Britain’s steam-powered industrial revolution led not just to material riches but also to an enhanced sense of civic and indeed national pride that found visible expression in dignified Victorian public buildings. While various styles were adopted, some architects and some city fathers continued to favor classical designs because they recalled the achievements of the Greek city-states and the majesty of imperial Rome. Cuthbert
Brodrick’s design for Leeds Town Hall (1858) featured classical columns of the local stone, millstone grit. The enormous commercial success of early-Victorian Liverpool was reflected in the building of St. George’s Hall (1842-54), acclaimed as one of the finest neoclassical buildings in Europe. H. L. Elmes’s design for the main hall was self-consciously modeled on the tepidarium (tepid bathing-room) of the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. There were other classical buildings in the city. A painting by the Liverpool artist Samuel Austin depicting Vergil’s Aeneas being received at the court of Dido, Queen of Carthage actually depicts many of these buildings, as if to suggest that the trade passing through the modern port of Liverpool invited comparison with that of ancient Carthage, Rome’s great rival (Vance 1997: 74).
Steam power also improved communications. Steamships and railroads increased opportunities for travel not only to Rome, Pompeii, and Athens but also to classical sites closer to home, such as Hadrian’s Wall or the Roman antiquities of Bath or Colchester. Before, and even, for a time, after, the famous Greek travels of Lord Byron and his protagonist Childe Harold, Greece had been more of a dream than an actual place, almost out of reach of northern Europe, tempting some so-called travel writers to stay at home and recycle the work of their predecessors rather than furnish fresh material from firsthand observation (Constantine 1989).
The Grand Tour of the eighteenth century which had allowed young aristocrats to see the grandeur that was Rome at first hand had been prohibitively expensive, a leisurely, once-in-a-lifetime experience for the privileged few. But the coming of the railroads and passenger steamers gradually made the journey to Italy quicker and cheaper, something that could be contemplated by middle-class novelists such as Charles Dickens or George Eliot as well as by wealthy noblemen. Karl Baedeker’s compact and indispensable handbook Central Italy and Rome, available to English travelers from 1861, responded to and stimulated a new classical tourism, economically providing the expert advice on art and antiquities that might once have been supplied by a special guide or an accompanying tutor. Baedeker’s Greece came later, in 1889.
The pioneer travel agent Thomas Cook conducted tours to Italy from 1863, after the completion of the rail-link between northern Italy and Rome, and the journey became even shorter with the opening of the Mont Cenis railroad tunnel through the Alps in 1871. It was now much easier for classicists to pursue their researches on the ground or in the Vatican library: the British Archaeological Society of Rome was established in 1865, and French, American, and British Schools in Rome followed in 1873, 1894, and 1901. The British School in Athens was opened in 1886.
Roman antiquities within Britain had begun to attract more visitors during the Napoleonic Wars, when continental travel was difficult even for the wealthy. The growth of the railroad network soon after encouraged this new interest by making it easier to visit the widely scattered sites and local museums testifying to Roman occupation. Traces of the Roman presence in Dorchester, which contributes to the sombre backdrop of Hardy’s novel The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), are still on display in the Dorset County Museum. Some of the artifacts were unearthed during the building of Hardy's new house in Dorchester in 1884. The massive excavations entailed by Victorian railroad construction as well as by road-making and building programmes constantly brought to light additional evidence of Roman settlement.
The scholarly London pharmacist Charles Roach-Smith took to haunting building sites, prepared to make an offer for almost anything Roman that the spade might turn up. His extensive collection of Roman artifacts, nowin the British Museum, provided the basis for his book Illustrations of Roman London (1859).
In 1832, in rapidly expanding industrial Manchester, remains of the old Roman fort of Mancenion were accidentally uncovered at the foot of the new Altrincham railroad viaduct and carefully protected by Lord Francis Egerton. The dramatic juxtaposition of bustling modernity and Roman remains stimulated the popular imagination and helped to encourage a sense of connection: it became apparent that, like the British of modern times, the Romans in Britain had been great civil engineers and improvers, building connecting roads if not railroads throughout the country, attaining new standards of personal comfort with running water, elaborate public baths, and underfloor heating, and developing a well-attested material culture.
World History
