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Was this dangerous? George Meredith, whose novels were much admired by the discerning among the intellectual aristocracy, was among the first to use the term. But he did not use it as a term of praise. He used it to highlight the dangers of a meritocracy. In 1859 he wrote in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel:

How soothing it is to intellect – that noble rebel, as the Pilgrim has it – to stand, and bow, and know itself superior! This exquisite compensation maintains the balance: whereas that period anticipated by the Pilgrim, when science shall have produced an intellectual aristocracy, is indeed horrible to contemplate. For what despotism is so black as one the mind cannot challenge? ’Twill be an iron Age.

Meredith forgot that there are always countervailing forces in history. In the second half of the twentieth century the props that underpinned the meritocracy were shaken. Most of the grammar schools, which had so often been the first step on the ladder, became comprehensive schools; the examinations for the public service were altered to take account of the revolution in electronics and the computer age; and people learned to doubt how far scientists, economists and applied sociologists could plan and control the future.

What were these families like? It was the mark of most of them to remain almost exactly where they were placed in society. Josiah Wedgwood had a country house and had married a squire’s daughter, but the Wedgwoods were not a county family and they knew it. Their fortune rested on the pottery and not on land and during the past century and a half they have neither risen nor fallen in the social scale. The families that rose by business, especially the Quaker connections, were affluent enough to enable some of their children to pursue their scholarly studies in leisure; but they had neither the wealth nor the inclination to become magnates and were always liable to need to save a brother whose affairs had failed to prosper. In any event a fortune divided among forty grandchildren did not give the cadet branches the chance to live extravagantly. The Anglican families tended to be less well-to-do. Sound commercial principles were allied to ascetic habits. Even on their meagre stipends the poorer dons thrived and, as few of them were permitted to marry, they saved. Aged twenty-six Henry Sidgwick wrote to his mother from Trinity, ‘I find that I have saved £1,700 and hope to save £400 a year as long as I stay here: in spite of all my travelling, books and the extremely luxurious life that I can hardly help leading.’ A fortnight later he told her that he had opposed a college ball being held because ‘I consider it a most unseemly proceeding on the part of a charitable foundation for the purposes of education and of which the majority are clergymen and … especially as it will be a great expense, and you know my miserly tendencies.’ His luxurious life was evidently restrained.

Restrained because for Sidgwick, as for all of them, the purpose of life was to distinguish in conduct as well as in concept the sham from the genuine, appearance from reality. Appearances were to be exposed and these men were splendidly eccentric in Victorian society in not keeping them up. They groaned at the thought of formal receptions and preferred to wear rough clothes. The gentlemanly Arthur Benson, Sidgwick’s nephew, opined that a don should be well dressed in the style-before-last and obeyed this precept by wearing shapeless flannels. Their self-confidence forbade them to ape the manners of their superiors in rank and their clothes, like their pursuits, were a protest against the pastimes of the upper classes, which became increasingly more gaudy and expensive. They neither hunted nor had the money for vast battues of pheasants. Most of them had lost their roots in their soil and, cut off from country sports, had become town-dwellers. But they had not lost touch with Nature, whom they sought mountaineering in the Alps or on forty-mile tramps or with their botanical satchel and geologist’s hammer. Their manners lacked polish. Indeed they despised it as much as they despised the art of pleasing – that imperative accomplishment for those who enter politics or London society. But they did not become parochial or cut themselves off from London. Many of them lived there, and those who did not kept up with public affairs through dining clubs, where they met their cousins and brothers-in-law in the professions, or sometimes by themselves through participating in politics.

Their good manners appeared in their prose. At its worst it was lucid and free from scholarly jargon. They wrote with a sense of form, of drama, of the possibilities of language; and they wrote not for a scholarly clique but for the intelligent public at large whom they addressed confident that they would be understood. Moreover, their scholarly manners had an ease seldom evident in a parochial professoriate. They declined, with a few exceptions, to follow the pulverising style of German professors. Darwin and Maitland showed that it was possible to argue without breaking heads, and even such controversialists as Huxley were untainted by the odium clericum and distinguished between the charlatan and the wrong-headed. They valued independence and recognised it in others. Because they judged people by an exterior standard of moral and intellectual merit, they never became an exclusive clique and welcomed the penniless son of a dissenting minister as a son-in-law if they believed in his integrity and ability. Because their own proud standards were assured they tolerated a wide variety of belief. They might follow the French sociologist Auguste Comte, they were often followers of Mill, they might be agnostics, or they might continue to adhere to the Church of their fathers; but they respected each other’s beliefs, however deeply convinced that the beliefs were wrong. They were agreed on one characteristic doctrine: that the world could be improved by analysing the needs of society and calculating the possible course of its development.

They could be intimidating to meet. Intellectuals often are. Their sense of responsibility to reason was too great for them to appreciate spontaneous behaviour. Spontaneity is attractive, but its lack of rational consideration irritated them. They were bored by the superficiality of drawing-room gossip, and preferred to have their talk out rather than converse. As infants they had learnt by listening to their parents to extend their vocabulary and talk in grammatical sentences – of which the best known (to an enquiry after his toothache) was the four-year-old Macaulay’s ‘Thank you, madam, the agony is abated.’ When older they subconsciously apprehended from hearing discussions between their elders how to reason logically. They lived in houses in which books were part of existence and the intellect was prized. They developed inner resources for entertaining themselves which did not depend on the ordinary social accomplishments. Competitive examinations at the schools and universities sharpened their minds. Children who did not inherit their parents’ intellectual talents suffered unjustly by feeling that they had failed; children were expected to marry according to their parents’ lights. One who was on the point of marrying an actor was safely brought back to the fold to marry a don. The dedicated agnostic G. M. Trevelyan bore his daughter’s marriage to a scholarly clergyman like a man. But there were limits, and he told his son: ‘I want you to know that your mother and I wish you to be free to marry whom you will. But we will take it hard if she is a Roman Catholic.’

They had their limitations, as every close-knit class must have. Their response to art was at best uncertain. Literature, of course, was in their bones. The poetry and prose of Greece and Rome had been their discipline, and that of their own country filled their leisure hours. They were the first to admire Meredith and Browning and to dethrone Byron for Wordsworth. Goethe and the German poets were admired primarily for the moral precepts which their works embodied. French culture was another matter. Lady Strachey, her children gathered about her, might rise from her seat in the railway carriage as the train steamed into the Gare du Nord and bow to the great city, the mistress of European civilisation, but such a gesture was rare. Matthew Arnold went as far as most were prepared to go in admiring French culture and he made strong reservations. The Parisian haute bourgeoisie combined a passion for general ideas with an interest in the arts, the theatre and opera, in a way which was impossible for them. Their experience of the visual arts was meagre. Beautiful objects and elegant rooms were not to them necessities: their comfortable ugly houses in Kensington, Bayswater and north Oxford, rambling, untidy, full of gloryholes and massive furnishings and staffed by two or three despairing servants, were dedicated to utility, not beauty. Some may have bought some good pieces of furniture, a very few of the more prosperous may have invested in Italian primitives, others were affected by the Pre-Raphaelites, but in the main they groped after artistic fashion in a manner inconsistent with their natural self-confidence.

To this there were exceptions. When Philip Webb, Norman Shaw and Bodley began to design houses, not in ponderous stucco or bewildering gothic, but in the potpourri of styles which came to be known as Queen Anne, some members of the intellectual aristocracy responded. Henry Sidgwick at Cambridge and the philosopher T. H. Green at Oxford both commissioned houses designed in the new style of sweetness and light, with bay windows, verandas, inglenooks and crannies crammed with a clutter of objects intended to delight the eye and interest the mind. Girton College was built as a spartan, spare building in the Tudor-gothic style of Waterhouse, everything geared to proving that women could compete on equal terms with men. But Sidgwick got his friend Champneys to design Newnham in the Queen Anne style: the students’ rooms were papered with Morris wallpaper, and his wife, the first Principal, insisted that the corridors should have windows on both sides for cheerfulness. Indeed there were always a handful of them who self-consciously kept up with new styles in the visual arts which, even if the effort was not spontaneous, was a good deal better than sinking into complacent philistinism. Still, many of them inherited the old evangelical distrust of beauty as a temptress, unsusceptible to the kind of analysis of which they were accomplished masters. That distrust inhibited them in their dealings with art. A fashionably dressed wife would not only have been an extravagance but an act of submission to worldly vanity: and the Pre-Raphaelite cloaks and dresses which had been donned as a homage to beauty and a protest against the world of upper-class fashion degenerated in some cases into thick woollen stockings and flannel petticoats, which were proudly worn as a badge of financial and spiritual austerity. By the end of the century there was a slight staidness, a satisfaction, a lack of spontaneity and intellectual adventure, even a touch of philistinism in the face of new forms of art; and some of their descendants, such as Samuel Butler or the Bloomsbury group, satirised these failings.

The artist’s vision was not theirs. Nor was the artist’s world; critical of conventions as they might be, they emphatically did not live in Bohemia. Pleasure was identified with happiness, and happiness by both their favourite philosophers, Mill and Green, with self-realisation. There could be family jollity, but exuberance, raciness and high spirits escaped them. They were a little too far removed from the battle of keeping a job and exercising the arts of getting a better, a little too severe on inconsequential behaviour, fully to understand human nature. Nor was this surprising; those who have clear ideas on what life ought to be always have difficulty in reconciling themselves to what it is. Considering that their hearts were set on transforming the old universities into institutions of education and research, their genial and tolerant regard for the older generation of dons was remarkable. Their goals nevertheless were so clear and their purpose so single-minded that they were apt to sacrifice other valuable things to achieve them. Self-realisation was not always extended to those gifted and capital creatures their wives. Fortunately for their husbands these wives were trained to self-sacrifice.

Great as their influence was in politics and intellectual life in the middle of the century, perhaps it was even more important at the end. For then the restraints of religion and thrift and accepted class distinctions started to crumble and English society to rock as money flooded into it and affected its values. The class war, not merely between labour and owners but between all social strata of the middle and upper classes, began in earnest. The intellectual aristocracy were one of the few barriers which resisted these forces. They insisted that honesty and courtesy were valuable; and they continued to set before the young unworldly ideals. They suggested that if public life was inseparable from spiritual ignominy, another life devoted to unravelling the mysteries of mind, matter and heart was to be desired.

For them, too, it was a period of change. In the 1880s the ban on married dons was removed and many who in the past would have been forced to vacate their fellowships and pursue their studies elsewhere or find a different source of income were able to remain at Oxford and Cambridge. As a result more of them became dons. They also became relatively poorer as taxation and the standard of living rose. A young don such as A. L. Smith, who later became Master of Balliol, the son of an unsuccessful civil engineer and one of a family of nineteen surviving children, had a hard time in making ends meet. Stipends which had been tolerable for a bachelor were inadequate for a married man, especially as the agricultural depression reduced college revenues that in great part came from farm rents.

By no means all the dons mentioned in this book belonged to these families. But these families were at the heart of creating an academic profession that could match the achievements of their colleagues on the Continent and in America.

* Martin Joseph Routh (1755–1854), President of Magdalen College, Oxford (1791); remembered for his advice to a young scholar: ‘Always verify your references.’

* An election to the chancellorship was a political event of importance. In 1809 the chancellorship fell vacant. The Protestant vote was split between Lord Eldon (who was Lord Liverpool’s candidate) and the Duke of Beaufort, an old High Churchman. So the election was won through skilful canvassing by Lord Grenville, who had concealed until the last moment that he was in favour of Catholic Emancipation. The contest impaled the Dean of Christ Church, Dr Hall, on the horns of an excruciating dilemma. He was beholden to two patrons, Liverpool and Grenville. Liverpool, his old pupil, had procured the deanery for him. Grenville had made him Regius professor of divinity. What was he to do? Hall felt bound to tell Liverpool that he could not guarantee to deliver the Christ Church vote, where Grenville had a considerable following. Liverpool never forgave him and the canons of Christ Church, who had been appointed by Liverpool, cut him dead; his finances fell into confusion; until at last Liverpool offered him not a bishopric, but the deanery of Durham and then only on condition that he left Oxford to reside in Durham. He accepted and promptly went abroad.

* If you want to follow the ramifications of the intermarriage of these families, please turn to the Annexe at the end of the book.

* The group of able young men from Oxford and Toynbee Hall who helped Milner reorganise and pacify South Africa after the Boer War.

CHAPTER TWO The Genesis of the Modern Don – William Buckland

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Oxford and Cambridge were Church of England communities in which most dons were clergymen. Oxford was regarded as a bastion of the Church at which every undergraduate had to sign on entry the Thirty-Nine Articles of faith and many expected to take holy orders on graduating. Why then were they studying Aristotle’s logic instead of theology? Why, asked that liberal clergyman Sydney Smith, were tutors so afraid that ‘mental exertion must end in religious scepticism’? A liberal don answered him. Edward Copleston was to become Provost of Oriel and the heart of liberal opinion within the university, a man known to be in favour of mental exertion. ‘There is one province of education,’ he wrote, ‘indeed in which we are slow in believing that any discoveries can be made. The scheme of revelation we think is closed, and we expect no new light on earth to break in upon us.’ The scheme of revelation was expounded from the pulpit. That was the point of sermons. For the first thirty years of the century all teaching, so the future tutor and Master of Balliol Jowett recollected, supported the doctrine of authority, and Oxford was another bulwark against the insidious ideas of the French Revolution. It was safer to train the mind on the writings of Greek and Latin authors. Modern studies encouraged speculation and political controversy, so the classics took priority. Science was not neglected. Posts were established and filled in chemistry, mineralogy and geology. When Thomas Gaisford became Dean of Christ Church, he insisted that all undergraduates should attend a course on physics and be examined on it. The Regius professors of modern history lectured on political economy and a chair was created in that subject. Oriel under Copleston’s influence set its own examination for fellowships, designed to test intelligence as well as syntactical exactness. Gaisford discouraged Christ Church men from entering for honours; and the future Lord Derby, who won prizes and later, while Prime Minister, translated the Iliad, left Christ Church without a degree.

None of these initiatives prospered. At the beginning of the century a former Dean of Christ Church, Cyril Jackson, had got the university to accept an honours system of examination in classics and mathematics. Undergraduates were classed according to merit. In 1808 Robert Peel was the first man to achieve a ‘double first’ in classics and maths; Gladstone followed him in 1831. The advocates of a broad education regarded the honours schools as irrelevant, but they were to be defeated. To get a first was the first step to winning your way in the world. In most colleges it was the passport to a fellowship. If it was not the dawn, it was the first light of meritocracy.

Most of the professors in science were impresarios for their subjects. They did not do experimental work; their task, they believed, was to tell their audience what had already been discovered. They supplemented the theology of the Church of England by providing new proofs of God’s design – not as meticulous as those of Newton but still evidence that ‘in all His works most wonderful, Most sure in all His ways’, as Newman’s hymn asserted. Nevertheless, there was one professor who lived in an apartment in Christ Church – which is at once a college and a cathedral – set aside for the canons, a clergyman unlike the orthodox run of canons. Christ Church was the citadel of the High and Dry party within the Church of England and this canon was a liberal latitudinarian. What was more he was a geologist. He had made his name with his research into the rocks of south-west England and his patron was no less than the Prince Regent himself, who created a special professorship for him in 1819. He was the first president of the newly formed British Association, which had been formed to publicise advances in science. This was William Buckland.

Buckland charged two guineas for attendance at his course of lectures and he drew rapt audiences. He lectured on mineralogy and palaeontology; but he was as competent to lecture on artesian wells and civil engineering. He did not despise applied science, and became chairman of the Oxford Gas and Coke Company. Buckland began lecturing in 1814, and between 1820 and 1835 his lectures were part of the Oxford scene – rather as the lectures by the controversial scholar, Edgar Wind, on the history of art became necessities for the general public in the second half of the twentieth century. But then – the common fate of many dons who are great lecturers – attendance began to drop. A rival in the shape of Newman preaching in the university church of Great St Mary’s took his undergraduate audience away and in 1845 he left Oxford to become Dean of Westminster.

Buckland became a legend not so much for his scientific studies as for his remorseless application of the scientific practice of experiment and observation in his private life. He used to say that he had eaten his way through the whole animal creation and that the worst thing was a mole – ‘perfectly horrible’ – though afterwards he told Lady Lyndhurst that there was one thing worse than a mole and that was a blue-bottle fly. Mice in batter and bison steaks were served at his table in London. A guest wrote in his diary: ‘Dined at the Deanery. Tripe for dinner last night, don’t like crocodile for breakfast.’ He had a Protestant’s scepticism of Catholic miracles. Pausing before a dark stain on the flagstones of an Italian cathedral where the martyr’s blood miraculously renewed itself, he dropped to his knees and licked it. ‘I can tell you what it is: it is bat’s urine.’

Like many scientists his mind subconsciously continued to work on the problems preoccupying him. ‘My dear,’ he said to his wife, starting up from sleep at two o’clock in the morning, ‘I believe that Cheirotherium’s footsteps are undoubtedly testudinal.’ They hurried downstairs and while he fetched the pet tortoise from the garden, his wife mixed paste on the kitchen table. To their delight they saw that the impression left by the tortoise’s feet in the paste were almost identical with those of the fossil.

Their apartments in the quad were at once a natural history museum and a menagerie. They and their children lived surrounded on all sides by specimens, dead and alive, that Buckland had collected. When you entered the hall you might as easily mount a stuffed hippopotamus as the children’s rocking horse. Monsters of different eras glared down on you from the walls. The sideboard in the dining room groaned under the weight of fossils and was protected from the children by a notice: PAWS OFF. The very candlesticks were carved out of the bones of Saurians. Toads were immured in pots to see how long they could survive without food. There were cages full of snakes, and a pony with three children up would career round the dining-room table and out into the quad. Guinea pigs, owls, jackdaws and smaller fry had the run of the house. The children imbibed science with their mother’s milk. One day a clergyman excitedly brought Buckland some fossils for identification. ‘What are these, Frankie?’ said the professor to his four-year-old son. ‘They are the vertebuae of an ichthyosauwus,’ lisped the child. The parson retired crestfallen to his parish.

Buckland helped to establish the climate of opinion that made Darwin’s theory of the origin of species within a few years irresistible. He also set a standard of integrity among British scientists. It is easy to forget today how much then the story of the earth’s antiquity, the theory of evolution and the development of homo sapiens were founded on hypothesis and conjecture. Certainly the early geologists such as Buckland and Lyell based their theories on the facts of rock formation; certainly Darwin prevailed because no alternative explanation from the evidence that he produced was convincing. But the mass of evidence confirming and modifying their hypotheses accumulated after they wrote. It is important to remember, too, how many of the early hypotheses and theories were wrong. Buck-land’s story is of a man who published a book which changed his countrymen’s notions of pre-history; who forced himself to acknowledge in public that the main conclusions in that book were wrong; and who failed despite his own personal success to get Oxford to introduce science into its curriculum.

The book that made Buckland’s reputation in 1824 was called Reliquiae Diluvianae (Relics of the Flood). In it he linked the evidence of deposits in other caves in England and abroad with his own findings in the Kirkdale Cave in Yorkshire. This was the first fossil cave to be excavated in England. Buckland claimed that it had once been inhabited by hyenas who, it could be shown, had dragged the bodies of other animals into it, since their bones were characteristically splintered and lacked the parts which hyenas are in the habit of swallowing. These bones and teeth now lay on the floor of the cave beneath a thick layer of mud and were found all at the same level. Buckland therefore deduced that the hyenas had abandoned the cave at the onset of a great flood; and that this flood had also swept away the animals which lived about the cave and on whose carcasses the hyenas fed. It was at this stage in the argument that Buckland produced a further hypothesis. All the evidence showed that Yorkshire was once a sub-tropical land where elephants, bears and rhinoceros had roamed. All the evidence pointed to a flood. This, then, must have been the Flood described in Genesis, but it had occurred tens of thousands of years ago and not, as the seventeenth-century genealogists of the Old Testament had calculated, after 4004 BC.

When Buckland announced that it would be prudent to regard the six days of the Creation as six ages, many pious readers were in no mood to feel that the confirmation of the seventh chapter of Genesis compensated for the loss of the first. Nevertheless, there was no such outburst as greeted Darwin’s great book. The evangelical movement in the churches was not so formidable then nor so well organised, and the leadership had not passed into the hands of unintelligent zealots. The Tractarians, who were to rouse Oxford and the country to new heights of religious intensity and intolerance, were still unknown young men: their campaign lay nearly ten years ahead in the future. Buckland’s speculations were regarded as dangerous and daring but they were not repulsive to the Oxford of Copleston, which gave shelter to liberal theology. It was indeed this book that won him his canonry at Christ Church and his European reputation. In 1830 he was asked by the trustees of the Earl of Bridgewater’s will to write under the terms of the will one of eight treatises to ‘justify the ways of God to man’. Buckland spent six years on the task of explaining what geology and palaeontology told us of the earth’s history and then of arguing that the Bible cannot be said to contradict these findings because it is not a scientific textbook. This elicited a flurry of pamphlets from the country parsons, one of whom spent pages deducing from the height of the Himalayas that the waters of the Flood must have risen at the rate of thirty feet per hour; and the Dean of York addressed several grave letters to Buck-land. But as the Archbishop of York was a personal friend of Buckland and the two great periodicals, the Quarterly and the Edinburgh, came out on his side, he had little to fear.

Success and social eminence can easily corrupt scholars – particularly English scholars. Victorian savants found themselves petted by the influential and the great; insensibly they slid into becoming the academic defenders of the safe and the cautious; and then they found themselves expected to condemn the heretical. When The Origin of Species was published the geologist Adam Sedgwick, a famous contemporary of Buckland at Cambridge, used the full force of his authority to discredit it; and when the most eminent of all the English classical geologists, Sir Charles Lyell, after first hesitating announced his support, Darwin showed his appreciation of the danger that Lyell had run when he wrote, ‘In view of his age and his position in society his conduct is heroic’. Buckland had in complete honesty put forward a hypothesis which enabled the story of Genesis in some sense to be reconciled with his geological discoveries. Suddenly he was challenged – and challenged by a young foreigner whom he had befriended. This young man was the Swiss naturalist Agassiz, who had corresponded with Buckland about his work and for whom Buckland had raised funds to enable him to continue his researches. Agassiz put forward the notion, commonplace nowadays, that the alluvial deposits in caves such as Buckland excavated were the relics not of the Flood but of an Ice Age. Buckland was not at first convinced. But he went to Switzerland to study glaciers with Agassiz; got him to England to go over the evidence in his caves; and then renounced his own theories, championed the hypothesis that the Swiss had put forward, and converted Lyell. The mud which had filled the hyenas’ cave in Yorkshire had been brought by the melting snows on the hills, which could not disperse because the Scandinavian ice sheet was jammed up against the east coast of Britain.

This was the action of a man of character and generosity. It is also the work of a man of integrity. This kind of integrity is so much taken for granted today among scientists that is it difficult to imagine a time when it cost an effort. Perhaps it still costs an effort to the eminent when their juniors upset their conclusions, but they know well enough that it is quite hopeless to bluster. In the first half of the nineteenth century this was not so evident. Men still thought of truth as a unity. It was not Buckland’s piety that made him leap to the conclusion that he had evidence of the Flood. He imagined himself simply drawing on another set of facts in the Bible which were well-attested and which fitted into the pattern of logical deductions that he had drawn from his findings in the Kirkdale Caves. It was all the more creditable then that, unlike other clergymen and members of the well-established academic circles to which he belonged, he did not fail to change his views even though they might have damaged his prospects.