Classics in Britain: Scholarship, Education, and Publishing, 1800-2000, by Christopher Stray

Abstract

Reviewed by: Classics in Britain: Scholarship, Education, and Publishing, 1800–2000 by Christopher Stray Simon Goldhill (bio) Classics in Britain: Scholarship, Education, and Publishing, 1800–2000, by Christopher Stray; pp. xxvi + 355. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018, £90.00, $124.95. When Christopher Stray published Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England, 1830–1960 in 1998, it hit a moment. There has been no period since the Renaissance when the study of classics and classicism has not been interested in its own history, and both the history of scholarship on antiquity and the history of modernity's relation to Greece and Rome have formed an insistent topic of debate. But during the previous decades, the field of Victorian classicism had been dominated by two works: Frank M. Turner's marvelous and still influential The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (1984), which focused on antiquity as a model for politics and historiography, and The Victorians and Ancient Greece (1981) by Richard Jenkyns, whose dilettante methodology is best described as an Eton and Oxford man fondling his Victoriana in his study. Stray brought a robust educational sociology to the subject: he gave a detailed and well-researched account of the development of the discipline of classics viewed from the classrooms of schools and universities, and from the committee rooms of administrators at university and governmental levels. It was a transformative and widely praised book based on widely collected and incisively analyzed empirical evidence. At the same time, Stray did not wander from his subject to see the effects of this education in a wider culture; he discussed almost no art, music, theater, or literature, although there are hundreds of novels, paintings, and other artworks that, as engagements with antiquity, formed the imaginary of Victorians, especially (but not only) for the more educated elites. Nor was he interested in the major shifts of society over the 130 years of his research. Even the World Wars or the loss of empire proved little more than an interruption of classroom practice in his story. Above all, religion, that pervasive and polemical force in Victorian social change, played little role in his story, although the imbrication of classics and theology is everywhere significant in the careers and the thinking of his main protagonists. He did trace brilliantly the movement of scholars between schools, universities, and religious institutions, but this important insight into their career patterns did not turn into a consideration of how such movement might have shaped their intellectual approaches to antiquity. Since the transformative impact of Classics Transformed, Stray has continued to publish articles and edit books at a sterling rate: the bibliography of Classics in Britain: Scholarship, Education, and Publishing, 1800–2000, his most recent book, lists sixty-three of his own works, all but seventeen published since Classics Transformed. No one has a deeper or more detailed knowledge of the figures who inhabited the Victorian classical classroom and its policies than Stray. Classics in Britain duly collects eighteen of these articles and book chapters, sixteen of which have been already published and four from over twenty years ago. The chapters are grouped under the general headings of "Scholarship and Institutions," "Scholarship and Publishing," and "Schools and Schoolbooks." These topics are central to understanding the formation of the discipline of classics, and thus the development of the university and, more intangibly but no less importantly, the shape of a culture's understanding of the classical past. Despite some repetitiveness, it is a good decision to put these pieces together, and for two reasons. First, it enables a particular set [End Page 333] of general questions to emerge. Stray is interested particularly in how the growing publishing business affects the work in schools and universities and how changing policies of education and technological advances change publishing. This remains a major question today and its history is salient. In particular, Stray adds a good deal to our knowledge of textbooks, which have often been insufficiently recognized in the history of education and book history. The best essays here reveal the infighting and mix of ideological and financial maneuvering that go into the battles for a market. Second, we now get a...