Intellect and character in Victorian England : Mark Pattison and the invention of the don / H.S. Jones.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jones, H. S. (H. Stuart)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Pattison, Mark, 1813-1884.

Pattison, Mark.

Lincoln College (University of Oxford)--Presidents--Biography.

Lincoln College (University of Oxford).

College presidents--England--Biography.

College presidents.

Presidents.

England.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

viii, 285 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Introduction. The invention of the don 1

Part I Lives 13

1 'No history but a mental history' 15

The wild boy of Wensleydale 16

Oxford: discovering the self 19

Into the Tractarian whirlpool: Newman and his impact 24

The college tutor 36

Europe's speculators: the encounter with Germany 43

Coining the ore into sixpences: the writer and his public 51

2 'Into the abysses, or no one knows where' 64

The prize: election to the rectorship 64

The dream of happiness 71

Unrivalled leisure: the Rector of Lincoln 85

3 Memoirs and memories 104

The subjective life of the scholar 105

The Memoirs 113

The Victorian reception of the Memoirs 120

Literary representations 132

After the Victorians: some twentieth-century survivals 136

Part II Ideas 143

4 Manliness and good learning 145

Preaching the life of learning 149

In defence of the philosophical life 161

The vocation of the scholar 166

5 The endowment of learning 178

Suggestions on Academical Organisation 184

Endowments 193

Culture and democracy 206

Learning and liberal education 209

6 The history of ideas as self-culture 219

The discovery of intellectual history 219

Religion and the age of reason 231

The critique of positivism 244

Epilogue. The don as intellectual? 256.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-277) and index.

ISBN:

9780521876056

0521876052

OCLC:

82367674