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Learned Lives in England, 1900-1950 Institutions, Ideas and Intellectual Experience
William C.Lubenow
Woodbridge:
The Boydell Press, 2020 Hardcover.
xi+278 p. ISBN 978-1783275502. £65/$99
Reviewed by
Peter Stansky Stanford University
This is, appropriately, an extraordinarily
learned book written by an extremely learned author. It is based on extensive
research in archives as well as primary and secondary sources. William Lubenow
has put us deeply in his debt through a series of books on the English intelligentsia
(not a word it would much like.) He began as a quantitative historian and from
that he has retained a high ability to keep many individuals in play but as
distinct thinking individuals. His present interest began, I believe, with his
fine study, The Cambridge Apostles (1998) and then as
more specific predecessors of this volume, Liberal Intellectuals and Public
Culture in Modern Britain 1815-1914 (2010) and ‘Only
Connect’ : Learned Societies in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2015) and now the
present work. In it he has taken us through the complicated story of individuals
and institutions. He states his thesis and his method as follows: [R]obust intellectual institutions
between 1900 and 1950 in Britain stabilized, legitimized and authorised
learning through a sustained insistence on Huxleyite positivism: charismatic,
informal societies and clubs on the margins of intellectual life—in their
nooks, cranies and niches—blunted regnant positivism by fostering, curiosity,
imagination and originality. This study attacks this thesis archivally, biographically
and conceptually. [7] Here the author uses, unlike his title, the
term British. But virtually all the organizations he discusses are to be found
in England. Some of the major players did originally come from the Empire as
well as significantly from elsewhere. The American Rockefeller and Carnegie
foundations play a small role in the story. Characteristic in
England is the interplay of intense individualism combined, perhaps
paradoxically, with a deep proclivity to establish social organizations. There
are innumerable dining clubs dedicated to particular areas of study. Perhaps
not quite enough attention is paid to the role of class. The English have
frequently been uncomfortable with the idea of the intellectual as perhaps implying
an individual who is too intense in style even though one should be serious
about one’s work. Ideally one should wear one’s learning lightly as more consistent
with what it means to be a gentleman. (There are a few important and
fascinating women in this study but the great majority of the numerous cast are
men.) Much of the text is
devoted to a rich examination of the various organizations in which learned
lives were pursued and to the most important individuals in them. We are told
their life stories in extensive footnotes (with sometimes a sly joke inserted)
and sometimes in the text itself. There is not much discussion of individual
endeavors although they are not neglected. Not surprisingly quite a lot of
attention is devoted to Oxford and Cambridge. The London School of Economics is
discussed as well, although not to any extent other institutions of higher
learning. As the author knows from his rich experience at Wolfson College,
Cambridge (acknowledged in his dedication) there cannot be a closer interplay
of the intellectual and the social than at Oxford and Cambridge Colleges. He
then very perceptively discusses the role of two premier institutions, the
Royal Society with its scientific members and the British Academy with its
membership drawing from the humanities and social sciences. Although Anthony
Blunt is mentioned a few times in the text its terminal date of 1950 means that
the author need not discuss whether it was appropriate for Blunt to be forced
out of the Academy when it was revealed that he was a spy. The London
headquarters of the two societies are in elegant buildings on Carlton House
Terrace in London, virtually next door to that great club, the Athenaeum,
dedicated to the social and the intellectual, which might have figured in this
study. There is comparatively little attention here to those in the creative
arts who do make up a significant part of the intellectual community but are
far less likely to belong to organized groups, a primary focus of this study. Lubenow next turns to
what
he calls interstitial societies, a rather fancy word for smaller mixed
groupings. There he pays some attention to literary sets, such as the Bloomsbury
Group with its only academic John Maynard Keynes and to the not on the whole particularly
significant literary figures who gathered around Logan Pearsall Smith. As with
interstitial as a term, Lubenow does at times have a tendency to write in almost
too learned a way with occasionally too abstract language, too many German
intellectual categories and some untranslated Latin tags. This chapter also
includes smaller groups, frequently dining clubs, and largely made up of
scientists. The study is particularly valuable for the considerable space it
devotes to scientists, giving them full credit for their participation in the
intellectual life of England. It also contains a fascinating account of the
moving of the Warburg art history library and its scholars from Hamburg to
London because of the Nazi threat and how it enriched English intellectual
life. That was also true of the influx of German and Austrian scholars escaping
to England, assisted by the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning,
although the British government made life more difficult through residence
restrictions. There is also illuminating discussion of the Russian physicist Pyotr
Kapitiza and his lively and tangled relationship with British science,
primarily at Cambridge as well as being harassed by his own government. It is
amazing how many individuals and how many groups of such varied sorts can form
a part and be illuminated in a comparatively short but densely written book. One
is deeply grateful to find out so much and so perceptively how intellectual
life was conducted in England, through the mind and so to speak the body in its
social aspects in the first half of the 20th century. One suspects it is not
all that different at present.
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