Publishing

Long’s painting was widely familiar because it was not only exhibited at the Royal Academy but was subsequently engraved and published by Thomas Agnew (Mayer 1994: 3). A century earlier the views of Roman ruins of Piranesi or Pannini had been expensively engraved and bound in elegant folio volumes intended for gentlemen’s libraries, but the processes were now cheaper and more reliable, so classical-subject paintings and the visual evidences of Greek and Roman antiquity could be conveyed to a much wider audience. With the development of line-illustrations and photographic reproductions, instead of expensive plates that had to be separately inserted into printed texts, and with improvements in printing and binding processes, the matter of Greece and Rome could reach people more vividly and more inexpensively than ever before. From the 1880s the slim blue volumes of Macmillan’s Elementary Classics series, intended for schools, were illustrated with maps and drawings and photographs of busts, mosaics, or Greek vases.

Without pictures, classical books could be even cheaper. Hardy’s self-taught Jude, like the young Hardy himself, had suffered from a lack of affordable and user-friendly classical texts. The Teubner series published in Leipzig from 1828 provided reliable texts, but these had only textual notes, in Latin. A. J. Valpy’s reissue (1819-30) of the seventeenth-century French Delphin Classics editions was better than nothing, but not much. But all that was about to change. The growth of public examinations as a rite of passage not merely to and from universities but also to professional employment brought with it a demand for inexpensive examination texts. Cambridge University Press’s Pitt Press series, inaugurated in 1875, was designed for students taking the Cambridge local examinations. It provided up-to-date, annotated editions of ‘‘set books,’’ including English, French, and German as well as classical texts.

Other publishers were quick to exploit this market. Rivingtons’ Catena Classi-corum series began in 1867. Elementary or abbreviated versions of substantial classical histories and editions became common. Sir Charles Oman’s History of Greece (1890) was followed by an Elementary History of Greece (1899), both published by Rivingtons. A. W. Verrall’s edition of the Medea of Euripides (1881) was followed by his friend M. A. Bayfield’s school edition (1892), both published by Macmillan.

But Macmillan’s Elementary Classics were not for everyone. The Prefaces are usually impersonal or couched in ungendered language, but when the word ‘‘beginner’’ is used, the beginner is usually assumed to be a boy, particularly when the text is Greek. Latin had always been more widely taught than Greek and it was often a matriculation requirement for university when Greek was not. George Eliot had taught herself Greek and brooded on the fate of Antigone in Middlemarch with some knowledge of Sophocles’ play, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning had read Homer in the original, but they were exceptional.

Demands for a national education system led to an Education Act in 1870, but secondary education that could include some Latin and even Greek continued to be the preserve of the middle and upper classes. Elementary education for those under 13, which was all that was available to a majority of the population, boys as well as girls, included neither Latin nor Greek, apart perhaps from a few etymologies of English words. Most readers, especially women readers, encountered the classics, if at all, only through translation. H. G. Bohn’s Classical Library, published between 1848 and 1913, eventually ran to 116 volumes of translations, anticipating later popular series such as Everyman’s Library, founded in 1906, which included classical authors in translation.

Both the Bohn and Everyman volumes often reprinted earlier translations, such as Thomas Moore and Leigh Hunt’s versions of Catullus, John Mason Good’s Lucretius (1805), and Shelley’s version of Plato’s Ion, so that readers were given some sense not just of the texts themselves but of a tradition of interest in them. That sense of a classical tradition was both witnessed and heightened by William Blackwood’s popular series Ancient Classics for English Readers (1870-1932), which provided elementary introductions to classical authors with translated passages and paraphrase or summary of classical texts. Contributors included the novelist Anthony Trollope (on Julius Caesar) as well as professional scholars. There was some overlap with Macmillan’s series of Literature Primers, issued from 1875, which included some classical volumes. Richard Jebb contributed Greek Literature (1877), and Mr. Gladstone himself supplied Homer (1878).