ABSTRACT
In addition to the intellectuals who clustered around the Leader, there was another group of London literati with whom Spencer associated during the late s and the s. is circle met at John Chapman’s house in the Strand to discuss literary and scientifi c matters. Of course, to say that British groups were intellectual could be seen to evoke a misleading continental association. It might be objected that reference to a class of intellectuals would be more apposite when recording the activities of the French, Germans or Italians. Emerson, writing at the time when Chapman was attempting to breathe intellectual excitement into London, said nothing came into English bookshops but politics, travels, statistics, tabulation and engineering, “and even what is called philosophy and letters is mechanical in its structure, as if inspiration had ceased, as if no vast hope, no religion, no song of joy, no wisdom, no analogy existed any more”. In general the American sage was accurate about the English; intellectual activity was too rare to form a national characteristic. e groups around the Leader and Chapman were too short-lived and as anomalous as the Pre-Raphaelites were to the traditions of nineteenth-century British painting. However, during the s, the intellectuals of the Strand gave inspiration, hope, religion and joy to young intellectuals. ese feelings also found a lasting life in the writings of Spencer, which carried what had been a parochial set of ideas to a vast international readership.
