The Victorian mandarins’ properties were several. They were secular, less and less bound by confessional ties. They rose up from the reformed public schools and the re-forming universities. Therefore, they were creatures of competitive examinations. Since those examinations were literary examina¬tions, they learned to live by their pens. The mandarins bound themselves by loose ties of loyalty in the sprawling interconnections of clubs, societies, and associations. They shaped their identities less through concepts of social class or ideology and rather more through moral concepts drawn from such families as gathered in Clapham Common. Those pieties drifted, slipped, and were shifted by those who wrote the Essays and Reviews and those who gave the Gifford Lectures.

Conclusion

THE Victorian secular clerisy emerged in the wake of Test Act repeal, Catholic emancipation, and the removal of Jewish political disabilities. These were not so much events as they were processes of political seculari¬zation which took the rest of century to express themselves. Even then they were not complete. Political secularization was complex, and indeterminate. The Victorian mandarins were anti-clerical, anti-literal, and anti-dogmatic. But they were not necessarily atheistic or even agnostic. The Victorian mandarins gestated in the period from the Northcote–Trevelyan Report (1853–1854) to Robert Lowe's Order in Council of 1870.