Feet Of Clay?

What is one to make of the writer of this letter to his father?

I sit down in great perplexity of mind to write to you … I hope I am doing right, certainly I am not doing what is pleasing to me … I have for some time suspected, although I have tried to disbelieve it, as long as I could, that one of my companions Jessop has exceedingly improper connections, and that he is in the habit of visiting them at times, when Dr Hoppus thinks, he is engaged at college, and on Sunday evenings, when he is thought to be at church. Now certainly I feel that it cannot be my duty to allow this state of things to continue; I do not think it would be doing right either to Dr Hoppus or to Jessop himself; yet the office of talebearer is so invidious, and in general so contemptible that I confess I am exceedingly loath to undertake it. The immediate necessity of taking some step is, that tonight under pretence of going to a debating society at the college, Jessop is going to introduce another of my companions  Collier to these women: this certainly must be stopped and I possess no other means of doing so, but informing Dr Hoppus immediately.

What further do you make of that writer if you learn that he was sixteen years of age when penning this apologia for dobbing in poor old Jessop and Collier? Well you'll probably have guessed that the boy in the frame is our old favourite Walter Bagehot. He wrote this within his first month away at University College London as he took it upon himself to report the doings of two fellow lodgers at the house of Dr Hoppus. There is no record of what became of the miscreants but Bagehot's later correspondence suggest that he was himself sent to Coventry by fellow students and experienced some consequent difficulty in gaining admission to the college debating society. If we read a little later into Bagehot's time at UCL we spot his creation (with Richard Holt Hutton, later co-founding editor with him of the National Review) of a new debating society. None of Bagehot's biographers seem to make the link that this was necessary because the extant society would not have him. That however is for another day - what intrigues me now is the assessment those biographers make of what we might term the Jessop Affair, and what it tells of the process of assembling personal history.

It will not have escaped notice that I have a soft spot for old Walter. But even his greatest admirer (and in that category we could suggest two prime literary candidates - the said Richard Holt Hutton and Walter's first full biographer, his sister-in-law Mrs Russell Barrington) might have to concede that he was prone to priggishness. Mrs Barrington, indeed, might not have seen priggishness as a vice but she does perhaps unwittingly allude to the problem:

Walter Bagehot seldom had other than friendly relations with those with whom he came in contact, but his real friends were few.

Mrs Barrington's description of the Affair is charmingly delicate. Mention of Jessop's and Collier's names is excised; she quotes admiringly from Walter's letter but does so sparingly, omitting any mention that the alleged indelicacy related to 'women'. Bagehot's letter was presumably in Mrs Barrington's possession but it was not fully published (so far as I can tell) until it appeared in the penultimate volume of St John Stevas' vast Collected Works in 1986. Thus its contents were denied to successive biographers, Irvine, Buchan, Sisson, all of whom rely on Mrs Barrington's telling of the tale. Sisson (by a wide margin the least enthusiastic assessor of Bagehot) is in no doubt, "One cannot but think that the sixteen-year-old moralist was taking a bit much on himself." Sisson perhaps falls prey to his own Anglo-Catholic prejudices when he asserts that the young Bagehot was "merely the medium of his father's sentiments." Bagehot's father was a resolute Unitarian but might the young Walter not equally have been the medium for his mother's Anglicanism?

Possibly Buchan gets closest to a fair summation of Bagehot's behaviour,

It reveals at the same time moral courage, a strong sense of right and duty, together with something which could either be officiousness or an overdeveloped fastidiousness.

What if I had been one of Bagehot's co-boarders at UCL in 1842? I'm rather afraid that I would have been amongst those giving him a wide berth, only later coming to admire his strength. Nobody likes a smart arse.