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Culture and discipline: Classics and society in Victorian England

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Abstract

This article deals with the uses of classical antiquity in 19th-century England, which is approached as a specific variant of a general phenomenon—the use of the past to generate metaphoric exemplars in the present. The era of Victorian Hellenism opens and closes with social and cultural crises. The first inaugurated a society which was predicated on the autonomous individual, not on stable groups; the second involved the erosion of the power of a noble-bourgeois elite under the pressures of modernisation and social reform. Latin and Greek stood above English in a hierarchy both linguistic and social, but were eventually marginalised by the expansion of university curricula into new areas. By the early 20th century, Latin had emerged from the shadow of Hellenism to symbolise the academic rigour of multi-subject curricula, the social aspirations of those who attended the new state grammar schools, and the self-discipline of the new voter.

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References

  1. I am aware that the use of “classics” to denote the study and/or use of classical antiquity is foreign to some traditions of thought and writing. It is used here analytically as a neutral signifier. That is not to say that the term does not have a specific history; its origins in the sense in which I employ it here probably lie in the examination regulations of the new University of London in the late 1830s.

  2. The approach sketched out here is argued for in detail in C. A. Stray,Culture and Discipline: The Transformation of Classics in England 1830–1930, Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 1997.

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  18. The journal is the organ of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, founded in 1879. For a centenary retrospective, see P. T. Stevens,The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1879–1979. A historical sketch, published by the Society in 1979.

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  22. J. J. Thomson,Recollections and reflections, London: G. Bell, 1936, pp. 54–55. I have chosen illustrative material with claims, however weak, to humour, because I believe such jokes form an important and neglected category of evidence which deserve serious study. By their jests ye may know them.

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  23. An example, unusual only in its explicitness, is the remark in an educational journal in 1915: “those who sit on governing bodies and places where they decide on curriculum … have got to be persuaded that Latin is not a waste of time, that it is not merely ornamental, and that it improves the breed of citizen” (Assistant Masters' AssociationCircular, May 1915, p. 73).

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  1. Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Wales Swansea, SA2 8PP, Swansea, UK

    Christopher A. Stray

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This article is based on a paper given at the Third Meeting of the International Society for the Classical Tradition, held at Boston University, March 8–12, 1995.

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Stray, C.A. Culture and discipline: Classics and society in Victorian England. International Journal of the Classical Tradition 3, 77–85 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02676905

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