Troy, Carthage and the Victorians: The Drama of Classical Ruins in the Nineteenth-Century Imagination by Rachel Bryant Davies

Abstract

Reviewed by: Troy, Carthage and the Victorians: The Drama of Classical Ruins in the Nineteenth-Century Imagination by Rachel Bryant Davies Michele Valerie Ronnick Rachel Bryant Davies. Troy, Carthage and the Victorians: The Drama of Classical Ruins in the Nineteenth-Century Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xix, 383. $120.00. ISBN 978-1-107-19266-9. Bryant Davies’s book is an extremely learned and wonderfully illustrated study of the place that Troy and Carthage held in the imagination, entertainment activities, and popular discourse of nineteenth-century Britain. She presents us with a “committed interdisciplinary approach to a series of synchronic and diachronic case studies” with the aim of “reinstating the full range of cultural products” (25). In bringing together “scattered parts of a cultural jigsaw,” she hopes to “recreate the whole picture of representations of Troy [and Carthage] across the cultural and social spectrum” among the Victorians, using “the opportunities that classical reception affords” scholars of today (27). To do this, Bryant Davies draws on sources that were known to those of high and low status and with diverse histories of acculturation. After a fascinating analysis of Troy, real and imagined, during the “Schliemannic” years found in accounts from the popular press and in scholarly circles, she turns to the examination of other ephemeral materials from print culture (108). One portion of her study examines the playbills of burlesque theater that were used to advertise “The Siege of Troy or the Great Horse of Sinon” (1833) and the “The Siege of Troy or the Miss-Judgment of Paris” (1854). These shows were performed more than one hundred times at Ashley’s Amphitheater located in Lambeth on Westminster Road, and among the attendees were Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who, as patrons, watched a performance in early April 1846 (139). She also uses cartoons, poems and children’s toy theaters in order to track the trajectory of these two “paradigmatic cities” through and within the British psyche (17). Taking her cue from the theater scholar Richard W. Schoch’s observation (in Not Shakespeare: Bardolatry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century [Cambridge 2002], 103) about English burlesque theater’s capacity to preserve “the continuity of literary tradition by endowing familiar (indeed overly familiar) texts with new capabilities” (225), she argues that the cities of Troy and Carthage “function as keys to decode their nineteenth-century intellectual, cultural, and imaginative frames of reference” (46). She finds, for example, that the “ready-made and mass produced” toy theaters popularized by Orlando Hodgson (fl. 1820), with their cardboard “backdrops,” “props,” and colored paste board cutouts, allowed “Troy and all of classical antiquity” to “become an imaginary play space for the family” in Britain and even in America, where an inexpensive edition was available (156–158). She finishes her work with a look at two Roman warriors, the victorious Scipio who weeps over Carthage, and the exiled Marius who broods among its ruins, and she sees them as tutorials in the public’s understanding of translatio imperii. She finds this dynamic, the anxiety over a collapse in imperial power and civilization, manifested in both serious and trivial ways through poetry, painting, newspaper cartoons, and new consumer marketing techniques such as candy makers’ collector’s cards. Carthage exemplified a city that utterly perished. Troy, however, was “a duality, as [it was] both ‘gone’ and yet culturally vital” (123)—a duality whose essence survived first in Rome and later in the British foundation myths about Brutus. In this way both cities served as a means for “artists and writers” to “imagine the future ruins of modern cities,” and they [End Page 234] formed a basis for thinking about “proleptical ruination—imagining the future through the remnants of the past” (341). Thus it was that their shifting identities “as sites of both myth and history” allowed them “to be harnessed to different narratives” (340). The author refers at several points to her concerns about the “messiness of classical reception” (37, 173, 194, 209), but her project has shown us that from an apparent “mess” valuable intellectual order can be had, especially when the scholarly exploration has been as thoughtful and as painstaking as hers has been...