Classics

Abstract

Classics Christopher Stray University of Wales, Swansea A textbook can be classified as such in different ways: authorial intention, publisher's planning, conventional markets, pedagogic function, and so on. But the modern notion of 'textbook' as a book designed for a teaching situation, often with an adapted or specifically targeted text and/or with pedagogic additions (questions and answers, vocabulary, exercises, notes) seems to have solidified around 1830.3 Before the nineteenth century a 'text book' was usually a book containing an important text – often a religious one, though it might be a secular text to be discussed in a teaching context. By 1900 the spelling had generally (though by no means universally) shifted from 'text book' through 'text-book' to 'textbook', and this perhaps indicates a reification and commodification of the category. It may be significant that the period around 1830 also saw a moveto safer markets by some publishers after the commercial alarms and publishing crashes of the mid-1820s (John Taylor and John Murray both made such moves); but it was also the beginning, as Simon Eliot has suggested, of a distribution revolution which was accelerated in the 1840s by the penny post and the railways.4 The rural boarding schools which relied on access by rail for pupils were also sent books by the [End Page 263] same route. Earlier innovations had included lithography, which spread rapidly in the first two decades of the century, and which facilitated the flexible printing of 'exotic' (i.e. non-roman, including Greek and Hebrew) and mathematical texts. It also made possible cheap, short-run, in-house printing of teaching material, much of which has probably disappeared.5 It is important to remember the existence of this kind of material, complementing or even replacing conventional books, since little survives. The same is true for some kinds of manuscript material: for example, the teaching texts assembled by mathematical coaches in Cambridge in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.6 Almost all of this material will have escaped the clutches of copyright deposit libraries, though traces can be found in institutional archives. Classics offered a dual tradition: Greek and Latin. In 1800 a previously central Latin exemplar (Augustan Rome) was being upstaged by romantic hellenism, but Latin was embedded not only as the language of Rome but as the language of learning: both Latin and Greek grammars, for example, were usually written in Latin.7 Teaching in the lower forms of the English public and grammar schools was dominated by memorised grammar; after that by literary texts, mem-morised, parsed and translated. The pedagogical canon was restricted, though some schools had their own books of extracts covering a wider range. Language and literature were all, there being no formal teaching of history or archaeology. In 1800 the grammar was the centraltextbook: not only because grammar and syntax were so prominent in secondary school curricula, but also because it often included literary quotations which turn up again and again in literature (e.g. in thematic chapter headings in Trollope). The Eton Latin grammar (1758), an adapted version of a grammar dating back to the early sixteenth century, was the market leader and from the 1790s had spawned numerous piracies and 'editions', some translating the Latin text into English. The use of English notes or translation was a contentious issue in the 1820s and 1830s. It was variously deplored as untraditional, inefficient, or threatening to the semi-religious world of the classical languages and hence potentially to religious faith. An underworld of translations grew up in mid-century, the series being best remembered: for instance Henry Bohn's Classical Library (116 volumes, c.1847–1913) and Kelly's Keys to the Classics (roughly the same period; continued in the twentieth century by such firms as Brodie, Gill and Cornish). The growth of an informal but distinct public-school community through the century, and of the proprietary school sector from the 1840s, created an identifiable market especially important...