissenters to Admission into the English Universities,” in Discussions on Philosophy and Literature (New York, 1855), pp. 383–499Google Scholar.

55 Bill, , H.H. Vaughan, p. 49Google Scholar.

56 Rothblatt, , Revolution of the Dons, pp. 88–90, 193–94Google Scholar; and “The Student Sub-culture and the Examination System in Early 19th Century Oxbridge,” in Stone, Lawrence, (ed.), The University in Society, 2 Vols. (Princeton, 1974), I pp. 247–303Google Scholar. For remarks on the “new gentry,” see Clark, G. Kitson, The Making of Victorian England (New York, 1967); pp. 253–74Google Scholar.

57 Rothblatt, , Revolution of the Dons, passim, esp. pp. 90–93Google Scholar; Engel, Arthur, “Emerging Concepts of the Academic Profession at Oxford,” in Stone, (ed.), University in Society, I, pp. 305–52Google Scholar.

58 Royal Commission on Oxford University, 1852 [c. 1482], Vol. XXII, pp. 90–103, 153–71Google Scholar; Royal Commission—Cambridge University, 1852–1853 [c. 1559], Vol. XLIV, pp. 74–88, 201–22Google Scholar.

59 Sparrow, John, Mark Pattison and the Idea of a University (Cambridge, 1967), p. 115Google Scholar.

60 Sparrow, , Pattison, pp. 114–19Google Scholar; Rothblatt, , Revolution of the Dons, pp. 169–76, 210–11, 221, 227–28, 244–45Google Scholar.

61 Procter, The English University Novel, passim.

62 On the relegation of the professoriate to research, see Engel, , “Emerging Concepts of the Academic Profession,” pp. 337–39, 345, 351Google Scholar. Engel emphasizes that even the tutors regarded learning as a higher level activity than teaching in the 1850s.

63 Sparrow, , Pattison, pp. 118–20Google Scholar; Sayce, A. H., “Results of the Examination System at Oxford,” in Essays on the Endowment of ResearchGoogle Scholar.

64 Freeman, E.A., “Oxford after Forty Years—I,” Contemporary Review (May 1887), p. 611Google Scholar.

65 Pattison, , Suggestions on Academical Organisation, p. 146Google Scholar.

66 Sayce, A.H., “The Needs of the Historical Sciences,” in Essays on the Endowment of Research, p. 198Google Scholar.

67 This tradition is brilliantly analyzed in Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society, 1780-1850 (New York, 1958), esp. Part IGoogle Scholar.

68 A splendid account of this development is Hough, Graham, The Last Romantics (London, 1961)Google Scholar.

69 This theme is discussed in Knights, Ben, The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1978)Google Scholar, from which I have learned much. However, I do not think that Knights accounts for the changes that took place in the idea of a “clerisy.” See also Kent, Christopher, Brains and Numbers: Elitism, Comtism, and Democracy in Mid-Victorian England (Toronto, 1978)Google Scholar.

70 Coleridge, S.T., On the Constitution of Church and State, According to the Idea of Each. Complete works of Coleridge, S.T., Shedd, (ed.), (New York, 1853), VI, p. 53Google Scholar.

71 Ibid., p. 52.

72 Arnold, Matthew, Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge, 1960), pp. 108–09Google Scholar.

73 Griest, , Mudie's Circulating Library, pp. 61, 83, 149Google Scholar; Nowell-Smith, (ed.), Letters to Macmillan, pp. 130–31Google Scholar; Gettmann, Victorian Publisher, p. 220, 256-57.

74 Arnold, Matthew, “The Literary Influence of Academies,” in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, Super, R.H. (ed.), (Ann Arbor, 1962), III, pp. 32–57Google Scholar.

75 Arnold, Matthew, Schools and Universities on the Continent, in Complete Prose Works (Ann Arbor, 1964), IV, pp. 262, 263Google Scholar.

76 Ibid., p. 318.

77 Roll-Hansen, Diderik, The Academy: 1869-1879: Victorian Intellectuals in Revolt (Copenhagen, 1957Google Scholar; in Anglistica, Vol. VIII, esp. Chaps. I-V; Johnson, John Curtis, “The Academy, 1869-1896: Center of Informed Critical Opinion”; (PhD thesis, Northwestern University, 1958)Google Scholar; Appleton, J.H. and Sayce, A.H., Dr. Appleton: His Life and Literary Relics (London, 1881), pp. 1–107Google Scholar.

78 Quoted in Nature (November 28, 1872), pp. 72–75Google Scholar.

79 Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science (“Devonshire Commission”), Third Report (1873), c. 868, Vol. XXVIII, pp. vii, lvi.

80 Ward, W.R., Victorian Oxford (London, 1965)Google Scholar, Chap. XIII; Adamson, , English Education, pp. 423–24Google Scholar; Sanderson, (ed.), Universities in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 151–52Google Scholar.

81 Wright-Henderson, P.A., “An Old Oxford Common Room,” Blackwood's Magazine (May 1896), p. 669Google Scholar.

82 Harrison, Frederic, Autobiographic Memoirs, 2 Vols. (London, 1911), I, pp. 133–34Google Scholar. See also Freeman, E.A., “Oxford after Forty Years,” I and II (May-June 1887), p. 609–23 and 814–30Google Scholar; Hobson, J.A., “The Academic Spirit in Education,” Contemporary Review (February 1893), pp. 236–47Google Scholar; Bryce, James, “The Future of the English Universities,” Fortnightly Review (March 1883), pp. 382–403Google Scholar. For an opinion that the universities had not changed much, see Vinogradoff, Paul, “Oxford and Cambridge Through Foreign Spectacles,” Fortnightly Review (June 1885), pp. 862–68Google Scholar.

83 Jann, , “The Art of History in Nineteenth-Century England,” pp. 163–64Google Scholar.

84 MacLeod, Roy, “Resources of Science in Victorian England: The Endowment of Science Movement, 1868-1900”, in Mathias, Peter (ed.), Science and Society, 1600-1900 (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 111–66Google Scholar; Sviedrys, , “The Rise of Physical Science at Victorian Cambridge,” pp. 127–45Google Scholar; Sanderson, The Universities and British Industry, Chaps. 1-4.

85 For the number of industrial laboratories in the 1890s, see Sanderson, , Universities and British Industry, p. 20Google Scholar.

86 Whistler, James McNeil, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (New York, 1924), pp. 127–28Google Scholar.

87 Gissing, George, Charles Dickens (Port Washington, N.Y., 1966) pp. 1–2, 75, 80Google Scholar. See also Poole, Adrian, Gissing in Context (London, 1975), pp. 108–09CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Korg, Jacob, George Gissing: A Critical Biography (Seattle, 1963), pp. 71–72Google Scholar.

88 Dudek, Literature and the Press, Chap. IX. For a circle of liberal men of letters in the twentieth century, see Clarke, Peter, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89 Yeats, W.B., Autobiographies (London, 1961), p. 166Google Scholar.

90 In a recent article, D.G. Wright, relying on Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, argues that the “preeminant position” of leading writers in public valuation did not end until the advent of modernism after the First World War: “The Great War, Government, Propaganda and English ‘Men of Letters,’ 1914-16,” Literature and History (Spring 1978), pp. 70–100Google Scholar. However, I agree with many critics who find the origins of modernism and the beginnings of a gap between serious writers and audience in the late nineteenth century.

91 Wedgwood, Julia, “The Moral Influence of George Eliot,” Contemporary Review (February 1881), pp. 173–85Google Scholar; Wedgwood, Julia, “A Study of Carlyle,” Contemporary Review (April 1881), pp. 584–609Google Scholar; Noel, Roden, “The Poetry of Tennyson,” Contemporary Review (February 1885), pp. 202–24Google Scholar; and Bond, R. Warwick, “Ruskin: Man Prophet,” Contemporary Review (July 1900), pp. 118–33Google Scholar.

92 See, for example, Pattison, Mark, “A Chapter of University History,” Macmillan's Magazine (June 1876) pp. 136–42Google Scholar; and Sayce, A.H., “The Needs of “the Historical Sciences,” in Essays on the Endowment of Research, p. 204Google Scholar.

93 Hamerton, P.G., The Intellectual Life (New York, 1885), p. viiiGoogle Scholar.

94 Ibid., p. 433.

95 For some uses of phrases like “the intellectuals” and “the intellectual life of the nation,” see Hobson, , “The Academic Spirit in Education,” pp. 236–47Google Scholar, Oliphant, Margaret, “New Books,” Blackwood's (November 1873), pp. 604–08Google Scholar; Lorimer, James, “Review of First, Second, and Third Reports of Royal Commissioners …”, Edinburgh Review (April 1876), p. 262Google Scholar; Colvin, Sidney, “Fellowships and National Culture,” Macmillan's Magazine (June 1876), pp. 136–42, esp. p. 141Google Scholar; Hillebrand, Karl, “On Half-Culture in Germany: Its Causes and Remedies,” Contemporary Review (August 1880), pp. 199, 203Google Scholar; Wedgwood, Julia, “The Moral Influence of George Eliot,” pp. 176–77Google Scholar; K.V.T., , “The Dreyfus Case: A Study of French Opinion,” Contemporary Review (October 1883), pp. 593–608Google Scholar; Garrett, F. Edmund, “Sir Alfred Milner and His Work,” Contemporary Review (August 1900), p. 153Google Scholar.