This chapter considers models of conversation, and ideas about it, that can be recovered from the 1870s, as exemplary of ‘high’ Victorianism in the later part of the nineteenth century. Good conversation was represented as intellectual exchange, amiable and uncontroversial, and speaking to the like-minded, as opposed to the rise of the public intellectual (such as the ‘Sage’) and the emergence of professional specialisms, that did not rely on or expect listening; in other words, congenial discussion as opposed to the declamatory. The chapter gives examples of good conversation as modelled by The Athenæum Club and The Athenaeum weekly journal in the 1870s (including ‘Our Library Table’), and the lived example of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, as well as contrary examples from Middlemarch and John Ruskin.

This chapter offers a historical power analysis from the Saxons to the end of Pitt the Younger’s premiership. In the liminal premiership, the ‘key’ minister/advisor behind the monarch, or Oliver Cromwell during the republic, had serious power, but cannot be considered a prime minister as their power was wholly dependent on the monarch, and the complex machinations of court politics. The important innovation is how the role of ‘lead’ minister developed, with the monarch’s agreement, into the more independent ‘prime’ minister. We contend that only with Robert Walpole’s accession to the office did the power of prime minister become apparent, the primary reason being the monarch’s (George I) reliance on Walpole to control Parliament for spending and the protection of the monarch’s power. However, it was only with Pitt the Younger’s premiership, which truly established more formal parts of the office – particularly the Treasury, the state/economy and the Cabinet – that we see the beginnings of the modern office we know today.