Reframing the Classics in Victorian England

[ 1 ] In the 1980s, a number of books, including Richard Jenkyns’ The Victorians and Ancient Greece (1980) and Frank Turner’s The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (1981), drew attention to the influence of ancient Greek literature, art, and ideas on Victorian writers and thinkers. (1) The comment is revealing of the approach adopted by early scholars of Victorian Hellenism, which entailed an almost exclusive emphasis on the interests of upper- and middle-class Victorian men, who, throughout most of the nineteenth century, were the sole occupants of universities in England and most easily qualified as “widely read.” Since the 1980s, however, several studies have challenged the idea that intimate relations with the Greeks were solely the provenance of an elite male population. The discussion of tragedy and the novel in Chapter Five expands on a topic previously discussed by Jenkyns and Jeanette King and is similarly effective in acknowledging motives of individual authors while suggesting the broader impact of classical material on women’s changing social status in the nineteenth century. Hurst acknowledges this distinction briefly, noting that “Greek, noticeably foreign and difficult because of the different alphabet which makes it seem like a secret language to the uninitiated, is central to the narrative of women’s exclusion from classical study” (5). Besides this provocative comment, however, the distinction between Greek and Latin studies is left largely untheorized, with one or the other singled out at odd moments, only to be reabsorbed into the general discussion of antiquity.