ABSTRACT
The passages which introduce this chapter have a characteristic rhetoric. William Johnson Fox, writing as editor of a radical Utilitarian and Unitarian journal at the beginning of 1832, the year of the great Reform Bill, argues passionately for fundamental structural change in the country’s institutions, in religion, parliamentary representation, the law, education, a change which necessitates the redistribution of wealth. Nothing, he reiterates, can ‘remain as it is’. It is a preeminently public debate, mounted through the polemic of the printed word in the cadences of political oratory. The second group of quotations is from the private letters of a university coterie, the opposite pole from public journalism, a group of friends who all belonged to an exclusive society, the Cambridge Apostles, in the 1830s. Written with the sophisticated elan of shared intimacy, the project under discussion is not political change but the ‘regeneration’ of society, not revolution, as Arthur Hallam’s sickened fear of the rick-burners round Cambridge indicates, but a transformation of the mind of the country. They were as much against the 1832 Reform Bill as Fox was for it. Browning was associated with Fox and the Monthly Repository group, Tennyson belonged to the Apostles. These groups represent two quite different intellectual formations in the 1830s. Yet both conceived themselves as avant-garde, experimenting with the new in political, theological and aesthetic matters, defining new categories and defamiliarising the old. Avant-garde as a term for experimental minority groups had not been invented. But arguably these two formations were the first recognisably avant-garde groups to emerge in Britain. Both were in the process of defining what minority groups of intellectuals might mean in a culture, and since the very notion of a culture was new, and the idea of the minority intellectual, this entailed constructing the idea of culture and defining what in particular a literary culture was. While the Monthly Repository was dissenting and radical, and the Apostles were subversive conservatives nominally assenting to the Anglican establishment, they did have some things in common. Both groups belonged to a new middle-class intelligentsia who repudiated aristocratic
privilege and wanted change. Both saw themselves as living in a time of unprecedented crisis when poverty was endemic and violence ever possible. By virtue of dissent the radicals were excluded from power. Theoretically, the Apostles were not. However, both groups explored a theology which transgressed orthodoxy and both saw literature and politics as inseparable from one another. In fact, both groups are at the beginnings of the conceptualisation of literature and the ‘literary’ as a distinct category with a particularly important part to play in the education of a mass culture.
