IN his usual trenchant and mordant fashion John Maynard Keynes called attention to the power and authority of those scribblers ‘of a few years past’. These were those who fitted themselves into the learned clubs, societies, and coteries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They represented a shift in the social landscape. No longer guided by eighteenth-century rules of politeness, their strictures were those of modern manliness. One historian has described this shift as a change from a ‘court-based culture to a clubbased culture’. In the former, men ‘derived respect from display, [were] affable to equals and inferiors but not afraid to proclaim [their] superiority’. In the latter, men ‘were discreet in manner, unpretentious in appearance, reserved if not cold’.

Lord Ashley, later the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, called these scribblers forth: ‘We must have nobler, deeper, and sterner stuff, less of refinement and more of truth, more of the inward, not so much of the outward gentleman.’ Henry Reeve, the editor of the Edinburgh Review and a member of the Cosmopolitan Club, the Literary Society, The Club, and the Athenaeum, sought ‘the most rising men of the day’ for membership in such societies. G. M. Trevelyan saw them fully arisen. They were ‘neither aristocrats nor shopkeepers, but men of University education, or of trained professional intelligence, readers of Mill, Darwin, Huxley and Matthew Arnold, George Eliot and Browning – the gentlemanly bearded intellectuals’. There you have it.

These members carried personal authority and charisma, but an uncharacteristic form of charisma. Lurking in their histories was the German (or, rather, Prussian) revolution in education: Wissenschaft, that curious combination of technical virtuosity and Bildung. But it was a British form of Bildung.