This is a thoroughly researched, closely reasoned intellectual biography of the Victorian Oxford don, Mark Pattison. H. S. Jones argues persuasively that Pattison was a “key figure” in two crucial nineteenth-century cultural developments: the secularization of intellectual life and the emergence of the modern university (1). His thesis is that Pattison was important because he articulated “a distinctive conception of the nature of academic life”—a life devoted to self-culture through learning (256).

Jones divides his monograph into two parts. The first concerns Pattison's life from his boyhood in Yorkshire to his headship of Lincoln College, Oxford, emphasizing Pattison's intellectual and spiritual development. Pattison arrived at Oxford in 1832 after an isolated boyhood, equipped with high expectations for the intellectual life of the university. He was disappointed with what he found, for he felt Oxford lacked intellectual standards and discipline. In reaction, Pattison embarked on a career devoted to self-education through study, a quest that became his identity. He was to project his own ambition for self-culture as the ideal for all academics. Predictably, when Pattison eventually wrote his Memoirs, he told his story entirely as the life of his mind.

Jones is especially good on Pattison's spiritual journey. Pattison went up to Oxford as an evangelical Anglican but soon leaned toward theological liberalism. By the mid-1830s, however, he was attracted to the Tractarians because of their asceticism and devotion to learning. As Jones acutely observes, the spirit of the Oxford Movement was “anti-rationalistic but it was not anti-intellectual” (30). Pattison even wrote two biographies in Newman's series on the Lives of the English Saints. But when Newman went over to Rome, Pattison (by then an Anglican priest) did not, because he thought that Rome would hamper his pursuit of disinterested learning. Thereafter, Pattison followed his devotion to rational inquiry toward unbelief, so that by the end of his life, though he remained a clergyman, many who knew him regarded him as an agnostic.

As a fellow of Lincoln in the 1840s, Pattison became an active and effective tutor who sought to cultivate in his students not a desire to win academic prizes, but a love for the life of the mind. Jones explains convincingly that Pattison was hostile to the competitive examination system but not to teaching itself. Moreover, he believed in liberal education—the development of the whole person, character as well as intellect. To Pattison, the self-discipline and asceticism required of self-cultivation and devotion to learning developed character.

Pattison's accomplishments as tutor led him to expect to be made rector of Lincoln, but his well-known defeat in the election for the headship in 1851 (which inspired C. P. Snow's novel The Masters) embittered him. Pattison never forgot a slight, and he soon resigned as tutor (but not fellow). In the 1850s he spent much time in Germany, where the German admiration for Wissenschaft, “the disinterested pursuit of systematic knowledge for its own sake” (50), confirmed his own ideals and equipped him to criticize England's ancient universities. Yet, curiously enough, Pattison was elected rector of Lincoln in 1861 in an election as unedifying as that leading to his defeat ten years earlier. As Jones observes, Pattison regarded the post as a sinecure and was inactive as head of the college.

The headship of Lincoln, however, enabled him at age forty-eight to marry. The marriage to Emma Francis Strong, twenty-seven years his junior, ended badly and has been taken by many readers to have been the model for the union of Casaubon and Dorothea in Middlemarch—an unfeeling, older dryasdust crushing the spirit of an ardent and idealistic young woman. Jones argues—not entirely persuasively, in my judgment—that George Eliot did not mean for her readers to identify Casaubon and Dorothea with Pattison and Francis. In fact, he says, Pattison and Francis had a companionate marriage for more than a decade, and that in this case art shaped life: Middlemarch did not reflect the relations of the real-life couple but actually taught Francis how to understand her marriage and thus led to its sad breakup.

In the second part of the book, Jones analyzes the content of Pattison's ideas, which mainly revolved around the concept of the academic profession and the practice of intellectual history, in both of which Pattison was a pioneer. Pattison's idea of the academic profession drew on Tractarianism as well as the model of German scholarship and centered around “the pursuit of self-improvement through study” (145). He believed this life of disinterested learning necessitated self-denial and separation from the world; yet he held a notion of teaching as training the character as well as the intellect. Jones thus sees a consistency between Pattison's advocacy of professional careers for tutors in the 1850s and his leadership in the movement for the endowment of research in the 1870s (which for Pattison actually meant endowment of learning).

Pattison took up the history of ideas because of his fascination with the life of the mind. He believed that ideas shape the world, but also that people necessarily form their ideas in the context of inherited intellectual traditions. To understand a person's thought, past or present, one must understand that person's heritage of ideas. Moreover, Pattison believed that to solve current intellectual problems, one must first address the history of ideas. These beliefs explain Pattison's lifelong interest in autobiographies and memoirs and why his contribution to the famous statement of liberal Anglicanism, Essays and Reviews (1860), took the form of a learned essay on the prevalence of rationalism in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English religious thought.

Jones makes a very good case for the importance of Mark Pattison and the coherence of his ideas. His two-part organization involves some repetition, but Jones succeeds in showing how Pattison's adoption of an identity for himself—self-culture through disciplined study—led to his distinctive idea of university life at a time when universities were being transformed into professional research institutions. Jones might have discussed the different elements in the coalition for the endowment of research because the reforms that were adopted were not by any means identical with Pattison's vision. Original research, not simply learned study; busyness, not retired contemplation; and research productivity for practical ends, not study for its own sake, have prevailed. It would be an interesting end to this fine book to suggest why.