Chapter 5 - The ‘High Victorian’

Summary

This chapter considers models of conversation, and ideas about it, that can be recovered from the 1870s, as exemplary of ‘high’ Victorianism in the later part of the nineteenth century. Good conversation was represented as intellectual exchange, amiable and uncontroversial, and speaking to the like-minded, as opposed to the rise of the public intellectual (such as the ‘Sage’) and the emergence of professional specialisms, that did not rely on or expect listening; in other words, congenial discussion as opposed to the declamatory. The chapter gives examples of good conversation as modelled by The Athenæum Club and The Athenaeum weekly journal in the 1870s (including ‘Our Library Table’), and the lived example of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, as well as contrary examples from Middlemarch and John Ruskin.