Intellect and Character in Victorian England: Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don (review)

Historians of higher education now view the nineteenth century as a period of major transition for Oxford and Cambridge as each institution became less insular, more secular, and more accountable to the English nation at large. Mark Pattison emblemizes this transition for Victorian Oxford. He was admittedly not prominent as a university reformer, nor did he leave any major work of enduring scholarship. Nevertheless, H. S. Jones argues that Pattison is significant because of his extended and influential reflections on the nature of the academic vocation and the aims of a university. In this careful intellectual biography, Jones presents Pattison's vision of the university don as someone with "a calling to the lifelong task of mental cultivation for its own sake" (9). As Pattison did not expound a systematic body of thought, Jones's aim is to characterize Pattison's "intellectual temper" rather than explicate Pattison's ideas or provide a complete biographical account (12).

Jones's exposition is divided into two sections, one on biographical aspects and the other on intellectual themes; in both sections, however, intellectual considerations are placed at the fore with emphasis on Pattison's writings. Pattison's early and eventful Oxford career included his involvement with the Tractarian movement, his evolution away from any sort of doctrinal orthodoxy in his religious views, the striking episode in which Pattison lost the election for rector of Lincoln College due to internal intrigues (an episode viewed as the model for C. P. Snow's The Masters [1951]), and Pattison's extended visit to Germany in the late 1850s to survey German academic institutions. During this period Pattison also penned his contribution on eighteenth-century religious thought to Essays and Reviews, and the controversy associated with its perceived liberal theological outlook came to color Pattison's subsequent reputation. The substantial influence that Pattison had on Victorian society is evinced by the reaction to his death and by the attention paid by both Victorian contemporaries and subsequent scholars to Pattison's posthumously published memoirs.

Jones gives extended consideration to the oft-noted parallels between Pattison and Edward Casaubon, George Eliot's fictional character in Middlemarch (1871–72). Jones doesn't deny the striking parallels in their respective May-December marriages and also acknowledges Eliot's likely allusion to Pattison's major study of the French Renaissance scholar Isaac Casaubon. Contrary to some previous characterizations of Pattison's marriage, Jones argues that, although it ultimately fell apart, Pattison's marriage was quite happy during its first decade (unlike that of Eliot's Dorothea and Casaubon). He also observes that Pattison did not share the dour demeanor of Eliot's Casaubon and unlike Casaubon was prolific and influential in his publications. Jones suggests that Eliot intended elements of resemblance between Pattison and the fictional Casaubon more facetiously than maliciously.

The book's second section explores Pattison's vision of the individual scholar, the university, and the discipline of intellectual history. Jones employs Pattison's sermons among other sources to develop Pattison's view of the academic vocation. According to this view, the overriding aim of the individual scholar was his own ongoing self-improvement. Such self-improvement entails elements of both intellect and character, hence the title of Jones's monograph. It was not a vision emphasizing research for its own sake or for utilitarian purposes. Jones suggests that Isaac Casaubon, as characterized in Pattison's major study, embodied Pattison's vision of the scholar as ongoing self-improver.

Jones claims—counter to some influential accounts such as those of John Sparrow—that Pattison was not seeking to abolish college fellowships, to merge the colleges of Oxford into the larger university, nor to transform Oxford into a research university along German lines. He argues convincingly that Pattison sought only to reorient the emphasis for college fellowships away from teaching and towards scholarly self-development or, as...