The Meanings of ‘An Intellectual’: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century English Usage

PETER ALLEN The Meanings of I An Intellectual': Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century English Usage I According to T.w. Heyck, 'no one was called "anintellectual'"in England before the 1870s. In the early and mid-Victorian periods we find 'men of letters,' 'cultivators of science,' and various terms describing professionals ofdifferent sorts, but we do not find 'intellectuals.' The emergence of the new term has allowed us to ascribe a social role to intellectuals throughout history, butin so doing we impose a characteristicallymodern idea on the past. The change is more than verbal: it is 'a profound transformation of the economic, social and conceptual relations in which writers and thinkers stood." This seems a reasonable argument, but just what was the transformation that the new term signalled? One approach to this complex topic might be to examine more closely the linguistic phenomenon that Heyck has identified. This paper traces the rise of the new idea by considering not just 'an intellectual' but several terms related to it. I conclude that nineteenth-century usage was not so entirely different from our own as we might think. In both centuries 'intellectual' and its related forms have been used for two very different purposes that are easily confounded, especially since one of the two reflects a bias on the part of highly educated people that is all too rarely admitted. The modern idea of 'an intellectual' is ofcourse an international phenomenon, and English usage was decisively influenced by developments in French, German, and Russian. Are-examination of the stages by which the idea was established in English shows that the term was applied in at least three distinct senses and continues to be used in all three, usually without recognition of this fact. The current widespread acceptance of the term is a very recent development and seems to derive from the intense interest in the idea of 'intellectuals' shown by academics from the late 1950S to the present. For all the efforts of the academics (and perhaps because of them), the term remains ill defined and highly questionable. Its value for objective description is usually limited by subjective, vague, or incomplete definitions , so that it often seems as elusive as the nineteenth-century term 'a gentleman.' Yet since the idea of 'an intellectual' is directly related to the UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 55, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1986 AN INTELLECTUAL' 343 continuing struggle between the organized forces of high culture and popular culture, it may be too much to expect anything else. II 'Toar rul 101 100, gammon and spinnage, the frog he wouldn't, and high cockolorum,' said the Dodger: with a slight sneer on his intellectual countenance . (Oliver Twist)' Although the noun 'intellectual' is uncommon in nineteenth-century English, the adjective and its adverb certainly are not. I had no sooner read T.W. Heyck's account of the scarcity of these words than they seemed to leap at me from every nineteenth-century text I opened. The substantial entry under 'intellectual' in Poole's Index to Periodical Literature would itself be enough to show how common this usage was in both Britain and North America.) Heyck's point is not that the words themselves were rare but that they were rarely applied to people so as to suggest a distinct social role, and this seems true if we look at this issue alone. Yet we cannot conclude that the idea of an intellectual person or of intellectual work was unusual in the nineteenth century. The modern idea of 'an intellectual' emerged from earlier ideas for which the word 'intellectual' was also used. In both modern and nineteenth-century usage these terms are confusing . They describe both mental and cultural competence, but the latter is spoken ofas though it were the former. Ifwe say a person is intellectually negligible or a task is intellectually challenging we normally mean that the person is unintelligent or the task is complicated. In this usage we evaluate the person or task in the light of human mental activity considered generally. A writer on women's suffrage in the Manchester Examiner for 26 May 1884 argued that it is 'frivolous to ask whether woman is intellectually...