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The role of intellectuals in shaping pressure on parliament has often been neglected and still more frequently downplayed. Even intellectuals themselves have doubted their own political importance; hence Walter Bagehot's observation that ‘the too clever by half people, who live in Bohemia, ought to have no more influence in parliament, than they have in England, and they can scarcely have less’. This article considers what it is to be an intellectual in politics – and what political role intellectuals played in Victorian Britain. It concludes that intellectuals were crucial in helping to define the nature of parliament and of the political process, articulating an ideology which shaped the ways in which other groups put pressure on parliament.
