History's (Un)Reason: Victorian Intellectualism from J. S. Mill to Leslie Stephen

Abstract

intellectual history remains one of the least studied of the various forms of historiography practiced by the Victorians, certainly when compared to political, constitutional, or literary history, or to the historical novel when considered as a historiographical genre. Yet intellectual-historical inquiry formed a vital strand in the Victorian discourse on the past, particularly in liberal quarters, where a belief in ideas as the engines of change reinforced the prevailing doctrine of progress in history as shaped by human agency, volition, and “char acter.” s ome of the more popular intellectual histories were epic in intention and scale: Henry Thomas Buckle’s History of Civilization in England (1857–61), John William Draper’s History of the Intellectual Devel opment of Europe (1863), and W. E. H. Lecky’s History of the Rise and Influ ence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (1865) presented the march of mind in terms of a steady, incremental victory of reason over supersti tion and of heroic human effort over the unruly forces of nature. i n a more scholarly (and more self-searching) key, historians like Mark pattison, John Morley, and Leslie s tephen saw intellectual history as a cornerstone of the historiography of civilization or—in the fashion able parlance of mid-Victorian sociology—of the study of the laws of social change. For them, publishing their major works of intellectual