Notions of Duty

Abstract

C oncluding his review of Anthony Kenny's edition of the Oxford Diaries of Arthur Hugh Clough in 1992, Alan Hill observed that ‘it is surely one of the greatest sources of interest that even the most cryptic of references [in Clough's diary] can often be related to some of the central issues of his time’. 1 Two substantial new biographical studies by Anthony Kenny and Gillian Sutherland amply bear this out. They reveal that it is true not only of Arthur Hugh (1819–61), but also of his sister, Anne Jemima (1820–92), promoter of women's education and co-founder of Newnham College, Cambridge, and of his daughter Blanche Athena (1861–1960) vice-principal and principal of Newnham College. The Cloughs were connected through family ties, friendship, and shared interests to an extraordinary number of those whom Matthew Arnold would describe as ‘the lights of Liberalism’. 2 Exploring the lives of different members of the family offers insights into developments in the public schools and the history of secondary education, into the history of the Church of England, into changing patterns of faith and belief and the intellectual history of the nineteenth century, and into the history of higher education. At the same time, as Sutherland demonstrates, tracing the experiences of the Clough women ‘leads us deep into the moral, mental and material world of a key stratum of the English middle class, those who sustained gentility through the practice of a profession’ (Sutherland, p. 2).