Intellect and Character in Victorian England
Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don

A major study of a distinguished Victorian intellectual at the epicentre of the revolutions transforming English academic and intellectual life.

H. S. Jones (Author)

9780521876056, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 June 2007

294 pages
23.5 x 15.5 x 3 cm, 0.614 kg

'Stuart Jones has produced a first-rate intellectual biography of one of the most formidable intellectual figures in nineteenth-century Britain…' Journal of Ecclesiastical History

In the Victorian period English universities were transformed beyond recognition, and the modern academic profession began to take shape. Mark Pattison was one of the foremost Oxford dons in this crucial period, and articulated a distinctive vision of the academic's vocation frequently at odds with those of his contemporaries. In the first serious study of Pattison as a thinker, Stuart Jones shows his importance in the cultural and intellectual life of the time: as a proponent of the German idea of the university, as a follower of Newman who became an agnostic and a thoroughly secular intellectual, and as a pioneer in the study of the history of ideas. Pattison is now remembered (misleadingly) as the supposed prototype for Mr Casaubon in George Eliot's Middlemarch, but this book retrieves his status as one of the most original and self-conscious of Victorian intellectuals.

Introduction: The invention of the don
Part I. Lives: 1. 'No History but a Mental History'
2. 'Into the abysses, or no one knows where'
3. Memoirs and memories
Part II. Ideas: 4. Manliness and good learning
5. The endowment of learning
6. The history of ideas as self-culture
Epilogue: The don as intellectual?

Subject Areas: British & Irish history [HBJD1], History [HB]