Liberal Intellectuals and Public Culture in Modern Britain, 1815–1914: Making Words Flesh (review)

Readers of The Difference Engine (1990), William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s science fiction novel about a Victorian world turned upside down by a precocious computing revolution, will remember the backdrop: the rise of a coalition of scientists, engineers, industrial entrepreneurs, and skilled workers; the overthrow of the old aristocracy and succession of a new meritocracy; and the ongoing convolutions of class struggle and interstate rivalry. For its play with history—radically accelerating historical processes, recombining events, and altering outcomes—the novel is good to think with. In particular, the character William Mallory, a paleontologist who supports a catastrophist view of natural history, throws into sharp relief the uncertainties of a career and a culture made up as they go. Yet the demands of the plot compress the historical unfolding of a society no longer bound by ordained authority into just a couple of decades, fictively bracketed by violent crises in the early 1830s and the mid-1850s.

In his deeply researched and gracefully written Liberal Intellectuals and Public Culture in Modern Britain, 1815–1914, William C. Lubenow shows that the actual processes of social and cultural formation were gradual, complex, uneven, and open-ended. He is concerned with the nature, spread, and limits of liberal values among educated and cultured Victorians and Edwardians. Rather than new departures in political economy, popular movements, or party politics, he takes as his starting point the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and the granting of Catholic emancipation between 1828 and 1829. These reforms, which broke up the constitutional and political basis for a variety of confessional restrictions and biases in higher education, the professions, public service, science, and religion, opened up possibilities for new ways of living and thinking. Liberal values and the institutional and social infrastructures underpinning them allowed intellectuals to work with these possibilities and cope with the accompanying uncertainties.

Lubenow’s wide-ranging study goes well beyond the familiar narrative of the rise and fall of nineteenth-century British liberalism. Chapter 1 examines the decadeslong effort to end subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles as a qualification for various Oxbridge degrees and fellowships, showing, among other things, that reform allowed Christianity to play a freer role in public culture and liberals to engage constructively with issues of faith, doubt, and difference. Chapter 2 gauges the ways in which liberal values became foundations for “intellectual authority in the universities” and “social authority in the professions” (29). Tracking the social origins and career paths of Oxbridge students, Lubenow illuminates the ways in which a reformed education in such seemingly unpromising subjects as classics and mathematics prepared the sons of not a few old clerical and landed families to enter the proliferating new professions. Chapter 3, with a nod to Noel Annan’s thesis of an “intellectual aristocracy” (qtd. in Lubenow 25), maps the constitution of a “new regime of social worth” through families that valued learning, writing, and striving (63). The histories of such families crystallize fluid social and political changes leading not to a contest between the aristocracy and the middle class but to a convergence centered on liberal academic and professional culture. The aristocrat George Curzon, a prize-winning student, hard-working traveler and writer, and aspiring imperial man, offers an excellent example of liberal “self-making” (86).

Chapter 4 reveals the “invisible hand of conviviality” in clubs and societies, which formed broad networks that could supercede narrow oligarchic affiliations and mitigate sharp political divisions (113). Lubenow also shows the importance of friendship, extending across the male homosocial world from schools, colleges, and clubs to intimate relationships. Chapter 5 uses the examples of Greek, statistics, literature, and history to argue that liberal values fostered something more than academic and professional expertise. These disciplines provided ways to know, think, and act in an endlessly changing world. Chapters 6 and 7 seek to explain why liberalism on...