Sheldon Rothblatt

The eye is attracted to bright colour and the ear to loud noise, and this is no less true in the writing of history than in the workings of nature. Accordingly, most recent detailed work analysing the transformation of higher education in 19th-century England has concentrated on the period after 1850 or 1860 when the ancient universities conspicuously joined the modern world. The trends are more to our liking, or at least we understand them better. The steep climb in matriculations, the diversification of the curriculum, the creation of professional schools, the spread of extra-mural education, the establishment of women’s colleges and the linkages (or lack of them) between the university and industrial sectors have gone into the making of the 20th century. However, the tendency to emphasise the relevance of the Second Industrial Revolution to our own time has led to a certain imbalance in the writing of university history, leaving the earlier decades to the biographer or the historian of religious movements. ‘Common room history’ is what often springs to mind when pre-Victorian or early Victorian Oxbridge is revisited. The general reader, desirous of knowing what part higher education played in the creation of Victorian England, is usually left with the textbook conclusion that the two senior universities remained in a sound Hanoverian slumber until the century was more than half over. Only occasionally, and then by prodigious effort, did the dons rouse themselves to denounce all attempts at academic reform. The reader’s attention is correspondingly drawn off to other areas of English society where higher education appeared to be responsive and innovative: to the London University, or to the new medical schools and civic universities.

With a titular allusion to Max Weber’s famous essay on the rise of capitalism, Martin Wiener discusses the bewildering question of Britain’s current economic stagnation, retardation, ‘de-industrialisation’ or decline – the word chosen depends upon how the magnitude and finitude of the situation are assessed. Wiener prefers ‘decline’, since he traces the present worrying business posture of Britain back to the later 19th century. Demonstrating a nice eye for the right quotation and example, he has put together lengthy excerpts and a long list of statements from an exceptionally varied range of sources to argue that cultural even more than economic factors account for Britain’s secular slide. Wiener is too careful a scholar to believe that historical causes can be neatly compartmentalised. As he says, culture and economics cannot be separated: but heuristically he has selected culture as the operative variable. He briefly defines culture as the outlook and mentality of the élites who influence the values of the rest of society.

It is impossible not to like Matthew Arnold now that we know him so well. There is no stereotyped Victorian sage in this excellent biography, which is a joy to read, nor are there stereotyped fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers or friends. Yes, the formidable Dr Arnold used the cane, and there was solitary confinement of sorts for sons who wilfully refused to do their lessons. Half-knowing medical men of distinguished metropolitan status did invent mechanical appliances for correcting bone deficiencies that resembled leg-irons fastened on captives. Yes, sisters doted on brothers and followed their careers anxiously, not being given similar opportunities for self-expression through gainful employment. Yes, the Victorian world was filled with status-seekers who complained incessantly about income and nursed social slights while prattling on about duty. Yes, the young Matthew Arnold, even the aging, egregiously corpulent Matthew Arnold, was a dandy who enjoyed titles, women in smart attire, the company of a Rothschild, the compliments of Disraeli, the wealth of a Hudson River estate (where in 1883 he went to see Delanos and Astors), and yes, it mattered to him that his famous lecture tour of the United States netted upwards of £1000, since he was perpetually in debt. Yes, Victorian biographers, memoirists, members of the family worried about propriety and suppressed unflattering information. Sometimes we may forgive them. Arnold’s wife Fanny Lucy (‘Flu’) struck out all favourable references to herself – exactly why? At other times we encounter outright lies or convenient omissions. Matthew skipped out on his sister Jane’s wedding to William Forster of the landmark Education Act. Forster’s personal style was flat, but Matthew was also jealous of his political success. Still, he did not give his sister away – in the Lake Country ‘with the great fells standing sentinel’, as family propaganda put it – because he was chasing his future wife abroad.

Whig historiography stood four-square to its age; there was no suggestion that it was addressed to the happy few, or that it appealed to the justice of posterity against the spirit of the times. Posterity has on the whole avenged itself for this neglect. Macaulay will presumably not lack readers for a good while to come, and Stubbs will enjoy affectionate and respectful remembrance in the small circle of medievalists. But on the whole the great Victorian histories now seem like the triumphal arches of a past empire, their vaunting inscriptions increasingly unintelligible to the modern inhabitants: visited occasionally, it may be, as a pissoir, a species of visit naturally brief.

It takes courage to write a book with the scope attempted here. Omissions of central themes, issues and historians are bound to occur, disagreements bound to arise. Reviewers have already called attention to the absence of the Franco-Scottish link in the Enlightenment, the skimpy treatment of Romanticism, the neglect of Lecky and new-wave social science, the scatological treatment of Thomas Carlyle. Other omissions may be added. Frederic Maitland is not very well realised, which is strange given the historians (Kenyon among them) who believe in his greatness. Maitland’s relationship with Leslie Stephen and avid interest in Meredith’s novels would appear to be precisely the kind of detail Kenyon enjoys. Some room might have been found for Sir Henry Mame’s genius, even while debating whether he fits the category of historian. Much better use could have been made of Robert Brentano’s amazing essay on ‘The Sound of Stubbs’, which gets an endnote. But such lists are unimpressively easy to compile and doing so is a sort of Actonian party game, though one encouraged by Kenyon’s general tone and approach.