Christopher Stray

Culture and discipline: Classics and society in Victorian England

This article deals with the uses of classical antiquity in 19th-century England, which is approached as a specific variant of a general phenomenon—the use of the past to generate metaphoric exemplars in the present. The era of Victorian Hellenism opens and closes with social and cultural crises. The first inaugurated a society which was predicated on the autonomous individual, not on stable groups; the second involved the erosion of the power of a noble-bourgeois elite under the pressures of modernisation and social reform. Latin and Greek stood above English in a hierarchy both linguistic and social, but were eventually marginalised by the expansion of university curricula into new areas. By the early 20th century, Latin had emerged from the shadow of Hellenism to symbolise the academic rigour of multi-subject curricula, the social aspirations of those who attended the new state grammar schools, and the self-discipline of the new voter.