Only Connect: Learned Societies in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Fills huge gaps in our knowledge of the activities and networks of the opinion-formers of the nineteenth century and will inspire future historians to take the development of the public intellectual far more seriously than hitherto. * CULTURAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY *
[A] magisterial volume. [This] thought-provoking study of the history of ideas will be of value to historians of science in contextualizing their own favored scientific club and society within Victorian intellectual culture generally. * ISIS JOURNAL *
This witty and erudite book shows how knowledge was formed in a context of conviviality and sociability through clubs and societies that allowed freedom to think and to disagree, crossing disciplinary boundaries and hierarchies. The result was not dry pedantry of German scholarship (at least as imagined in Britain), but cultured gentlemen who joined the wider public sphere. Lubenow captures a world of metropolitan learning and culture with panache and insight. – Martin Daunton, Professor of Economic History, University of Cambridge

WILLIAM C. LUBENOW is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Stockton University, Galloway, New Jersey. His previous books included Liberal Intellectuals and Public Culture in Modern Britain, 1815-1914 (2010), “Only Connect”: Learned Societies in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2015) and Learned Lives in England, 1900-1950 (2020), all published by the Boydell Press.

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