The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses - Noel Annan

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to posts in Oxford and pari passu that patronage by cabinet ministers flowed into the right channels in the university. The ornamental don held university offices. He became a proctor and looked forward to offers of succulent benefices in the Church. He was therefore so cushioned by genial company and emoluments that further effort on his part was not required and he added nothing to learning. Preferment in the Church was what occupied his mind. But if he failed to get it he might die as senior fellow of his college, renowned for his nose for a vintage. Or he became an eccentric whom younger fellows boasted of having known.

      The mere don referred to the bulk of the fellows, tutors who took the undergraduates in their college through Latin and Greek texts, up in arms at any attempt by the professors to deflect their pupils to attend professorial lectures. A mere don might well be voted in as head of a house, the compromise candidate when the supporters of the two abler rivals produced a deadlock by their intransigence. He would then preside ‘with a late-married wife as uncouth and uneducated as he … respecting no man in the University and respected by no man out of it’. There were indeed some roughnecks among the heads or others, such as the Rector of Lincoln, Edward Tatham, a stickler for Anglican orthodoxy and hater of dissenters, whose violence of language did his cause more harm than good. In a two-and-a-half-hour sermon he declared that he wished ‘all the Jarman critics at the bottom of the Jarman Ocean’. Yet there were fine heads of houses, among them Tatham’s opponent, Cyril Jackson, the Dean of Christ Church, Richard Jenkyns of Balliol and later the liberal reformer Francis Jeune of Pembroke.

      Tuckwell’s fourth category was the learned don. The days had passed since Gibbon could portray the dons as stupefied by their dull and deep potations while supinely enjoying the gifts of their founder. A few were certainly learned and edited classical texts. Many more were quick and elegant versifiers in Latin and Greek. Common room talk was peppered with Latin tags; some could even pun in Greek. Arthur Ridding not only described the Duke of Wellington lying in state as ‘splendide mendax’ but, seeing a wretched horse, scarcely more than skin and bones, hauling a barge along the tow-path of a canal, muttered ‘to pathos’ (towpath ’oss). There was the good-natured Henry ‘Horse’ Kett, whose long face so resembled a horse’s head that undergraduates filled his snuff-box with oats. Realising that many undergraduates found the compulsory questions on Aristotelian logic beyond their powers, ‘Horse’ Kett wrote a book called Logic Made Easy. His fellow examiner Edward Copleston at once wrote a devastating riposte and headed his pamphlet with the Virgilian warning about never trusting a Greek even with a gift in his hands: ‘Aliquis latet error; Equo ne credite, Teucri’ (Some trick here; don’t trust the horse, Trojans). But although Oxford scholars read German commentaries on classical texts, they could not be compared to the German classical scholars, at that time the finest in the world.

      What was happening was that certain families of a serious cast of mind intermarried and their children became scholars and teachers, joining those at Oriel and Balliol in Oxford, or at Trinity and St John’s in Cambridge. They led the movement for academic reform within the universities and became the first professors of the new civic academies; and their achievements as headmasters at Shrewsbury or Harrow or Rugby were watched by the professional classes, eager to educate their sons well at schools where they mixed with those of the lesser aristocracy or gentry. When these sons in turn came to marry, what was more natural than to choose a wife from the families of their fathers’ friends whose fortune and upbringing matched their own?

      They were a new status group. Sociologists distinguish a social group from a social class. These families were not concerned with the means of production and creation of wealth. What marked them off was not wealth but standing. A section of the Victorian middle class rose to positions of influence and respect as a range of posts passed out of the gift of the nobility into their hands. They naturally ascended to positions where academic and cultural policy was made. In literary life they were the backbone of the Victorian intellectual periodicals. In public service they were strongest in the Indian and home civil service rather than in diplomacy, which for long was too expensive for them and attracted the sons of the upper classes; but once diplomats could support themselves on their salary they began to invade the foreign service.

      They were not a narrow professoriate. They could not be when most fellowships had to be vacated on marriage or the holder required to take holy orders. True to the traditional role of Oxford and Cambridge, which was to educate men for service in Church and State, they overflowed into the new professions. The days when Addison could define the professions as divinity, law and physic were past. Not only were the old professions expanding to include attorneys and apothecaries, but the establishment in 1828 of the Institution of Civil Engineers to further ‘the art of directing the Great Sources of Power in Nature for the use and convenience of mankind’ marked the rise of a new kind of professional man. Members of these intellectual families became the new professional civil servants at a time when government had become too complicated and technical to be handled by the ruling class and their dependants. They became school inspectors or took posts in the museums or were appointed secretaries of philanthropic societies; or they edited or wrote for the periodicals or entered publishing houses; or, as journalists ceased to be hacks scribbling in Grub Street, they joined the staff of The Times. Thus they gradually spread over the length and breadth of English intellectual life, criticising the assumptions of the ruling class above them and forming the opinions of the upper middle class to which they belonged.

      This intellectual aristocracy was not an intelligentsia, a term which, Russian in origin, suggests the shifting, shiftless members of revolutionary or literary cliques who have cut themselves adrift from the moorings of family. The English intellectual élite, wedded to gradual reform of accepted institutions and able to move between the worlds of speculation and government, was stable. That it was so – that it was unexcitable and, to European minds, unexciting – was in part due to the influence of these academic families.

      Nevertheless they did not think of

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