Did these families at their zenith exert a stultifying effect upon English intellectual life by monopolising important posts? Did they exclude a new class who, unbeneficed and indignant, ate out their hearts in the wilderness? Some think so. They produced a disproportionately large number of eminent men and women, but it is also true that they produced men of sound but not outstanding ability who reached the front ranks of science and scholarship because they had been trained in their families and at school to turn their upbringing to account. The heyday of their influence probably came in the early years of this century until the 1930s, when the number of academic and editorial posts rose. As the BBC, the British Council and Arts Council, the media and other cultural institutions were set up and expanded, the number of posts multiplied far faster than the progeny of these families; and after the Second World War their members were spread very thin over the crust of British intellectual life. The charge of monopoly at any time is farfetched; but that they had influence and used it is undeniable.
What was the ethos of these families? What spiritual springs refreshed them? The first spring was evangelicalism, and though the faith in its purest form might fade, they were imbued with its principles. There was the sense of dedication, of living with purpose, or working under the eye, if not of the great Taskmaster, of their own conscience – that organ which evangelicalism magnified so greatly. They were filled with a sense of mission to improve the shining hour. They felt they had to account for their talents. They held themselves apart from a world given over to vanities which men of integrity rejected. These were the principles that inspired the Clapham Sect to which the Macaulays, Venns, Stephens and Thorntons belonged.
The second spring was philanthropy. Philanthropy linked the Clapham families with the Quaker families; the Gurneys, Frys, Gaskells, Hoares, Hodgkins, Foxes, Buxtons and Barclays had intermarried in the eighteenth century. As the Quakers became prosperous and began to play a larger part in the affairs of the world; as they turned from small traders into bankers and brewers; and as they began to own country houses and mixed with evangelical philanthropists or enlightened businessmen, many of them felt oppressed by the narrow bounds of the Society of Friends. The children of John Gurney of Earlham, a banker and country gentleman, had outgrown the simple narrow piety of their elders. They were a lively household and referred to the meeting house in Goat Lane, Norwich, as ‘that disgusting Goat’s’. One of the liveliest, Elizabeth Fry, suddenly experienced conversion and returned to the ways of the Society, but of her seven brothers and sisters who married, four knelt before the altar of a church. They were not alone in seceding. Mary Ann Galton left the Quakers for the Moravian Brothers, William Rathbone went over in 1805 to Unitarianism and James Wilson, the father-in-law of Walter Bagehot, ceased to attend Meeting in 1832 after marrying an Anglican. Small wonder that an appeal was made not to excommunicate members who married those of other religions.
The Quaker families also linked the evangelicals to the third group of philanthropists, the Unitarian or philosophic radical families. The Wedgwoods neither stemmed from a line of parsons nor did they breed them. Josiah Wedgwood of Maer, the son of the founder of the pottery, told his wife not to be uneasy about playing cards on Sunday, since she knew in her heart that it was not wrong. ‘I am rather afraid,’ he wrote, ‘of Evangelicalism spreading amongst us though I have some confidence in the good sense of the Maerites for keeping it out, or if it must come for having the disease in a very mild form.’ His first cousins, the Darwins, a singularly unreligious family, were equally untouched. They both belonged to the upper-middle-class world of Brougham and Mackintosh and the Edinburgh Review, a world which had ties with the cultivated French middle class. Their children made the Grand Tour and went to balls and race meetings. Yet if their manners were freer they were not very far removed from some of the children of Clapham; and Charles Darwin’s description of his uncle Josiah as ‘the very type of an upright man with the clearest judgment. I do not believe that any power on earth could have made him swerve an inch from what he considered the right course’, surely suggests that they had the same temperament as the descendants of the Evangelicals or Quakers,
In the 1860s two objectives vital to their class and, as they rightly thought, vital to their country, united them. They worked tirelessly for intellectual freedom within the universities which, they thought, should admit anyone irrespective of his religious beliefs. They also worked for the creation of a public service open to talent. If they can be said to have had a Bill of Rights it was the Trevelyan-Northcote report of 1854 on reform of the civil service, and their Glorious Revolution was achieved in 1870–71, when entry to public service by privilege, purchase of army commissions and the religious tests were abolished. From then on clever men could succeed through open competitive examination. What was more Macaulay had recommended that the examination for the Indian Civil Service should be designed for those who had taken high honours at the university. The change took time. Even after Victoria’s reign it was still possible to be nominated to a place in Whitehall, though one had to pass a formal examination after entry. Not until 1908 in the Home Office and 1911 in the Treasury were the values of the intellectual aristocracy – probity, loyalty, a rational system of promotion and detachment from party politics – enshrined. The workaholic bureaucrat was replacing civil servants like Trollope who expected to get three days’ hunting a fortnight. By the time of the First World War no formal obstacle remained to prevent the man of brains from becoming a gentleman. An intellectual aristocracy had formed.
Was this dangerous? George Meredith, whose novels were much admired by the discerning among the intellectual aristocracy, was among the first to use the term. But he did not use it as a term of praise. He used it to highlight the dangers of a meritocracy. In 1859 he wrote in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel:
How soothing it is to intellect – that noble rebel, as the Pilgrim has it – to stand, and bow, and know itself superior! This exquisite compensation maintains the balance: whereas that period anticipated by the Pilgrim, when science shall have produced an intellectual aristocracy, is indeed horrible to contemplate. For what despotism is so black as one the mind cannot challenge? ’Twill be an iron Age.
Meredith forgot that there are always countervailing forces in history. In the second half of the twentieth century the props that underpinned the meritocracy were shaken. Most of the grammar schools, which had so often been the first step on the ladder, became comprehensive schools; the examinations for the public service were altered to take account of the revolution in electronics and the computer age; and people learned to doubt how far scientists, economists and applied sociologists could plan and control the future.
What were these families like? It was the mark of most of them to remain almost exactly where they were placed in society. Josiah Wedgwood had a country house and had married a squire’s daughter, but the Wedgwoods were not a county family and they knew it. Their fortune rested on the pottery and not on land and during the past century and a half they have neither risen nor fallen in the social scale. The families that rose by business, especially the Quaker connections,