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Antiquity In Victorian Contexts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2010

Frank M. Turner
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Extract

The organizing theme of this volume and of the conference from which it originated and the publication within a year of one another of Mr. Richard Jenkyns's The Victorians and Ancient Greece and my own Creek Heritage in Victorian Britain are symptomatic of our having arrived at an important turning point in the pursuit of Victorian studies. As scholars of history, literature, art, ideas, and culture, we are at long last beginning to investigate topics that were actually of the most fundamental significance to the educated elites of nineteenth-century Britain and without which their culture and intellectual universe would have been radically different. It has taken us a very long time to reach this point of departure. We have remained overly interested in questions that seem relevant for our own rime or major figures whose work has entered die literary or philosophical canon. We have almost unwittingly continued to interpret die nineteenth century through the dwardian categories of “Victorianism.” That has even been die situation with critics, such as Walter Houghton and Basil Willey, who refuted much of the Edwardian image but did so without rejecting the very presuppositions from which Edwardian writers had launched their attack. In a unique manner the study of Victorian classicism and related topics will allow us to break through the old interpretive and evaluative categories, because classicism was an issue about which Edwardian critics and later scholars had little to say. We come to Victorian classicism widi rather fewer presuppositions than to many other topics in Victorian intellectual and literary history.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 10 , Spring 1982 , pp. 1 - 14
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

NOTES

1. In this essay the term Victorian clascicism will refer to the general interest of the Victorians in antiquity, the appearance of classical allusions in literature, and most particularly to the realm of Victorian scholarly commentary on various features of antiquity. The main body of the essay refers to the Victorian treatment of Greece with which the author is most familiar. All of the broad interpretive arguments of the essay are, however, equally applicable to the Victorian consideration of Rome.

2. Bradley, Andrew Cecil, “Old Mythology in Modern Poetry,” Macmillan's Magazine, 44 (1881), 30.Google Scholar

3. For detailed discussion of the issues mentioned in these paragraphs and elsewhere in the essay, consult Turner, Frank M., The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Jenkyns, Richard, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1980)Google Scholar; and Turner, Frank M., “Lucretius among the Victorians,” Victorian Studies, 16 (1973), 229–348.Google Scholar

4. Pusey, Edward Bouverie, Collegiate and Professorial Teaching and Discipline in Answer to Professor Vaughn's Strictures (Oxford and London: John Henry Parker, 1854), p. 62.Google Scholar

5. Cornford, Francis Macdonald, The Cambridge Classical Course: An Essay in Anticipation of Further. Reform (Cambridge:W. H. Heffer & Sons, 1903), p. 19.Google Scholar

6. Grote, John, “Old Studies and New,” in Cambridge Essays: 1856(London:John W. Parker and Son, 1856), p. 114.Google Scholar

7. Richard W. Livingstone, “The Position and Function of Classical Studies in Modern English Education,” Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg (1930–31), p. 258.

8. Grant, Alexander, The “Ethics” of Aristotle Illustrated with Essays and Notes (London:John W. Parker and Son, 1857,1858), II, xi–xii.Google Scholar

9. Arnold, Matthew, Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. Super, R. H. (Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 230.Google Scholar

10. Livingstone, Richard W., The Greek Genius and Its Meaning to Us (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1912), pp. 247–48.Google Scholar

11. For the various changes in both content and format, consult Benjamin Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato, Translated into English with Analyses and Introductions (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1st ed., 1871; 2nd ed., 1875; 3rd ed., 1892).Google Scholar

12. Blackie, John Stuart, “Plato and Christianity,” North British Review, 35 (1861), 369.Google Scholar