Liberal intellectuals and public culture in modern Britain, 1815-1914 : making words flesh

Liberal Intellectuals and Public Culture in Modern Britain shows how liberal values reconstructed public space in Britain after the repeal of the Test and Corporations Acts [1828] and the passage of Catholic emancipation [1829]. It traces the century-long process against subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles. It examines the emergence of the intellectual authority of the universities and the social authority of the professions. It shows how these changes gave different political and social opportunities for new families such as the Bensons, the Venns, the Stracheys and the Trevelyans. When the social moorings of the confessional state diminished new forms of association emerged to devise and promote liberal values as a distinctive form of cultural capital. This cultural capital - antique and modern letters, mathematics - filled the public sphere and provided the materials for intellectual change. The final chapters on Roman Catholicism and nationalism reveal the fragilities of this public culture. WILLIAM C. LUBENOW is Distinguished Professor of History at Stockton College, New Jersey. He is the author of The Politics of Government Growth, Parliamentary Politics and the Home Rule Crisis, and the Cambridge Apostles, 1820-1914.