Nice job, Maverick.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) fits the bill perfectly of a "gentleman scholar" of the Victorian era (1837-1901).
He was born into "the Shropshire gentry", he self-financed his voyage aboard the Beagle, and he married into even more wealth.
But once Darwin had developed his 'revolutionary' theory of natural selection, he agonized for years about publishing it.
"From Darwin: The Man and His Legacy" - BBC"Darwin's social perceptions and evolution's use by the rioters - to smash Anglican thraldom - provide the telling backdrop to this illness and publishing delay. Loss of social standing was a very real threat to a Victorian gentleman.
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Darwin's reform of Nature -- was essentially complete. He sketched out his theory. But with the country reeling from pro-democracy, anti-workhouse riots it was no time for a gentleman to go public. Atheistic Red Lamarckians were jailed as subversives. Darwin's Cambridge divines derided their views as foul. Sedgwick saw evolutionists threatening the whole Anglican paternalist status quo.
Hadn't Darwin, the impeccable old-boy, secretly jotted: 'Once grant that species...pass into each other....& whole [Creationist] fabric totters & falls'? What then of Establishment Anglican power?"From this life of Darwin, Maverick, as told by the BBC, I conclude that the gentleman-scholars of Darwin's day were a breed apart ["the Anglican paternalist status quo"] and they owed nothing of their high-minded, privileged sensibilities to the Confucian ideal.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/darwin/leghist/desmond.htm
