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No talent required in the new and lucrative era of the gentleman amateur | Martha Gill
Pierce Brosnan and Robbie Williams are modern-day dabblers gaining undue attention
The idea that people should succeed and fail on their merits at work is a fairly modern one. Until around the end of the 19th century in Britain, it was entirely natural that the top end of all kinds of occupations – sports, the sciences, art, politics – should be filled not by the hardworking and talented but by wealthy hobbyists. “Gentlemen amateurs”, a phenomenon traceable to the 17th century, were the renaissance sorts both created and personified by Arthur Conan Doyle: those with the time to treat careers as interesting collectors’ items. Crucially, they also had social pull. So where they dabbled, they dominated.
Sometimes the dabbling led to spectacular breakthroughs: Charles Darwin is a famous example. But gradually a consensus formed that a thick and stifling layer of privilege was holding back talent and getting in the way of progress. Amateur officers were blamed for military catastrophes in the Boer war. Bloomsbury bourgeois-bohemians were scooping up patronage in the art world while the rest starved in their garrets. In the decades leading to the first world war, a brace of vulgar new “professionals” shook off and shut out these aristocratic hangers-on. Meritocracy in the world of work had begun in earnest. The gentleman amateurs disappeared.
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