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The maternal reformers were the most important leadership group among the women anti-suffragists. Their ideas underpinned what became known, after 1908, as the forward policy: a positive version of female anti-suffragism which aimed to enhance women's gendered participation in public life as social reformers and participants in local government, whilst sparing them from the polluting rigours of parliamentary politics. This chapter opens with a discussion of the growing importance of maternalism in Victorian Britain. A group of leading anti-suffragist maternal reformers is identified, including Mary Ward, Louise Creighton, Ethel Harrison, Elizabeth Wordsworth, and Lucy Soulsby. An outline is presented of their formative years and personal experiences of female education. This is followed by a discussion of their ideas and activities as maternalist educational reformers in late Victorian Oxford and elsewhere. Despite varied life experiences, these women shared important ideals which were relevant to wider female anti-suffragism.

This chapter introduces Walter Pater's troubled individualism as a personal and intellectual problem. It presents a case for viewing Pater at the philosophical centre of British Aestheticism in the period 1864-1894 and uses Steven Lukes' seminal work of sociological history, Individualism, to define the importance of 'Romantic Individualism' in Pater's writings throughout his career. It argues that the philosophical spirit at the heart of Aestheticism has yet to be appreciated, asserting that Pater perceives the limitations of contemporary formal philosophical discourse and -- radically -- attempts to remake 'philosophy' so that it might account for the 'fugitive conditions' and spiritual uncertainties of emerging modern sensibility. This chapter sets out its argument in the cultural and intellectual contexts of mid- to late-Victorian Oxford; a tumultuous time at which the creation of university disciplines, challenges to the Church of England, and reconceptions of philosophical discourse in Oxford.

This chapter revises the oft-perpetuated view that Pater rejected God and metaphysics in his early writings. It argues that he is never able to commit himself to the materialist view he entertains in Conclusion to The Renaissance. It focuses on how Pater uses light as a metaphor in ‘Diaphaneitè’ (1864) and ‘Winckelmann’ (1867, 1873) to represent the animating and individuating quality in each individual. It suggests that whilst light begins as a symbol of Hellenistic intellect, after Matthew Arnold, Pater is unable to give up the idea of a metaphysical quality animating the individual and, in consequence, the metaphor of light becomes irreducibly ambiguous. This chapter traces Pater's ostensible return to the Church in the latter part of his life and suggests that though he violently rejects Hellenistic light in ‘Apollo in Picardy’, he is never fully reconciled to faith or to its implications for his individualism

This chapter discusses Clark’s ‘Words in War-Time’ as a distinctive project in its own right. Beginning in 1914, it has an intellectual hinterland that reaches into Victorian Oxford, the philological revolution, and the making of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED1). Other models of historiography were, however, important, too. The chapter also explores the inspiration Clark drew from his own earlier work on the English Civil War writer Anthony Wood’s Life and Times and John Aubrey’s contemporaneous Brief Lives –especially in relation to their emphasis on the need to register living history with ‘minuteness’ in a process that directs particular attention to its incidental details. Clark’s work on language in World War One proves, in this light, intriguingly experimental, presenting both emulation and resistance in relation to earlier works on language and the narratives of time and change that might be made.