Scholarship

So what is distinctively Victorian about Victorian classicism? What made it different? In the first instance, it was often more scholarly. In Oxford and Cambridge and the great public schools, the dominance of the classical curriculum was increasingly challenged, particularly from the 1860s, but it was not finally dethroned by science and modern studies until the end of the century: it was indeed strengthened by more systematic teaching and examining, a steady retreat from the older gentlemanly emphasis on Latin and Greek verse composition to allow time for more extended classical reading, and a new research-driven professionalism influenced by rigorous German scholarship (Stray 1998: 117-40). The study of early Roman history, hampered by the semilegendary nature of the Roman sources, was revitalized by the sometimes-speculative or intuitive work of the scholar and diplomat B. G. Niebuhr in his Romische Geschichte (Roman history, 1811-12, rev. edn. 1827-32), translated by Connop Thirlwall, J. C. Hare, and William Smith (1828-42) and used extensively by Thomas Arnold in his History of Rome (1838-43). Theodor Mommsen’s extensive researches on imperial Roman history, particularly his monumental Roomische Geschichte (1854-6), were taken seriously in Britain, although his unstinted praise for Julius Caesar encouraged some unsympathetic English readers to misread and dismiss him as a Prussian militarist reconstructing Caesar as an immoral Bismarckian hero. Text-editing, involving the collection and patiently systematic comparison of ancient manuscripts to reconstruct the best possible text, had been brought to a fine art that was almost a science, mainly by German scholars such as Karl Lachmann of Berlin, and in Britain this was reflected in substantial editions with full commentary such as H. A. J. Munro’s Lucretius (1864), based in part on Lachmann’s work, and John Conington’s Virgil (1858). The Danish scholar and sometime Minister of

Education Johan Nicolai Madvig had published extensively on the syntax of both Latin and Greek, and this work was adapted and made available to English classrooms by the indefatigable textbook compiler Thomas Kerchever Arnold. The German philologist Wilhelm Freund’s pioneering Latin dictionary on historical principles (Leipzig, 1834-5) was edited and translated by the American scholar Ethan A. Andrews in 1850 and then in 1879 substantially revised and expanded into a durable standard work, published by Oxford University Press, by Andrews’ compatriots Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short. Franz Passow of Breslau, who in 1807 had been appointed to a professorship of Greek literature at the Weimar Gymnasium by Goethe himself, had produced a major Greek dictionary in 1819-24, building on the work of his Breslau colleague J. G. Schneider, and this was used as the basis for the monumental Greek-English Lexicon compiled by the Oxford classicists Henry Liddell and Robert Scott (1843; 8th edn. 1897).

Yet words on the page were only one of the clues to classical civilization. New archaeological discoveries in Italy, Greece, and the Middle East and increased awareness of the evidence for and the importance of ritual, religion, visual culture, and social life in the ancient world greatly enlarged the scope of classical studies: from about the time Victoria came to the throne in 1837, the new German Alter-tumswissenschaft, or multidisciplinary science of antiquity, began to influence British classical studies. W. A. Becker, Professor of Classical Archaeology at Leipzig from 1842, had assembled materials for both Roman and Greek social history in his two extraordinary, encyclopedic volumes, cast in the form of fiction, Gallus, or Roman Scenes of the Time of Augustus (1838; English trans. 1844) and Charicles, or Illustrations of the Private Life of the Greeks (1840; English trans. 1845). Both must be among the most heavily footnoted ‘‘novels’’ ever published, although they ran through many editions and supplied many more readable novelists and historians with invaluable background material.

But Victorian classicism was never just a matter of rigorous scholarship and the accumulation of detailed information. The ultimately ahistorical liberal humanism that it supported among teachers and educational thinkers such as Matthew Arnold was indeed sometimes unhappy with academic developments and the increasing archaeological evidence of what Homeric society might actually have been like (Turner 1981: 180-3). Among the general public a distinctive and vivid, if unscholarly, sense of connection with the world of Greece and Rome, particularly Rome, was stimulated by contemporary developments, notably steam engines, religion, popular publishing and the politics of class, nation, and empire.