LBB, Vol. 43 No. 7 · 1 April 2021
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Weavers and Profs
Katherine Harloe
<https://www-lrb-co-uk.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/contributors/katherine-harloe>
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A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in
Britain and Ireland 1689 to 1939
byEdith Hall
<https://www-lrb-co-uk.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/search-results?search=Edith%20Hall>andHenry
Stead
<https://www-lrb-co-uk.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/search-results?search=Henry%20Stead>.
/Routledge, 670 pp., £29.99, March 2020,978 0 367 43236 2/
In July 1914, a cartoon called ‘Fool’s Paradise!’ appeared in/Plebs
Magazine./It features two pairs of contrasting male figures. In the
foreground a top-hatted, round-bellied ‘Capitalist’ shakes his fist at a
rugged, flat-capped worker representing the ‘Central Labour College’.
The worker, his arms folded firmly against his chest, returns his
opponent’s glare eyeball to eyeball. Between them, in the background, a
man just as fat as the capitalist, but wearing a gown and mortar board,
takes a knock-kneed, emaciated boy by the hand and encourages him to set
out along the steep and winding path that ascends to a Palace of
Culture: a walled and gated, curiously Orientalised citadel that floats
illuminated in the sky. The man represents Oxford University: ‘Come and
dwell with me, my boy,’ he says to the young Ruskin College, ‘and forget
all about nasty things like wages and class struggles. They are/so/sordid!’
The cartoon, reproduced in Edith Hall and Henry Stead’s/People’s History
of Classics/, encapsulates several elements of the debate about
classical education at the turn of the 20thcentury. In/Classics
Transformed: Schools, Universities and Society in England, 1830-1960/,
published in 1998, Christopher Stray traced the rise and fall of a High
Victorian conception of the study of ancient Greece and Rome as offering
‘large-scale visions of value – rules of taste and morality, images of
the good life’. According to Stray, Classics was a means for both the
traditional landowning and the emergent middle classes to differentiate
themselves from those who could not afford to put their sons through
secondary and higher education. A classical education at a public school
and an ancient university was a curriculum in gentility, valued for its
non-vocational character. It fashioned Tory landowning and Whig
mercantile families alike into a new ruling class united by high
cultural tastes and interests.
The consensus on the virtues of a classical education lasted more or
less intact until around 1900, though cracks had been showing for some
time. Stray shows that, from the 1870s onwards, the requirements of
industrialisation and empire-building brought classical education under
pressure from science, as well as from subjects such as English
literature, which was beginning to construct its own canon and
articulate its claims to represent the best of vernacular, national
culture. Even at Oxford and Cambridge, the arrival of new notions of
discipline and method (often imported from Germany with the incumbents
of newly established professorial chairs) sparked quarrels between dons
committed to the scholarly ideal of Classics as the historicising and
multidisciplinary study of the Greek and Roman world as a whole, and
those devoted to the traditional ideal of the Oxbridge college as
rounding off the educational/cursus honorum/of the public schoolboy. Yet
a classical education retained its lustre into the 20thcentury: Albert
Mansbridge, who co-founded the Workers’ Educational Association in 1903,
professed allegiance to the ideal of classical education as ‘the best
instrument...in our time’ for the development of ‘a larger view of life’.
The Plebs League was founded in 1908 by working-class students at Ruskin
College. Inspired by Marxism, syndicalism, and the ideas of the American
industrial unionist Daniel De Leon, they rejected theWEA’s offer of
educational improvement, considering it a ‘palliative’ aimed at
integrating workers into the capitalist system by binding them to an
eirenic, liberal-progressive view of the public good. Their call for
‘independent working-class education’ was a repudiation of establishment
attempts to co-opt working-class educational initiatives, including
Ruskin College, to serve capitalist interests. Rejecting Classics was
part of this, but as Hall and Stead point out, the league didn’t abandon
it entirely./Plebs Magazine/’s editors saw the committee of Oxford dons
andWEAlackeys who tried to extend the university’s influence over Ruskin
College as exhorting the workers: ‘Back to Plato! Back to Aristotle!’
Yet the name of their movement was inspired by De Leon’s lectures on
Roman history. Early issues of/Plebs/included a series of articles on
Greek and Roman economic development by William Craik, a railway worker
from South Wales who had enrolled at Ruskin.
Mansbridge, Craik, De Leon, the Plebs League, theWEAand Ruskin College
find no place in Stray’s account. Their absence demonstrates the need
for Hall and Stead’s book, which takes aim at the idea that the history
of Classics in Britain and Ireland is a history of social elites. They
don’t question Stray’s history of the socially exclusive uses to which
Classics was put in the 19thand 20thcenturies, but show that, alongside
and often outside Oxbridge and the public schools, there was a wide
spectrum of lively, fascinating and often unruly working-class
engagements with Greek and Roman cultural material. They look at
translation, vernacular poetic imitation, children’s literature, popular
performances such as burlesques and puppet shows, the/poses
plastiques/of ‘Beauty and Strength’ performers, feats of sporting
prowess that invoked comparisons with Hercules and Atlas, as well as
everything from classicising architecture to the iconography of trade
union banners and Staffordshire pottery.
Hall and Stead’s protagonists include shoemakers, milkmaid poets,
printers, booksellers, miners, dock workers, sports promoters and
travelling showmen. Mary Collier, a washerwoman poet, may or may not
have been a historical person, but the verse epistle published under her
name is one of a series of 18th-century poems that describe
working-class life and labour in a classicising form. Dic Aberdaron, an
itinerant boatmaker’s son from a remote village on the Llŷn peninsula,
spent much of his life on the streets of Liverpool. A linguistic
prodigy, who Hall and Stead suggest may have been autistic, he was said
to have mastered Aramaic, Arabic and Persian as well as Greek, Hebrew,
Latin, French and Italian.
More familiar figures are seen in a new light. Richard Porson, a student
and, briefly, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge before becoming the
Regius Professor of Greek in 1792, was praised for his editions of Greek
tragedies and his contribution to the study of tragic metre. His
habitual drunkenness and slovenliness, which earned him the disapproval
of contemporaries such as Byron, were also often noted. Hall and Stead
relate his uncouth behaviour, speculatively but plausibly, to the
discomfort he may have felt – as the son of a Norfolk weaver – in the
gentlemanly surroundings of Cambridge. They also draw attention to his
political views in the revolutionary 1790s: he is probably the author
of/A New Catechism for the Use of the Swinish Multitude, Necessary to Be
Had in All Sties/, a satirical pamphlet attacking the social and
educational conservatism of Burke’s/Reflections on the Revolution in
France/.
Hall and Stead also examine the role of classical knowledge in the
‘hedge schools’ of Catholic Ireland and ‘adventure schools’ of rural
Scotland – unofficial and often clandestine institutions that offered an
alternative to Anglican or Presbyterian educational provision – as well
as the colliery libraries of South Wales and County Durham. This rich
and diverse panorama expands the boundaries of classical knowledge in
Britain and Ireland far beyond the linguistic mastery at the heart of
elite curricula. Since 2017, Hall has been the director of Advocating
Classics Education, a campaign to expand and embed the study of Classics
in translation in state schools. She and Stead declare themselves to be
‘politically and emotionally committed to the provision of excellent
educational opportunities to everybody in the world’. They present their
book as ‘a rallying cry for modern Britain to support the case for the
universal availability in schools of classical civilisation and ancient
history’ by providing ‘a systematically class-conscious avenue...into
the history of Classics’, and ‘refute wholesale the argument that
classical education must be intrinsically elitist or reactionary’. I
have my doubts as to how far the book supports this mission.
One puzzle about Hall and Stead’s claim to provide a class-conscious
history of Classics is that they never quite tell us what they mean by
it. ‘Class’, as they recognise, is a slippery concept. The Marxist dyad
of proletarian and bourgeois, founded on opposing relationships to the
means of economic production, was challenged by Weber’s account of
social stratification as determined by occupational class, social status
and power. The authors of recent empirical studies such as/The Great
British Class Survey/have built on Weber and Bourdieu to analyse class
in terms of the ways in which various types of capital are enjoyed:
economic (disposable income and asset wealth), cultural (educational
attainment, taste and other preferences) and social (professional and
personal networks). Hall and Stead’s discussion suggests it’s their
subjects’ occupational status – or rather, that of their families – that
defines a ‘working-class’ engagement with the Classics. Mansbridge gets
his place as the son of a carpenter; Porson as the son of a weaver and
grandson of a cobbler/./The book tends not to ask how, if at all,
classical knowledge was wielded in the service of the collective
interests of the working class. Did hard-won classical education serve
the class as a whole, or was it – along the lines of the Plebs League’s
criticism of theWEA– just the means of their assimilation?
/A People’s History of Classics/is, ultimately, an account of the field
of classical knowledge by writers who are already convinced of the
improving character of a classical education. Hall and Stead show in
loving and fascinating detail that a variety of working-class people
engaged with ancient Greek and Roman material. That such encounters
‘improved’ or ‘emancipated’ them is often taken for granted. This leads
to an absorbing and innovative yet also curiously stable conception of
‘Classics’. Their understanding of it as ‘the whole subject-area
constituted by the texts, artefacts and archaeological remains produced
by people who spoke Greek and Latin between the late Bronze Age and the
Christian closure of pagan temples in the late fourth century’ is
essentially the position reached at the end of the 19thcentury by the
adherents of new ideas of Classics as ‘method’ and ‘discipline’. It
would be accepted by most academics who study and teach Classics in
Britain today, though some (then as now) would be horrified by its
decentring of Greek and Latin language learning, just as others would
lament the exclusion of other ancient civilisations, such as those of
Anatolia, Egypt and Persia.
The meanings of Classics are just as slippery as those of class, and
classicists today still operate between the contested conceptions that
Stray identified in British society more than a century ago. Depending
on occasion and audience, we present our subject as variously a
specialised and objective ‘discipline’; a value-inspired ‘culture’ (‘the
foundation of Western civilisation’, ‘the best that has been thought and
done’); or as having to do with the origins of ‘progressive’
institutions and values (democracy, secularism and free thought,
science, constitutionalism, multiculturalism). These multiple meanings
explain why classicists often seem to be talking at cross purposes,
bewildered by voices inside and outside the discipline who say we are
refusing to confront its elitism, yet embarrassed that one of its most
prominent contemporary products is a 56-year-old public schoolboy who
also happens to be the prime minister, his claims to intellectual
prowess resting on his knowing the beginning of the/Iliad/off by heart
along with Kipling’s ‘Mandalay’.
Classical researchers who understand their subject to encompass the
language, literature, history, culture, art, archaeology and thought not
just of ancient Greece and Rome, but also of Ancient Egypt, the Near
East and Byzantium, may feel entitled to disavow the image of it
embodied by Boris Johnson. Yet he is testament to the enduring symbolic
power of a bastardised version of the High Victorian ideal of classical
‘culture’, often employed in the marketing materials produced by
universities as part of the ever more ferocious competition for new
audiences and students. Hall and Stead persuasively show that people
outside the elite have long found ancient Greek and Roman material
beguiling, exciting, conducive to professional advancement or otherwise
life-enhancing. But pointing out that engagement with Classics has not
always been a middle and upper-class preserve won’t answer those who
object to the way the elite still deploy it as a mechanism of
class-based solidarity and exclusion.
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