Carving Out the Public Sphere: Romantic Literary Periodicals and the Elgin Marbles

Abstract

When the British government decided, in 1816, to incorporate the Elgin Marbles into the British Museum’s collections, it brought the sculptures’ presence to bear on British history as much as on ancient civilizations’. British writers, painters, sculptors, politicians and antiquaries debated the purchase question from all sides. This chapter focuses on two works in which the Marbles’ location in the British Museum is an immense concern, thanks to questions of proprietorship or display strategy: Byron’s The Curse of Minerva, first published in a pirated and heavily excised form in the New Monthly Magazine in 1815; and Horatio Smith’s ‘The Statue of Theseus, and the Sculpture Room of Phidias’, given a privileged position within the London Magazine in 1821. The New Monthly Magazine sought a way to exploit Byron’s fame without endorsing his liberal politics, whereas the London Magazine afforded Smith a platform for a Whig cultural agenda, and, as I will argue, a platform to define the magazine itself against its rivals and its epoch. Romantic literary periodicals were self-consciously contemporary, seeking to capture and define the effervescent spirit of the age for a substantial readership. Indeed, Romantic literary periodicals were never more contemporary than when they reached back to the classical past.