The Wellesley Index originated in its founding editor Walter Houghton's The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (1957), a manual which was influential among students of the Sixties. Houghton's book took as its starting-point the fact of a collective Victorian mentality - a kind of public overmind. Although this Victorian mind might contain oppositions within itself (the so-called 'Victorian debate'), it was nevertheless governed by structures of thought which, if not consensual, were in the largest sense rational and intellectual - a set of ideas articulated by a clerisy. Houghton's book broke the Victorian mind down into its constituent parts, or ideas, under such headings as 'Optimism'. 'Anxiety', 'Hero Worship', 'Hypocrisy'. The dominant ideas were principally extracted from the pontifical utterances of 'sages', in John Holloway's expression, like Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin, Bagehot, Froude, Huxley, Morley, Arnold.

LRB 10 November 1988 | PDF Download