It is best that we begin our re-examination of a life notable for the ideas associated with it, as near as we are able, at the beginning. It was in Cambridge, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, that the ground was made ready for a much wider appreciation to come, in Great Britain and abroad, of a distinctive intellectual talent in legal scholarship and social theory. It was a talent that would ultimately win for him in his later lifetime and in the tumultuous century which has passed since his demise the rare intellectual accolade that Maine was the author of a book that epitomized the spirit of an age, a book regarded by posterity as a classic.

It was at Trinity Hall, in the late summer of 1844, that fresh from his brilliant undergraduate studies at nearby Pembroke College, Henry Maine was to take up rooms near what was then the mathematics lecture-room in the principal court and to begin his career as a junior classics tutor. That tutorship was only the first step of a personal and public progress ‘ he would leap-frog from the tutorship in a matter of only three years to become, in June 1847, the very youthful Regius Professor of Civil Law in unreformed Cambridge, and simultaneously, in another display of an unerring penchant for accumulating public appointments, Reader in Jurisprudence and Civil Law at the Middle Temple, London ‘ that would carry Maine in the span of his relatively short lifetime from modest and even obscure beginnings to a position high on the ladder of arrived Victorian social mobility.