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.

A major study of a distinguished Victorian intellectual at the epicentre of the revolutions transforming English academic and intellectual life.

About the Author
Stuart Jones is Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Manchester. He has written widely on British and French intellectual history and political thought, chiefly of the nineteenth century. His books include The French State in Question (Cambridge University Press, 1993), Victorian Political Thought (Palgrave, 2000), and Intellect and Character in Victorian England: Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don (Cambridge University Press, 2007). He also edited Comte's Early Political Writings for the Cambridge Texts in Political Thought series (Cambridge University Press, 1998). He is currently Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford (2008-9).

Reviews
'H. S. Jones wrote the excellent entry on Mark Pattison for the New Dictionary of National Biography, and now he has written a lengthier study not on what he did but what he thought. ... Jones shows that the over-simplified picture of Pattison ... has to be revised ...' Oxford Magazine
'This is an elegant and persuasive biography written with economy and clarity that brings to life a neglected and much maligned mid-Victorian essayist.' The American Historical Review
'This is an intriguing and important group...' Journal of Interdisciplinary History
'Stuart Jones has produced a first-rate intellectual biography of one of the most formidable intellectual figures in nineteenth-century Britain...' Journal of Ecclesiastical History



Book Information
ISBN 9780521876056
Author H. S. Jones
Format Hardback
Page Count 294
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 614g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 155mm * 30mm