Jowett: A Portrait With Background
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good to fair. Jacket: No dust jacket. Page Condition: Good - possible tanning. Markings: possible previous owner inscription.
Few figures in Victorian Oxford commanded as much reverence and controversy as Benjamin Jowett — Master of Balliol College, translator of Plato, and one of the most influential educators of his age. Geoffrey Faber's Jowett: A Portrait with Background presents a richly textured biography that situates its subject not merely as an individual, but as a product and shaper of his era, drawing on extensive archival research to reconstruct both the man and the world that formed him. Faber — himself a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford — brings an insider's authority to his portrait, illuminating the religious controversies, intellectual battles, and social tensions that defined mid-to-late nineteenth-century Oxford. Written with scholarly rigour yet sustained by a prose style of remarkable elegance, this biography chronicles Jowett's decades-long struggle against theological orthodoxy and his ultimately triumphant career as a reformer of university education. Faber illustrates how Jowett's personal contradictions — his ambition, his deep affections, his guarded inner life — made him at once admired and enigmatic to his contemporaries. For anyone seeking to understand the forces that shaped modern English intellectual life, this portrait of Jowett remains an indispensable and quietly revelatory work.
Author: Geoffrey Faber
Format: Hardback
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good to fair. Jacket: No dust jacket. Page Condition: Good - possible tanning. Markings: possible previous owner inscription.
Few figures in Victorian Oxford commanded as much reverence and controversy as Benjamin Jowett — Master of Balliol College, translator of Plato, and one of the most influential educators of his age. Geoffrey Faber's Jowett: A Portrait with Background presents a richly textured biography that situates its subject not merely as an individual, but as a product and shaper of his era, drawing on extensive archival research to reconstruct both the man and the world that formed him. Faber — himself a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford — brings an insider's authority to his portrait, illuminating the religious controversies, intellectual battles, and social tensions that defined mid-to-late nineteenth-century Oxford. Written with scholarly rigour yet sustained by a prose style of remarkable elegance, this biography chronicles Jowett's decades-long struggle against theological orthodoxy and his ultimately triumphant career as a reformer of university education. Faber illustrates how Jowett's personal contradictions — his ambition, his deep affections, his guarded inner life — made him at once admired and enigmatic to his contemporaries. For anyone seeking to understand the forces that shaped modern English intellectual life, this portrait of Jowett remains an indispensable and quietly revelatory work.