A People's History of Classics

Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689 to 1939

Edith Hall, Henry Stead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315446585
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

A People's History of Classics explores the influence of the classical past on the lives of working-class people, whose voices have been almost completely excluded from previous histories of classical scholarship and pedagogy, in Britain and Ireland from the late 17th to the early 20th century.

This volume challenges the prevailing scholarly and public assumption that the intimate link between the exclusive intellectual culture of British elites and the study of the ancient Greeks and Romans and their languages meant that working-class culture was a 'Classics-Free Zone'. Making use of diverse sources of information, both published and unpublished, in archives, museums and libraries across the United Kingdom and Ireland, Hall and Stead examine the working-class experience of classical culture from the Bill of Rights in 1689 to the outbreak of World War II. They analyse a huge volume of data, from individuals, groups, regions and activities, in a huge range of sources including memoirs, autobiographies, Trade Union collections, poetry, factory archives, artefacts and documents in regional museums. This allows a deeper understanding not only of the many examples of interaction with the Classics, but also what these cultural interactions signified to the working poor: from the promise of social advancement, to propaganda exploited by the elites, to covert and overt class war.

A People's History of Classics offers a fascinating and insightful exploration of the many and varied engagements with Greece and Rome among the working classes in Britain and Ireland, and is a must-read not only for classicists, but also for students of British and Irish social, intellectual and political history in this period. Further, it brings new historical depth and perspectives to public debates around the future of classical education, and should be read by anyone with an interest in educational policy in Britain today.

Part I

Canons, media and genres

Pictures of romance and beauty I had never dreamed of suddenly opened up before my eyes. I was transported from the East End to an enchanted land.

[Will Crooks MP, quoted in 1917, on reading Homer]¹

The upper classes, from their first day at school, to their last day at college, read of nothing but the glories of Salamis and Marathon, of freedom and of the old republics. And what comes of it? No more than their tutors know will come of it, when they thrust into the boys’ hands books which give the lie in every page to their own political superstitions. ²

[Charles Kingsley, 1850]

A student of classical influence and of the interest felt in Greek and Latin authors in successive periods cannot but feel surprised, and sometimes even startled, at the different points of view to which he must adjust himself in order to follow the thought of past generations about the classics. ³

[Henry Lathrop, 1933]

Notes

1 Labour MP Will Crooks on reading a translation of the Iliad, quoted in Haw (1917) 22.

2 Kingsley (1898 [1850)] vol. I, 143.

3 Lathrop (1933) 9.

1

Motives and methods

In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke laments that all is lost if the aristocracy and the church lose their authority: ‘Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude’.¹ To fan the flames of moral panic about the consequences of mass education, Burke here invokes the King James Bible’s translation of a famous passage of Matthew’s Gospel (7:6): ‘Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you’.²

Classicists and theologians dispute the meaning of Matthew’s pearls, margarites, which in the New Testament Greek may imply crumbs from the rite of the Eucharist.³ But, in Burke’s polemic, the pearls are not crumbs of communion bread. Burke’s pearls are learning, and the swine are the uneducated masses. Since the education of the French ruling class revolved around classical languages, Burke’s pearls of learning meant—and were understood to mean—learning in those tongues.

His sentence resonated with his contemporaries.⁴ Its impact can be seen in the new frontispiece engraving entitled ‘Homer casting pearls before swine’, supplied to a 1797 edition of a bawdy burlesque of the Iliad books 1–12. (Figure 1.1) It was entitled A New Translation of Homer’s Iliad, adapted to the Capacity of Honest English Roast Beef and Pudding Eaters and ascribed to Thomas Bridges, who treated Virgil’s Aeneid to a comparable subversion in his Dido, a comic opera produced at the Haymarket Theatre in 1771.⁵ The first four books of this burlesque Iliad had originally been published in 1762 under the pseudonym of Junior Cotton.⁶ It creates humour through stylistic bathos and social demotion of its personnel, presented as plebeian Britons who speak uncouth rhyming iambic tetrameters. Book X, for example, begins thus:

FIGURE 1.1 Homer casting pearls before swine, frontispiece from Bridges (1797), reproduced from copy in Hall’s personal collection.

The Greeks, though sorely drubb’d all day,

Asleep before their scullers lay—

All but poor Agamemnon, who

Could only nod a spell or so.

His fears did such a rumbling keep

Within his guts, he could not sleep.

As when a barrel of small-beer,

No matter whether foul or clear,

Begins to leak, drop follows drop

As fast as wanton schoolboys hop.⁷

The author revels in the burlesque’s swinification of the Homeric pearls, requiring a knowledge of Alexander Pope’s Iliad (1715–1720) rather than of Homer’s.

Pope’s translations had brought Homer to a larger audience, including workers and women, than ever had the opportunity to learn Greek. Take Esther Easton, a Jedburgh gardener’s wife, visited by the poet Robert Burns in 1787. He recorded that she was

a very remarkable woman for reciting poetry of all kinds … she can repeat by heart almost everything she has ever read, particularly Pope’s ‘Homer’ from end to end … and, in short, is a woman of very extraordinary abilities.⁸

Pope’s Homer captured the childhood imagination of another Scot, Hugh Miller, to whom the discussion will return in Chapter 5. A stonemason and a distinguished autodidact, Miller grew up to become a world-famous geologist (Figure 1.2). Even as a boy he saw the Iliad as incomparable literature. He wrote in My Schools and Schoolmasters (1854) that he had learned early ‘that no other writer could cast a javelin with half the force of Homer. The missiles went whizzing athwart his pages; and I could see the momentary gleam of the steel, ere it buried itself deep in brass and bull-hide’.⁹ The working-class Esther and Hugh, whom Burke would no doubt have regarded as swine, could easily have understood what Bridges was doing with his Iliad.

FIGURE 1.2 Hugh Miller (1802–1856), from Miller (1885), reproduced from copy in Hall’s personal collection.

Burke’s swine made defiant appearances in the 1790s during the trials of British republicans.¹⁰ Joseph Gerrald, a revolutionary democrat and member of the London Corresponding Society, used the swine trope in a speech he delivered in a court in Edinburgh when charged with sedition. Perhaps his democratic ardour had been fostered when, two decades before, he had acted the role of Sophocles’ tyrant of Thebes in a Greek-language production of Oedipus Tyrannus at Stanmore School, run by the ‘Whig Dr Johnson’, Dr Samuel Parr.¹¹ Gerrald attacks Burke in his Edinburgh oration partly by presenting the 14th-century Henry Knighton as Burke’s predecessor. Knighton was outraged by the popularity of translations, usually known as the Wycliffe Bible, of the Latin Vulgate Bible into Middle English.¹² Gerrald therefore reminds his audience of their contemporary, Burke, by pairing him with the medieval Knighton, as twin enemies of the Reformation/Reform. He refers to Knighton’s lament concerning the translation of the Scriptures: ‘Pity it is, that this evangelical pearl should be trodden down under the foot of swine’.¹³ Knighton, Gerrald implies, was complaining about popular literacy as well as popular access to the word of God. Gerrald accurately presents both Knighton and Burke as enemies of social inclusion.

Gerrald was not the only democrat of the 1790s who used classical material to advance the cause. A collection of works in the public journals during that decade shows how much satirical response Burke’s ‘swinish multitude’ had elicited, from radicals including the controversial Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, Richard Porson.¹⁴ The sympathy with the lower classes apparent in the pig-theme central to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant, published and almost immediately suppressed in 1820, along with the pirating of Queen Mab in 1821, first attracted a large working-class readership to his poetry.¹⁵ The theme of the swinish multitude and their vexed relationship with ancient languages will recur repeatedly in this volume.

Conventional histories of Classics always discuss Thomas Gaisford, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford and Regius Professor of Greek (1811–1855), who one Christmas Day supposedly told his congregation to apply themselves to the study of Greek literature, ‘which not only elevates above the vulgar herd, but leads not infrequently to positions of considerable emolument’.¹⁶ Gaisford’s is the most concise statement available that financial capital can be accumulated through Greek. The distinction between lucre and social capital is further explored in the memoir of Charles Frederick Briggs, an American citizen, published in 1855. His father was a merchant, but

had enlarged views for his son, and determined to give him what he had always felt the need of himself—a thorough education; that he might have a capital to start with, which no adverse circumstances could deprive him of. Bonds and stocks might prove worthless, banks might fail, and merchandise depreciate in value; but no changes in the market could affect Latin and Greek; and with a good stock of these commodities, the father had no fears for his son.¹⁷

In Burke, Bridges, Gerrald, Knighton, Gaisford and Briggs, the pearls of Greek and Latin bear values that go beyond intellectual life to embrace religion, aesthetics, class and money. Translation into the mother t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of maps
• List of figures
• Maps of locations discussed in the text
• Preface
• PART I Canons, media and genres
• PART II Communities
• PART III Underdogs, underclasses, underworlds
• PART IV Working identities
• Afterword
• References
• Index