Antiquity In Victorian Contexts

Abstract

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.