For more than one hundred and fifty years the Cambridge Apostles have
played an influential role in the development of the British
intelligentsia. Peter Allen's concern is with the origins and early
history of this long-lived coterie and in particular with those years
just before the first Reform Bill when the central figures among the
Apostles were F. D. Maurice, Arthur Hallam and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. He
explains the reasons for the club's extraordinary powers of survival and
traces the stages of its early development. Using manuscript material,
he describes the principal members of the Apostolic group and reveals
its inner life through extensive quotation from their correspondence.
The early Apostles' role in the formation of the Victorian
intelligentsia is exemplified, and they are shown to have made important
contributions to the rising movement of liberal intellectualism, a
movement which brought about profound changes to Victorian opinion and
in society itself.