‘It may be said with deliberation, and without fear of contradiction from any competent authority, that in Mr Mark Pattison the University of Oxford has lost by far the most distinguished of her resident members.’ So wrote the Saturday Review in August 1884, on the death of the rector of Lincoln College. This was a strong assertion to make at a time when the University housed Benjamin Jowett, Max Müller and John Ruskin, but the spirit of the remark was echoed in other obituaries in the national press, and it captures the extraordinary reputation Pattison enjoyed at the end of his life. He occupies a shadowy presence in Victorian studies today, but his contemporaries would have been surprised to find that his intellectual distinction has been lost from view by historians. In his last decade he enjoyed nationwide renown for the exceptional qualities of his mind; and that renown reached continental Europe too. Even his antagonists recognized that they were dealing with a man of rare ability. Jowett, who was more aware than most of his personal deficiencies, could nevertheless call him a genius.

Pattison lived through a formative period in the history of the modern university in England, and in his person he embodied many of the transformations that occurred in the half century he spent at Oxford.