ABSTRACT
Born in 1822, raised in conditions of shabby gentility, Henry Maine went up to Cambridge in 1840 where he enjoyed a brilliant undergraduate career, distinguished by the award of the Chancellor’s medal for English verse (for a poem on the birth of the Prince of Wales), and election to the elite Cambridge secret society, the Apostles.1On graduation he became a fellow of Trinity Hall, a Cambridge college noted for its lawyers, and began to specialise in Roman Law. At the age of twenty-five he became Regius Professor of Civil Law at Cambridge. This sounds rather grander than it was. His friend, James Fitzjames Stephen, described the professorship as an ‘ill-paid sinecure’, and Maine soon moved on to a Readership in Roman Law in the Middle Temple. In London, he became an active political journalist, and was one of the founders of The Saturday Review. A ‘hard-headed Peelite … with a taste for Burkean rhetoric’,2he championed aristocratic forms of government and opposed the extension of the suffrage. And he became fascinated by the Indian question.
