I must admit that I loved Liberal Intellectuals and Public Culture in Modern Britain, William Lubenow’s alternately fascinating, provocative, and frustrating study of the mentalité of Britain’s educated elites in the mid- and late-Victorian generations. Those familiar with the author’s large corpus of journal articles and earlier books on the Home Rule crisis or the Cambridge Apostles will recognize his signature strengths here: lively engagement with an astounding array of contemporary scholarship, inventive prosopographical research, vivid case studies that give color to a larger point. Newer to Lubenow’s book-length projects is the boldness and reach of this investigation. Lubenow’s goal here is to elucidate the rise and post-1914 eclipse of a new “regime of political, social, and moral identity” (13) that characterized the increasingly large body of university-educated writers and professionals in the course of the long nineteenth century. In the process, he would have us rethink old understandings of the nature of liberalism itself as created and practiced by the Victorians.

The sociological part of Lubenow’s story will be familiar to readers of Harold Perkin, Noel Annan, Sheldon Rothblatt, Reba Sofer, Stefan Collini, and others. Lubenow places Oxford and Cambridge at the heart of the account, arguing that sons of lesser gentry, country vicars, and perhaps placemen of the Old Corruption used the competitive examination systems of higher education to create a cultural capital based on intellectual merit that then propelled them into new professional careers in education, the law, the civil service, and the various venues of punditry. Moving easily among politics, professions, and literature, such men usurped influence from both the unreformed portions of the aristocracy and rising business interests. In the process, they created the distinctive and “vibrant governing temper” of Victorian liberalism (1).

Lubenow contributes to this story of the rise of white-collar professionals by unpacking the changes in emotionality, sociability, and identity as experienced by these creators of modern society. After the Napoleonic wars, the breakdown of older forms of allegiance to patronage networks or confessional community was both liberating and anxiety producing. Homosocial venues from colleges themselves to clubs, associations, libraries, and discussion groups created new public spaces, both concretely and psychologically, that were deeply engaged with the moral dimensions of citizenship and the reconstruction of knowledge. Lubenow vividly re-creates the dense cultural milieu of these worlds, stressing their intellectual openness and fluidity. Norms of behavior as well as casts of mind adapted to these venues, although treatment of the former is considerably less developed. “Rather than entities, dogmas, or philosophies,” Lubenow writes, the liberal values that concern him constituted a “moral mindset which was instrumental, elastic, plastic” (2). They involved inherent dynamism and contradiction, making the outlook of their practitioners “unstable, unsteady, and ambiguous”—precursors of the fragmentation and transience of the modern self (1–3, 217).

Lubenow’s approach to his subject is so fresh and synthetic that it is hardly surprising that some of the argument leaves room for questions. Liberal values, for example, often appear as disembodied actors in their own right. At times they are “imaginative procedures” of intellectual engagement or knowledge creation (26). Elsewhere they are mental qualities like openness and hesitancy to settle on final truths or such familiar Victorian character traits as “restraint, reserve, rectitude, resolution” (220). In the end, we are left with a liberalism that seems like a hegemonic atmosphere, a “multivalent sensibility” (7), rather than any particular convictions or behaviors.

In separate chapters at the end of the book, Lubenow explores two developments—the resurgence and increasing isolation from civic culture of British Catholicism and the controversies over Ireland’s claims for national self-determination—when the collaborative gentlemanliness of the liberal intellectuals failed to overcome fundamental differences in political outlook. Both are useful for showing how the liberal mental stance, which by midcentury helped define “the capacities for participation in public life” of the governing elites (7), was failing to accommodate the contradictions and indeterminacies of a mass society and expanding empire.

Lubenow’s work is too thoroughly grounded in current historiographical concerns not to address the issues of manliness and masculinity that accompanied the rise of the professional class. But this remains a relentlessly gendered analysis. Wives and children are dismissed in a quick paragraph on the still pervasive and conflicted pressures of late-Victorian domesticity (90). Women who might be seen as liberal intellectuals—Eleanor Sidgwick, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Millicent Fawcett—hardly appear. Although they might share the cast of mind and even certain parts of the public space, they did not have access to the more exclusive venues where cultural capital was fostered and displayed. Nor is there much attention to paradigms that would stress the powerful new hierarchies of male subordination and domination that were emerging in this era, as posited by Regenia Gagnier, Jonathan Rutherford, or Hannah Arendt. Lubenow tells us a great deal about the bonds of trust, loyalty, and affection among the members of this community, and less about how they intersected with increasingly precise rankings of sexual, racial, class, and personality difference by the end of the century.

To say that there is more to explore is no criticism of a book as original as this. It is impossible to do justice to the number of times Lubenow manages to cast fresh light on controversies over the transformation of the Victorian elites. Characteristically modest in scale, Liberal Intellectuals and Public Culture provides a genuinely synthetic approach to studying the portion of political culture represented by the governing classes, a world the author knows well through a lifetime of archival immersion. He would have us get past every one-dimensional lens of analysis, every simplistic reification and outdated binary, in order to see how social opportunities, mental activities, institutional development, literary culture, and psychological outlooks intertwined in the lives of particular generations. This rich book makes real contributions to our understanding of the transitional nature of these intellectual and publicly minded elites, before the era when niche expertise narrowed mental worlds and compartmentalized arenas of public discourse.