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VICTORIAN PIETY PRACTICED

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2008

MICHAEL O'BRIEN
MICHAEL O'BRIEN*
Affiliation:
Faculty of History, University of Cambridge
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Extract

For some time, there has been reason for imagining that we live in neo-Victorian times. We are awash in restless evangelicals, profligate of stern and apocalyptic advice. We have had praying leaders who imagine that foreigners, usually with beards, require reform and invasion. Celts threaten secession and the Union is extolled. There is much talk of families, education, and the anxieties of class. Our novels grow long and vexed, and even have plots. Historians seek the common reader and write meandering narratives, full of metaphor, which may be purchased at railway stations.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , April 2008 , pp. 153 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

1 Collini, Stefan, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 121–69Google Scholar; idem, English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 119–43.

2 Strong, E. W., “William Whewell and John Stuart Mill: Their Controversy about Scientific Knowledge,” Journal of the History of Ideas 16 (April 1955), 209–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yeo, Richard, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fisch, Menachem, William Whewell, Philosopher of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Fisch, Menachem and Schaffer, Simon, eds., William Whewell, a Composite Portrait (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Henderson, James P., Early Mathematical Economics: William Whewell and the British Case (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996)Google Scholar.

3 See, for example, Winch, Donald, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 287, 372, 377Google Scholar; Hilton, Boyd, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 610Google Scholar; Gillispie, Charles Coulston, Genesis and Geology: A Study in the Relations of Scientific Thought, Natural Theology, and Social Opinion in Great Britain, 1790–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), passimGoogle Scholar; Collini, Stefan, Winch, Donald, and Burrow, John, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 71, 80, 344, 346CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 “Someone having said of Whewell that his forte was science, ‘Yes,’ assented Sydney Smith, ‘and his foible is omniscience’”: quoted in Todhunter, I., William Whewell, D. D., Master of Trinity College, Cambridge: An Account of His Writings with Selections from His Literary and Scientific Correspondence, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1876), 1: 410Google Scholar.

5 This is argued in Annan, Noel, Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 1984), 179Google Scholar. On Whewell's elitism see Searby, Peter, A History of the University of Cambridge, Vol. 3: 1750–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 450CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which quotes Whewell on the discovery and dispersal of “Fundamental Ideas”: “One idea after another, of those which constitute the basis of science, becomes distinct, first in the minds of discoverers, then in the minds of all cultured men, till a general clearness of thought illuminates the land; and thus the torch of knowledge is handed forwards, thousands upon thousands lighting their lamps as it passes on; while still from time to time some new Prometheus catches a fresh light from heaven, to spread abroad among men in like manner.”

6 Mill's Autobiography, quoted in Snyder (4).

7 There was a student parody of Whewell, which requested that “the Master may not disturb the devotions of the congregation by his loud responses: that Mr. Whewell may learn the manners of a gentleman.” See Winstanley, D. A., Early Victorian Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 392Google Scholar.

8 Winstanley, Early Victorian Cambridge, 79, 141, 405–7; Fowler, Laurence and Fowler, Helen, comps., Cambridge Commemorated: An Anthology of University Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 197–98Google Scholar; Searby, University of Cambridge, 1750–1870, 445–55; Annan, Noel, The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses (London: HarperCollins, 1999), 119Google Scholar.

9 In recent memory, one must single out Sproat, John G., “The Best Men”: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Kelley, Robert, The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal-Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969)Google Scholar; Kloppenberg, James T., Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Turner, James, The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Rodgers, Daniel T., Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap, 1998)Google Scholar. But, arguably, literary scholars have been more assiduous, for example Weisbuch, Robert, Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Giles, Paul, Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 May, Henry F., The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time, 1912–1917 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969; first published 1959), 9Google Scholar.

11 An ambivalence clear even in this book, but most clearly in his autobiography; see May, Henry F., Coming to Terms: A Study in Memory and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)Google Scholar.