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THE GREEK-PLAY BISHOP: POLEMIC, PROSOPOGRAPHY, AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY PRELATES*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2011

ARTHUR BURNS  and
CHRISTOPHER STRAY
ARTHUR BURNS*
Affiliation:
King's College London
CHRISTOPHER STRAY*
Affiliation:
Swansea University
*
Arthur Burns: Department of History, King's College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS[email protected]
Christopher Stray: School of Arts and Humanities: History and Classics, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP[email protected]
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Abstract

Discussions of classical scholarship and of the Anglican church in Victorian England have both at times identified an ‘age of the Greek-play bishop’ during which there was a close relationship between classical distinction and episcopal promotion. Closer investigation reveals few prelates fitting the description. This article explains this paradox by tracing the idea of the ‘Greek-play bishop’ across a variety of nineteenth-century literatures, in the process suggesting the significance more generally of the migration of ideas between overlapping Victorian print cultures. The article demonstrates how the concept originated in the radical critique of Old Corruption around 1830, before in the 1840s and 1850s satirists (notably Sydney Smith) adopted it in ad personam assaults on two bishops, J. H. Monk and C. J. Blomfield. In the 1860s, the concept became a less polemical category in the context of more wide-ranging analyses of the composition of the episcopate, gradually acquiring an elegiac aspect as new intellectual challenges arose to Victorian Christianity. By 1900, the ‘Greek-play bishop’ had begun to find the place in the conceptual armoury of historians of the nineteenth-century church that it would hold for much of the twentieth century, its polemical origins long forgotten.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , December 2011 , pp. 1013 - 1038
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

*

The authors gratefully acknowledge advice and comments on earlier versions of this research from Hugh Bowden, Mark Curthoys, Kenneth Fincham, Joanna Innes, Ludmilla Jordanova, Jo MacDonagh, Dominic Rathbone, and especially Stephen Taylor; we are also indebted to the anonymous reviewers for this journal.

References

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27 A. Aspinall, ed., The letters of King George IV, 1812–1830 (3 vols., Cambridge, 1938), iii, p. 171, no. 1159.

28 Richardson, ‘Failure of history’, p. 28. It will be apparent from our account of Blomfield's career that, while we agree that he did not owe his mitre to scholarship, we see more of the meritocratic in his advancement, and indeed some reason for taking at face value Blomfield's account of the classics’ role in his appointment to Dunton in 1811.

29 Blomfield, Memoir of Charles James Blomfield.

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32 George Crabbe, The borough (1810), letter 2, ‘The church’ l. 8.

33 See Christopher Stray, ‘Thomas Gaisford: legion, legend, lexicographer’, unpub. paper.

34 See Arthur Burns, ‘English “church reform” revisited, 1780–1840’, in idem and J. Innes, eds., Rethinking the age of reform: Britain, 1780–1850 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 148–52.

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50 Nowell C. Smith, ed., The letters of Sydney Smith (2 vols., Oxford, 1953), ii, p. 675, Smith to Lady Grey, 15 Nov. 1838. The quotation from Luke 7:40 alludes to Monk's supposed interpretation as a coded attack on him of an anecdote concerning the medieval prelate Simon of Gloucester in the First letter.

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54 For the attribution and sources, see the online Quarterly Review archive, ed. J. Cutmore at www.rc.umd.edu/reference/qr/index/38.html, accessed 16 Aug. 2011. For evidence of Monk's research for the article, see H. V. Bayley to Monk, 29 Dec. 1818: TCC, Monk papers, A/4/7.

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61 Idem, Barchester towers (London, 1857)Google Scholar, ch. 43.

62 Trollope, Clergymen of the Church of England.

63 Ibid., pp. 16–30, at pp. 21, 26. In a scathing review, Trollope's chief critic, Henry Alford, affected to puzzle over the ‘punctuation’ remark (‘What particular branch of scholarship this may represent it is quite beyond us to say’) despite its obvious reference back to earlier invocations, but did not comment on the category further. ‘Mr Anthony Trollope and the English clergy’, Contemporary Review, 2 (1866), pp. 240–58Google Scholar, at p. 252.

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85 Turner, F. M., The Greek heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT, 1981)Google Scholar; Goldhill, Simon, Who needs Greek? Contests in the history of Hellenism (Cambridge, 2002)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 4. See also Jenkyns, Richard, The Victorians and ancient Greece (Oxford, 1980)Google Scholar.