Hall is planning a further AHRC application
Education
Other
Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections
Key Findings
Classics and Class in Britain 1707-1939
Edith Hall (King's College London) and Henry Stead (Open University)
i] Introduction
The proposed book is co-authored by the Principal Investigator and Postdoctoral Researcher who have just completed collaboration on an AHRC-funded three-year research project Classics and Class in Britain (see www.classicsandclass.info, which has to date attracted over 18,000 individual visitors and more than 50,000 page views).We believe we can complete this volume, the project's major research output, by the end of September 2017.
The project has asked whether there is any historical truth in the prevailingscholarly and public assumption of an intimate link between the exclusive intellectual culture of British elites and the study of the ancient Greeks and Romans and their languages. In Britain, such study became consolidated as the prestigious 'classical' curriculum in the early 18th century, and retained a dominant place in high-status educational institutions until World War II. But did this mean that lower-class culture was ever a 'Classics-Free Zone'?
Few of the 93% of British children and teenagers in state-sector secondary education today are offered any access even to Classical Civilisation and Ancient History, taught in translation, in their schools and 6th-form colleges; the ancient languages are now rarely available except in the private sector. Was it ever thus? Our volume, on one level, is a straightforward exercise in excavating the cultural past, at the precise intersection of the presence of classical culture on the one hand and socio-economic status and identity on the other. As such, it will make crucial reading in the fields not only of Classical Reception, but also of Intellectual, Political, Social and Educational History as well as English Literature (the same people who bought Jonathan Rose's landmark bestseller The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes [Yale University Press, 2001]). We anticipate that our study will be essential reading on undergraduate courses in all these fields. It is also intended as a spur to further research; a whole monograph or doctorate of path-breaking originality could be written on the topic explored in any one of our chapters: having identified the relevant archives and field of evidence for all these topics, as well as the research questions which need to be pressed further and in more detail, we believe our proposed book will prove to bethe seminal contribution in this area of scholarly investigation.
On another level, however, the volume will be timely and topical: it will bring new historical depth and perspectives to public debates around the future of classical education in Britain. Our gallery of colourful individuals whose lives were enhanced by engagement with the Greeks and Romans, whatever the obstacles they needed to overcome in order to achieve that engagement, changes the parameters of this debate profoundly. An article by Edith Hall in the Guardian Review making precisely this argument, published on June 28th 2015, 'Classics for the People', has been read online by more than 200,000 readers.
Although there are similarities between our method and Rose's (there is overlap especially in the autobiographical materials we have examined), and our volume will complement his and appeal to a similar readership, it has no 'market competitors'. The reason for this is that Classical Reception, itself a relatively new field, has previously almost completely ignored social class as a category of analysis. Chris Stray's Classics Transformed (OUP, 1998), albeit focussed on school and university curricula, is a notable exception;it looks at Classics from the 'top-down', elite perspective and has influenced us profoundly. There have been several studies of ethnicity, slavery, imperialism and colonialism in relation to Classical Reception in Britain and her territories abroad (some of them, including India, Greece & Rome 1757-1947 [London, BICS, 2010]and Ancient Slavery and Abolition [OUP, 2011] authored or co-edited by Edith Hall). An increasing interest in gender and Reception in relation to Classical Philology has also, belatedly, transpired and is about to come to fruition in Rosie Wyles and Edith Hall (eds.) Women Classical Scholars from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly(OUP, 2016). But socio-economic class has hitherto been left almost completely out of the picture, except in Hall's pilot articles, beginning with 'Putting the Class into Classical Reception' (2008), and now Stead's monograph A Cockney Catullus (OUP, 2015). There is no precedent whatsoever for a study with our over-riding aim: that is, to provide a class-conscious avenue, emphasising individual experience, into the history of Classics into Britain.
ii] Volume Authors (for further detail please see separate CVs)
Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at King's College London. She is the author or editor of more than twenty books on ancient Greek and Roman culture and its Reception. She is the Co-Founder and Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek & Roman Drama at Oxford University and Chairman of the Gilbert Murray Trust. She makes TV and radio appearances and regularly contributes to newspapers and periodicals including TLS, NYRB, Times, Guardian, History Today, Prospect Magazine and New Statesman. In 2015 she was awarded both a Goodwin Prize (American Society of Classical Studies) for her monograph Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris (OUP New York, 2013) and the Erasmus Medal of the European Academy in recognition of her contribution to international research.
Henry Steadis Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Open University. He is author of A Cockney Catullus: The Reception of Catullus in Romantic Britain, 1795-1821 (OUP, 2015), and co-editor of Greek and Roman Classics and the British Struggle for Social Reform (Bloomsbury, 2015). His primary research interests lie in British working-class engagements with classical culture 1789-1939, and British communism and the classics 1917-1956, the subject of his current research project, 'Brave New Classics'.
iii] Volume Description
The volume is intended as the chief conduit for the results of researches into diverse sources of information, both published and unpublished, in archives, museums and libraries across the United Kingdom and Ireland. In our first book, a collection of essays entitled Greek and Roman Classics in the British Struggle for Social Reform (Bloomsbury, 2015), we and our guest contributors focussed on classical ideas and education in the personal development and activities of British social reformers in the 19th and first six decades of the 20th century, most of whom were from the lower echelons of the middle class. In this more substantial volume, we listen, rather, to the voices of working-class people, who have been almost completely excluded from previous histories of classical scholarship and pedagogy.
Our methodology is grounded in the principles of Cultural History. More than three decades ago, Robert Darnton predicted that both Intellectual History and the History of Ideas would inevitably yield to Cultural History, because its core strength is an essential concern for the experience of the historically silenced or 'inarticulate'. In a path-breaking article published a year later in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History (1981), European Renaissance scholar William Bouwsma argued that Intellectual History must expand its horizons to incorporate not only of canonical texts and their elite interpretation but a far wider social history of how humans make meaning for themselves in their own environment and in accordance with their specific experience. And in his 2006 manifesto on appointment to the editorship of the Journal of the History of Ideas, Anthony Grafton advocated the new Cultural History which grasps, 'successfully, for previously unrecorded and unplumbed worlds of experience'.
We have been influenced by several scholars who have traced the relationship between certain kinds of what Pierre Bourdieu calls 'cultural capital' and the maintenance of class boundaries in France, Germany and elsewhere; we use an empirical cultural historicism, combined with a class-conscious perspective which starts from Bourdieu's premise that 'culture and education aren't simply hobbies or minor influences. They are hugely important in the affirmation of differences between groups and social classes and in the reproduction of those differences.'
We cover multifarious individuals, groups, regions, and activities (indeed, the very diversity of the evidence is part of our contention that monolithic models of experience are usually unhelpful in intellectual history). But our central argument is patently articulated and sustained throughout the volume. The records of working-class experience which we feature here (memoirs, autobiographies, Trade Union collections, poetry, factory archives, artefacts and documents in regional museums) have revealed a complex picture, but our two principal conclusions, put simply, are these:
1) While there is no doubt that 'classical education' frequently functioned to emphasise class boundaries and social exclusion, British people with no or minimal formal education throughout the period between the Act of Union (1707) and the outbreak of World War II in 1939 found numerous avenues by which to access the culture of the ancient Greek and Romans, a selection of the more prominent of which our book illustrates in depth. These include inexpensive published series such as Everyman, recreational activities including popular theatre and sport, worker's libraries and political activism, non-conformist schools, the 'autodidact' tendency, and employment in industries where classical content was prevalent (printing, pottery).
2) What less privileged people did with their often hard-won 'classical' intellectual property varied widely. Many used it as a springboard to social advancement, and in embracing the elite connotations of Classics abandoned their identification with the working class and loyalty to the cause of its progression. Others advanced their careers and joined the establishment, with careers in Higher Education, parliamentary politics or commerce, but retained a sense of obligation to their natal class expressed in philanthropic and charitable activities. Some were intensely vulnerable to propaganda using classical material devised to serve ruling-class interests (the use of the ancient British leader Caractacus in encouraging unemployed Welshmen to enlist in World War I, with which we conclude our volume, is an outstanding example). Others discovered an 'alternative canon' which helped them to cope with poverty, oppression and boredom (Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius), inspired them with revolutionary ideals and republican heroes (the Aeschylean Prometheus, Plutarch's Spartacus) or provided them with models for their own radical poetry (for example, the Chartist 'rhymers'). Yet others waged a more subterranean class war in creating a tradition of cheeky, sometimes causticparodic subversion of 'classical' literature and languages, in burlesque theatre, poses plastiques, fairground spectacles and insouciant sports journalism.
iv] Format
We propose 25 chapters of 6,500 words each including notes, plus a 1,000-word Epilogue explaining why our findings matter to curriculum debates today, and a consolidated bibliography. This makes a total of 165,000 words. Each chapter will include up to four monochrome images, most of which are photographs we have taken ourselves or out of copyright (engravings from Illustrated London News, for example); we have provided afew examples below to give a sense of the visual 'feel' of the book. We have institutional funds (but please note these are onlyavailable until the end of June 2016) to pay for reproduction permissions, and will be available to apply for these as soon as we have signed a contract.
We have chosen to approach Routledge under the terms of their Routledge Books Open Access scheme because we want to collaborate with a prestigious peer-reviewed publisher while also guaranteeing free-of-charge Immediate Universal Access. Our subject-matter (the history of struggle over access to intellectual property and culture) makes cost-free availability as an ebook essential on principle. If we are offered a contract by Routledge, the Head of Research Support at King's College Library Services has offered to pay the full fee out of their APC support budget.
v] Detailed Synopsis
Our over-arching argument is simple, but the evidence we use to support it is diverse. The extent of the diversity was not planned, but we became conscious of the need for it soon after we began following our working-class subjects, readers and writers, members of circulating libraries and Mechanics' Institutes, authors of memoirs, poems, and polemics, down intricate paths. Our literary emphasis, it became clear, needed to develop into one which could accommodate other sorts of documentary material. This was especially the case with working-class women, for whom far fewer institutional resources (the libraries of Mechanics' Institutes, for example) were generally available, and who were, even more than their middle- and upper-class female counterparts, regarded as utterly incapable of learning ancient languages. The life stories of the working-class children, women and men we study often show that they were encountering classical material not only in their reading and writing lives, but in their domestic, civic and workplace environments, their media of entertainment and places of recreation, and, regardless of their political affiliations, in the maintenance of their class identity and political activities.
Our response to the widening of our evidential brief was to break down our narrative into four sections, A-D below, which cumulatively create a panoramic view of the diverse opportunities working-class people had to access the Greeks and Romans, but starting from four different trajectories.
Section 'A' (chapters 1-7), Groundwork: Canons, Media, Genres, uses a wide-angle lens to outline the contours of the 'Big Picture' which our book will paint. It explains our own backgrounds and motives for writing the book and the difficulties we faced in the early stages of our research; it defines our chronological and regional scope and key terms. It introduces our readers to the most important research resources we have used, defining the strikingly different 'canon' of ancient literature, myth and history which emerged amongst the working-class literary community in comparison with that of their social 'superiors', the genres (above all, life-writing) in which they put that knowledge to literary use, and the sources of knowledge other than literary texts-especially environmental and recreational materials-on which the book draws. It also prepares the ground for the complex interaction between identities grounded jnclass position, gender, and the British imperial project.
Section B (chapters 8-13), Communities, then looks at the presence of Classics in the identity construction and psychological experience of substantial groups of working-class Britons, emphasising the religious and regional differences between them: Non-Conformists (many of whom were based in the south-west of England and in East Anglia), members of Workers' Educational institutions and movements, especially 'Settlements', the Workers Educational Association, the Council of Labour Colleges and the Plebs League, and lower-class inhabitants of Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Within these communities, there were also variable differences between the experiences of girls and boys, men and women, which we systematically elucidate. The section concludes with a discussion of a phenomenon which linked non-metropolitan British regions: the extraordinary status of ancient Greek (rather than the much more familiar Latin) as 'intellectual property' of the highest value and yet of potential danger and hazard: Greek in Wales, Scotland, Ireland and northern England was the language of God, of Satan, of the transcendent and occult, and above all of the hyper-elite.
Section C (chapters 14-19), Underdogs, Underclasses,Underworlds, puts individual working-class subjects at the centre of the radar to explore some of the ways in which Classics features in manifestations amongst the poor of class dissatisfaction and frustration, disaffection, anger, deprivation, psychological trauma (even diagnoses of insanity) and dispossession. After an opening chapter which traces the prodigious professional rise of a handful of outstanding autodidacts who from illiterate beginnings acquired university chairs, and whose classical education was instrumental in their meteoric rises up the academic ladder,this chapter houses some of the most original and vivid testimony in our book. It leaves the 'respectable' working class far behind to enter a carefully chosen series of sleazy, mendicant, homeless, revolutionary, dissident and sometimes criminal underworlds, including prisons, madhouses and brothels where classics bore bizarre associations. There is a greater focus on London and metropolitan culture in this section than in the other three.
Section D (chapters 20-25), Working Identities, blends the 'community' approach used in section B with the evidence of individual subjects in section C to focus on the role played by classical material in the defining the labouring classes' multifarious experience of remunerative work. It discusses the proud and colourful use of figures from classical mythology and history in Trade Union banner art and in emblems of positive self-definition amongst craftspeople, some of which originated in medieval guilds and some had long been established as traditional nomenclature (e.g. amongst seamen and fire services). It exposes the ironies of the intense relationship between mining and the ancient world, tracbale to Georg Bauer's influential treatise De Re metallica(1556), the heightened literacy and political consciousness, leading to an interest in Classics, amongst stonemasons, shoemakers and pottery workers, and the phenomenon of the 'weaver-poets', inspired by the classical texts they propped up on their looms. The book ends with the army, and the only World War I poem, David Jones' In Parenthesis, which, shortly before the outbreak of World War 2,uniquely used Classics at length, in detail, and with an admixture of highly colloquial diction in order to express the psychological trauma of the ordinary (non-Officer-class) English and Welsh British soldier.
vi] Detailed Chapter Breakdown
Section A Groundwork: Canons, Media& Genres
1. Introduction: Motives and Methods
This chapter states the aims of the book, describes the methodology, and offers a review of previous literature in both Classical Reception and adjacent fields which have informed our own work. Since our research and analysis have been necessarily so multidisciplinary, indeed transdisciplinary, we clarify and emphasise the precise research questions which have guided all our enquiries: Was there working-class access to 'Classics'? What happened to working-class people who gained access to classical culture and even languages? What motivated them? How did they use it, as groups or individuals? Since part of our argument is that Classics has often been involved in the personal self-development of our subjects as individual and political agents, we also describe how each of us became interested in developing a class-conscious approach to 'Classical Reception', the unusual problems we encountered in getting it funded, and in what ways we have divided up the research according to our temperaments, academic experience, skills and specialisms.
This opening chapter also defines our two key terms. 'Classics' is these days often used to mean any iconic, archetypal or ideal example of a thing-vintage cars can be 'classics', as can pop songs, or novels or recipes. But we understand the term to refer to the cultural output specifically of ancient Greece and Rome. This is what the term most often meant in the period we are primarily researching, and what it means in educational contexts today.The words classic, classical and Classics all stem from the same Latin term, classis, as our word 'class'. When the Romans heard this noun, it contained a resonance that we do not hear when we say class: deriving from the same root as the verb clamare('call out'),a classis consisted of a group of people 'called out' or 'summoned' together by a trumpet. A classis could be the men in a meeting, or in an army, or the ships in a fleet, or sub-divisions of such groups. The word has always been associated with ServiusTullius, the sixth of the legendary kings of early Rome, who held a census in order to find out, for the purposes of military planning, what assets his people possessed. It is this procedure that explains the ancient association of the term class with an audible call to arms. In Servius' scheme, the men in the top of his six classes-the men with the most money and property-were called theclassici. The Top Men were themselves the 'Classics'. This is why, by the time of a Roman writer in 2nd-century AD, AulusGellius, by metaphorical extension the Top Authors could be called 'Classic Authors', scriptoresclassici, to distinguish them from inferior or metaphorically 'proletarian' authors, scriptoresproletarii(Attic Nights 19.8.15). The opposition between 'classics' and 'proletarians' was born!From the early 16th century, the word classicusis used by scholars writing in Latin to describe admired authors of antiquity, both Greek and Latin. Melanchthon calls Plutarch a classicuswriter in 1519. So when a term was needed in the 18th century to describe the canonical texts of Greek and Roman antiquity studied by youths privileged enough to receive more than a rudimentary education, it was inevitable that the term Classics, the 'top authors', was adopted to describe the subject area-the term is first used with this meaning in 1711, shortly after the publication of an influential English translation of AulusGellius.
We have chosen the term partly on the ground of its cultural scope. We don't just mean the written texts of the ancient Greeks and Romans, but their entire cultures; in this we imitate the Victorian Charles Kingsley, who referred to them jointly as 'classical civilisation'. Ancient philosophy, history and material culture were by the end of the 19th century added to the 'classical curriculum'. But the term also reminds us of the historic connection between socio-economic hierarchies ('class') and of the differences between the cultural and imaginative lives of people in different classes. It helps us ask (1) whether 'Classics' has been used to maintain class distinctions, but also (2) whether Classics' elite connotations must remain inevitable or not.
'Class' is an even more contested term. Our determination to reveal the imprecision of the category 'popular culture', which blurs and erases the true economic inequities from which such culture emerges, has led us to careful use of the term 'class' in the sociological sense of Tony Giddens, but specifically as a category which aids the investigation of the cultural uses of the ancient Greeks and Romans. That is, we read the history of the uses and abuses of 'classical' culture from a perspective that is conscious of the social class of the agents involved. But 'class' in the sociological sense means two different things, although they are often commensurate: 'objective class' is an economic category, while 'subjective class' defines the way individuals and groups are perceived by themselves and others. Everyone has an 'objective' class identity in that everyone has a position in the economic working of society. Everyone acquires their subsistence (food etc.) from somewhere, and plays a role in the way that goods and services are consumed and distributed. Objective 'class analysis' simply asks what the source of subsistence and the role are.All the people in our historical period of study derived their basic subsistence from one or more of a number of sources, just as everyone does today. There are nine basic ways to acquire it: earn it, extract it legally from the labour of others, steal it, live off interest on capital or rent on property, inherit it, win or be given it with no strings attached, derive it from the state, derive it from charity, orbe supported by another individual (spouse, parent, lover). During the period covered by this book, the majority of British people fell into the first category, in that they earned their livelihood from physical labour, or they were dependent on someone who did. This means that they were objectively 'working-class'. But it is as a subjective definition, rather than the actually more significant socio-economic role, that most people understand the term 'class'. Class position is often 'subjectively' diagnosed or perceived from a whole cluster of identifying markers, ranging from style of speech and accent, hairstyle and clothing, to recreational tastes and educational attainments. The 'subjective' markers of class, especially in the modern world and where there is social mobility, are not always co-extensive with 'objective' class position.
2 The Invention of Classics and the Emergence of Class
Our second chapter jumps straight into the cultural and social chaos of London in 1707.It traces the pre-18th-century history of the linguistically cognate terms 'Classics' and 'class', locating the emergence of the meanings (as they are understood today) of both terms in Britain to just after the Glorious Revolution. It then illustrates the arena in which class identities were formed in early 18th-century London in the context of a confrontation and contest between 'elevated' translations of classical authors (Dryden, Pope) and the extraordinary popular fairground entertainments based on the Homeric epics by Elkanah Settle, immortalised by Hogarth. As modern-language translations of Greek and Latin authors became high-earning publications, the first debate over the 'inferiority' of accessing classical authors in translation commenced; but this coincided with the emergence of the classical curriculum as we know it in schools and universities and of the signification of elite identity by 'the Grand Tour'. The case of Settle's collaboration with two working-class women entertainment entrepreneurs, Mrs Mynn, portrayed 'drumming up' support for her show by Hogarth (see fig.) and her daughter, who in the 'legitimate' theatre world would never have been able to manage companies or commission new works, allows the introduction of gender and the different cultural experience of working-class women as a continuous thread in our argument.
3 Working-Class Readers
Building on Jonathan Rose's ground-breaking The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), and drawing directly from evidence in John Burnett, David Mayall and David Vincent's The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated Critical Bibliography (3 vols; 1984-1989), and that compiled more recently by the pioneering digital project 'Reading Experience Database UK' (Open University), this chapter opens up the question of the classical reading of workers in Britain. It asks how working-class people in the period gained access to the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, covering the reform of primary education, improvements to workers' living conditions and available leisure time, the growing fashion for self-improvement, and technological innovation which resulted in affordable books; these factors created a demand for English translations of classical texts, met quickly and variously by translators, publishers and booksellers. Important series included Charles Abraham Elton's three-volume Specimens of Classic Authors (1814), Henry G. Bohn's 'Classical Library' (from 1848), and Joseph Malaby Dent and Ernest Rhys's 'Everyman's Library' (from 1906). Mass-market classics texts were born in the 19th century and changed the way people engaged with classical culture. Additionally, a trade for 'self-help' books began to thrive. Self-help publications, in the tradition of Samuel Smiles, did not so much cater for emotional and psychological development (as the term suggests today), but for educational and social betterment, which then required some 'cultural literacy' in classical topics and authors. The chapter therefore closes with a discussion of the encyclopaedias, classical handbooks, and other forms of affordable literature aimed specifically at the working classes.
4 Class and Classical Canons
Throughout our period (1707-1939), the Greek and Roman authors and topics to which Britons were attracted varied precisely on the criterion of social class. This chapter builds on the previous chapter's picture of the bibliographical resources available to some elements of the working classes,but with a specific aim: to identify the distinctive features of the working-class classical canon. It uses the curricula of public schools and universities on the one hand, and the workers' libraries and reading lists described in our previous chapter on the other, to explore, define, and compare the 'establishment' classical canon as it emerged by the late 18th century (including Homer, Aristophanes, Plato, Cicero, Livy, Virgil, and Horace, with an emphasis on reading these authors in the original languages and composition of both Greek and Latin prose and verse) and the alternative working-class canon on the other. Mostly read in translation, sometimes in visually illustrated excerpts printed in journals such as The Penny Magazine,the popular classical authors among the poor included Hesiod, Aeschylus, Aristotle, Stoic literature-especially Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius- Josephus, Plutarch, and Aesop. Some authors were, however, universally popular, especially Sophocles and Ovid. The divergence in canon is discernible through workers' libraries (first identifiable in Scotland in the mid-18th century) and brought to fruition in the (male-dominated) miners' libraries of South Wales, chapbooks and hedge school syllabuses in Ireland, and, for example, 'Lubbock's List' in the Working Men's college movement.
5 Writing the Working-Class Self
In the 19th-century British novel, the trope of the exclusion of the working class from the classical cultural realm, especially access to the ancient languages, became a standard feature of the genre: David Copperfield offering to teach Uriah Heep Latin; Thackeray's hapless Arthur Pendennis failing to construe Greek at school; Kingsley's Chartist tailor Alton Locke teaching himself Greek by candlelight; Hardy's mason, Jude Fawley, locked out forever from studying classics at Christminster. This chapter, the result of prolonged engagement with workers' autobiographies, argues that this familiar trope in fiction emerged in response to the repeated charged encounters with classical education which featured in the new genre of working-class memoir identifiable from the early 1800s. By 1827, working-class autobiography was enough of a cultural phenomenon for James Lockhart to complain about the trend in The Quarterly Review: 'The classics of the papier maché age of our drama have taken up the salutary belief that England expects every driveller to do his Memorabilia Our weakest mob-orators think it a hard case if they cannot spout to posterity. Cabin-boys and drummers are busy with their commentaries de bello Gallico; the John Gilpins of "the nineteenth century" are the historians of their own anabaseis, and thanks to "the march of the intellect", we are already rich in the autobiography of pickpockets.' The chapter also demonstrates the development in the nature and function of the formulaic encounter with a Greek or Latin author in the writing of both 'real' and 'fictional' working-class lives across the century; late Georgian autodidacts emphasised that their ability to overcome educational obstacles signalled their own superiority to others of their class, mid-century texts stressed the morally 'redemptive' power of self-education, often accompanying the rejection of a life of dissipation and crime; by the end of the century, however, both workers' autobiographies and novels are more likely to emphasise the cruelty of a socio-economic system where lack of finance and leisure placed insurmountable barriers in the would-be self-educator's path. Key autobiographies here are those of miner Jack Lawson, stonemason Hugh Miller, the unemployed diarist James Turner and dockworkers' leader Ben Tiller.
6 Working-Class Classics via the Visual Environment
This chapter establishes a key theme in our study: that working-class people, who (without signal autodidactic effort) usually remained 'illiterate' in the ancient languages, were often highly 'culturally literate' in classical myth, design and aesthetics through their everyday interactions with their material environment. They constructed the Palladian and Doric architecture beloved of the ruling class; they recreated in public house venues with classical signage and fairgrounds displaying extravagant classical iconography. The argument is divided into three sections. First, the lowly origins of several of the draughtsmen who drew ancient Greek and Roman ruins and whose publications stamped them on the British visual imagination: our prime example is James Stuart (1713-1788), from the lowest echelon of the London East End community, who became a pioneer of classical archaeology and art history and internationally famous with his The Antiquities of Athens and Other Monuments of Greece (1762), published with Nicholas Revett. But Stuart had been born into extreme poverty amongst the lowlife, dossers and beggars who then inhabited Creed Lane, Ludgate Street, near St. Paul's. His father was a Jacobite, a Roman Catholic, a Scotsman, and 'a mariner of inferior station', whose death when James was a boy left the family destitute. Secondly, we document the crucial role played by labourers, especially construction and agricultural workers, in regional archaeology: hardly any important classical artefacts discovered in Britain, and abroad on colonial ventures, for example the Greek antiquities excavated at Sebastopol during the Crimean War, were not first seen and held by members of the labouring classes. Thirdly, we look at the work of class-conscious artists and designers who consciously syncretised classical forms often imitated from 'the Elgin marbles' looted from Athenswith working-class content, for example Godfrey Sykes's adaptation of the Parthenon frieze to the context of the Sheffield Mechanics Institute in 1854; he substituted artisans, labourers, miners and steelworkers forPheidias' procession of Athenian horsemen. Headed by Minerva/Athena and other gods, in Sykes's vision the workers of Sheffield proudly wield their tools and push their trucks around the whole thirteen painted panels, extending to 60 feet, of the frieze. Third, we examine the oil painting 'Greek Builders' by Victor Noble Rainbird (1887-1936), on display at the Quadrant (North Tyneside Council's collection of paintings at The Silverlink North Cobalt Business Park). Rainbird was a working-class painter and stained glass artist from North Shields. When Rainbird, unusually for him, chose to depict a scene from the ancient world-indeed a beautiful temple with a columned portico-he focuses on the labourers rather than the classical edifice. Realistic, muscular but in no way 'classically' handsome or idealised, against a cloudy rather than sunlit sky, his serious-minded ancient Greek labourers are exerting themselves in several physical tasks: digging, cutting down a tree, stone-working, carrying supplies.
7 Radical Stages
In Greek Tragedy and the British Stage 1660-1914 (OUP, 2005), Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh showed how adaptations of Greek tragedy were used to make radical political points not only about the excesses of British imperialism but about the treatment of the home-grown poor and their exclusion from the parliamentary process. This phenomenon can be traced from James Thomson's controversial Agamemnonin the 1730s all the way through to the Edwardian era. In an article on Prometheus in Ancient Slavery and Abolition (OUP, 2015), Hall showed how the myth of the Titan enchained by the tyrant Zeus was also used both on and off the stage during and in the aftermath of the Abolition debates. But several figures from Roman history such as Brutus and Virginius, and in particular Spartacus and the Gracchi brothers from Plutarch's Lives, also acted like a magnet on the more radical playwrights, especially during the late Georgian decades. After some preliminary remarks on the neglected theatrical uses of ancient Greek and Roman history in the long 19th century by playwrights sympathetic to political and economic reform, the chapter focusses on Caius Gracchus by the impoverished Irish migrant actor James Sheridan Knowles. This exposed the starvation of the northern British in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. After successful productions to cross-class audiences in Ireland and Scotland, it was only allowed to be staged in London in 1823 (with the republican actor Macready in the title role), after drastic censoringby the Lord Chamberlain to remove criticism of the Roman ruling class. Close examination of the physical manuscript submitted to the Lord Chamberlain has survived in the Larpent Collection of plays (now held in the Huntingdon Library, San Marino, California). So does a printed version of the original play, as performed in Belfast, which was published in 1823 in Glasgow, and to which Knowles restored many lines which had been cut for the Drury Lane production. This allows us a precious opportunity to study closely the processes by which a performance text deemed politically acceptable was painfully achieved. The effect of Knowles' play on the afterlife of Plutarch's Gracchi, moreover, remained conspicuous in the case of Ireland, 'Gracchus' becoming thereafter almost a code-word for the causes of the Irish challenge to British colonial rule and of Irish Republicanism. Indeed, 'Gracchus' was the chosen pseudonym of John O'Callaghan, the Irish activist and poet, who in THE EXTERMINATOR'S SONG (1842) celebrated in the persona of 'Gracchus', in a dialogue poem, the call for total rent strikes by the peasants made by the agitator William Conner.
Section B Communities
8 Dissenting Classics
This chapter demonstrates the importance of the previously underestimated contribution to British classical culture made by members of the dissenting community. It was via the dissenting educational system that many working- and middle-class men and (to a lesser degree) women, acquired the experience and skills to take part in the ubiquitous classicism of 19th-century Britain. After first introducing the broader cultural practices inculcated in educational establishments of non-conformist Christian denominations, it will investigate the somewhat problematic place of Classics within a specifically vocational religious educational system. As Penelope Wilson argues in Isabel Rivers and David Wykes'sA History of Dissenting Academies in the British Isles 1660-1860(CUP, forthcoming), the classical education of students inside this 'hidden educational tradition' was impressively rich and frequently just as extensive (if not more so) as that delivered according to the more familiar Anglican grammar school and university model. The second half of the chapter will discuss how the alternative classicism begun in the dissenting academies, which developed their own idiosyncratic reading lists and often show a distinct tendency towards Greek texts over Latin, affected British Classics more broadly. It will do this by case studies of well-known middle-class radicals, such as William Godwin, James Martineau and Gilbert Wakefield, and lesser-known working-class memoirists from the same dissenting tradition.
9 Workers' Educational Classics
All manner of workers' educational organisations formed during our period of study, both 'top-down' institutions (those established for the workers by middle- and upper-class philanthropic groups or individuals), and more 'grass-roots' initiatives established by workers for themselves. Two such organisations were Mechanics Institutes and Mutual Improvement societies, and these sprang up all over industrial Britain in the early 19th century. This chapter begins by exploring the presence of the Greek and Roman Classics in the educational programmes provided in the early Improvement movement. These two more-or-less formal educational institutions were supplemented by myriad smaller and often short-lived initiatives, including reading and discussion groups, which provided platforms for workers to learn and educate themselves. The centrality of Classics in the formal curricula of what we would now call secondary and higher education throughout the 19th century-not to mention its prominence in a good deal of cultural activity and entertainment-ensured that the learned languages, and what was written in them, were seen as important by workers as well as by their middle- and upper-class counterparts. The chapter will then move from the early 19th century to late 19th-century Christian socialist initiatives, including the University Extension movement and the University Settlement movement. It will focus on the position of the ancient Greek and Roman classics in the curricula of these educational programmes, and the abundant use of classical reference in debates about the syllabus, leading up to 1903 and the foundation of the Workers Education Association (WEA). The formation of the Plebs League in 1908, for example, stemming from workers' dissatisfaction with educational policy in Ruskin College, Oxford and the WEA more widely, was inspired by US radical academic Daniel De Leon's pamphlet Two Pages FromRoman History(c1902) which told of the plebs' betrayal in 494 BC by the tribunes who were supposed to be representing them. Not only were the Classics more prominent than might be expected in the WEA and Extension curricula, but they also featured in the openly Marxist workers' organisations of the Plebs' Leagues and Central Labour College.
10 Scottish Working Classes
Besides the rare prodigy or eccentric who essayed the arcane study of Greek (see below, ch. 13), working-class Classics in 19th-century Scotland break down into three regular kinds: the study of Latin at school, the reading about ancient Greece and Rome in newly cheap reading materials, and the experience of the classical in material and performance culture. This chapter examines them in turn. First then, attention is paid to the key role of the Latin language in social mobility. In Scotland the tradition of the 'lad-o-pairts', who in spite of his impoverished and rural origin may (if gifted and diligent enough) obtain a university education. This proud tradition prevails because it is based in partial truth: the potential was sometimes and in some parishes indeed there for the occasional exceptional 'lad' to win a bursary. But, as one educationalist put is, for the few strong swimmers there were always many more who did not make it to land. Where scholarships and bursaries were available, it was often the middle-class boys who benefitted from them. The much-overstated potential for working-class boys to study their way out of poverty has been consistently buoyed up by the example of highly visible and inspirational individuals, which tell of the successful ascent up the slippery slope towards social prominence. These exceptional individuals will certainly feature in the chapter, but so will the wider educational and social context from which they emerge. By focussing on their communities of origin and the logistics of social mobility, we discover the local philanthropic initiatives (e.g. the Milne, Ferguson and Dick bequests) which resuscitated in certain areas a critically underfunded and ineffective system of education. Equally prominent will be numerous colourful working-class 'also-rans', who too gained a certain level of classical attainment but never really 'made it'. The trade in cheap printed material and concomitant spirit of improvement provided alternative routes to different kinds of classical knowledge, and experience of the classical through material and performance culture, exploited a surprisingly high classical literacy among even the most remote constituencies.
11 Classics & Class in Ireland
In the case of Ireland, Classical Reception Studies took deep and early root in the outstanding work on Ireland and the classical legacy by W.B. Stanford (1976). Partly as a result of this pre-existing scholarly tradition, unusually there isanother scholar whose work parallels ours and who is preparing a monograph exploring the historical relationship between Classics, class position and Irish identity: Laurie O'Higgins (The Irish Classical Self: Poets and Poor Scholars, forthcoming). In this chapter of our volume, although Irish women and men frequently feature in the discussion of other topics, we focus on the contribution of two contrasting individuals, a woman and a man, whose stories neatly illustrate the particular nature of the Classics/class relationship in Ireland: Constantia Grierson (1706-33), the self-taught Roman Catholic daughter of illiterate Co. Kilkenny peasants who married The King's Printer and produced three important editions of Latin authors, and the Belfast Methodist Robert Mitchell Henry, Professor of Latin, Workers' Educator, and author of The Evolution of Sinn Fein (1920). Henry was an ardent supporter of the movement to save the Irish language and culture as well as secure Irish independence from Westminster. But he always emphasised that the fundamental issue was economic and that it had been a coalition of Anglo-Irish middle-class interests which had kept most of the Irish in subjection. The profiles of these two individuals are contextualised in the landscape where classical culture and class identity intersected in ways distinct from other parts of Britain before Irish Independence in 1922: the discussion covers the special place of ecclesiastical Latin and of the figure of the poet as in Irish culture; the hedge schools, to which attention was drawn by Brian Friel's play Translations (1980, set in Donegal in the 1830s), some of which taught Latin and a few even Greek; the tension between economic class and the Irish 'identity crisis' of the 17th to mid-19th centuries, especially around the time of the Penal Laws and the revolt of the United Irishmen before the 'Celtic revival' took deep popular root; and Irish counter-reformation perspectives on ancient history.
12 Caractacus and The Recruiting Drive in Wales
This chapter shows how the figure of Caractacus, a British chieftain who, according to Tacitus, fought the Romans in the Welsh borderlands and delivered a defiant speech in the Roman forum, was mobilised in the 19th century by Welsh nationalists, Welsh-speaking working-class communities in north-west Wales and local archaeologists, and subsequently by the Welsh-speaking David Lloyd-George's propaganda machine to incite Welshmen to enlist in World War I. In a manner similar to the ideological uses to which Boudicca was put in England and Calgacus (the Caledonian tribal leader according to Tacitus) in Scotland, working-class men in Wales were invited to compare themselves with their supposed ancestors who had defied the Roman Empire, even as they were offered a share in the fruits of the British Empire themselves. Drawing on previously untapped archival material from Welsh secondary schools, it illustrates the way plays and operettas about Caractacus' defiance were used to make Welshmen feel allegiance to British imperial values (there is an important relationship between the reception of Caractacus and the legitimisation of British imperial activities in India and Rhodesia, a connexion most transparent in Elgar's Caractacusof 1898) and to the urge to support another 'gallant little country', Belgium.
13 Hinterland Greek
The rarity of knowledge of Greek and its strange-looking alphabet, combined with its association with the Word of God (it was widely believed that Jesus and the disciples spoke the Greek of the New Testament), created a situation in which it was often associated at least amongst the poorer classes, especially in the provinces, with extreme, almost other-worldly intellectual prowess and arcane, even sinister arts. William Perrye, an idle thirteen-year-old from Bilston in the Midlands, feigned Satanic possession in order to avoid going to school by faking a fit every time he heard the first verse of the Gospel of John in Greek, which people knew he had not learned; they therefore assumed a supernatural power was at work. The prophetic lore of dream-interpretation of the Greek Artemidorus was read and translated into Welsh by 1698. The mental supremacy required to master this ancient tongue signified nothing short of a prodigy: the erudition of stupendously accomplished animals was demonstrated at public house and fairground spectacles by proving that they knew the Greek alphabet, like famous 'Learned English Dog' who toured the Midlands in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, or 'Toby the Sapient Pig', whose favourite author was allegedly Plutarch. Greek, rather than Latin, marks out some of the more zealot autodidacts, obsessive personalities and eccentrics amongst our cast of working-class classical scholars, especially in remote locationsWilliam Wilkie, the 'Scottish Homer' fluent in ancient Greek, composed a nine-book epic about Thebes while personally ploughing his few fields in order to plant potatoes. James Moor, professor of Greek in the mid-18th century, never got over his upbringing and preferred to live in humble quarters with a lower-class 'wife'. Robert Foulis, the barber who set up a world-famous publishing house in Glasgow and transformed the quality of Greek printed texts, was the obsessive son of a humble maltman.
Section C Underdogs, Underclasses, Underworlds
14 Underdog Classicists
The history of classical scholarship has hitherto been dominated by either the biographies-often hagiographies-of distinguished individuals, orthe institutional histories of universities and libraries. Most of the 'great men' of British Classics, as of Dutch, or German or North American Classics, were (and still are) born into the professional classes and well (usually privately) educated. Yet there are some exceptional figures, who by good luck or sheer persistence succeeded in overcoming the barriers placed in their educational path by lowly birth and rose to the top of the classical tree. As celebrated prodigies, of course, their existence on one level served as the 'exception that proves the rule'; the very rhetoric in which their spectacular leaps up the social ladder were celebrated, in journalism aimed at the working class, underlined the improbability of the feat. On another level, however, the working-class annexation of classical scholarship and pedagogy at the very highest level, however unusual, was remarked and noted by the more liberal members of the academic establishment and used by them when arguing for the extension of secondary and higher education to a greater proportion of the population. This chapter focusses on the different responses, in different publications, to four figures: Andrew Dalziel (1742-1806), the Scotsman and carpenter's son whose talent for languages was spotted at parochial school and who was eventually appointed to the Chair of Greek at Edinburgh; loyal to his birth class, he was a fan of Robert Burns and fostered the careers of his own poorer students; Richard Porson, the weaver's son from Norfolk who became a famous Greek metrician and textual critic, but who never lost his regional accent or uncouth table manners; Henry Jones (1852-1922), the shoemaker's son from Denbighshire who rose through Classics scholarships at Bangor Training College for Teachers and Glasgow University to hold chairs in philosophy at the universities of Bangor, St. Andrews and Glasgow and receive a knighthood; and Joseph Wright, the workhouse boy who became Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford. Perhaps the most prodigious of all 19th-century autodidacts, Wright worked from the age of six as a donkey driver at a stone quarry near his home in Bradford. Illiterate at the age of 15, in 1870, he became a wool sorter and taught himself to read. He then joined a Wesleyan night school where he studied French, German and Latin, discovered his gift for languages, and immersed himself in the fortnightlyCassell's Popular Educator.Wright supplemented his income by opening his own night school, became a schoolmaster, taught himself Greek, and managed to fund a PhD at Heidelberg by teaching incessantly.
15 Ragged-Trousered Classicists
Throughout our research on 'Classics and Class in Britain 1789-1939' we have been heartened to discover numerous ragged Grecians and Latinists. In the extraordinary examples of the Welsh itinerant grammarian Richard Robert Jones, alias 'Dirty Dic of Aberdaron' (1780-1843) and the Scottish peripatetic teacher, Andrew Donaldson (1714-1793), both allegedly harbouring serious aversions to soap and the barber's blade, we are confronted with intellectually able men with behavioural peculiarities that today might be diagnosed as some form of Autism Spectrum Disorder. In spite of their brilliance as linguists, these men lived impoverished and itinerant lives. George Martin, alias the Saint of Southwark (1864-1946), was not poor by birth but by choice. After a good classical education at Blundell's School in Devon and St John's College Cambridge, he gave up a princely salary as an Anglican churchman in Cornwall to work as a porter in Borough Market and attend the spiritual and material needs of the working poor in one of the most impoverished boroughs of the capital. He wore a ragged frock coat and anyone who would stay around long enough found themselves being taught Greek. Another Blundellian was the journeyman printer Charles Manby Smith (b.1804), who was keen to advise that his knowledge of Latin never earned him so much as a penny. In his memoirs he tells of a fellow compositor who specialised in Greek letters. This man he described as 'a wretched grimy specimen of humanity fluttering in rags He was a positive scarecrow, but his appearance was no index of his ability. He rained a perfect storm of Greek type into his empty case as he began distribution, and picked it up again when he commenced composing with proportionate rapidity' This ragged Grecian would sip a bottle of gin through the day, and subsisted solely (if we are to believe Smith's narrative) on a diet of bread and cheese. Examples such as these act as stark reminders of the cross-class plurality of engagement with classical culture. A classical knowledge could distinguish even the most undistinguished worker from his fellow man, but it was not always possible to cash in the potential cultural capital it afforded. This chapter presents a number of colourful case studies showing just how precarious life as a working-class classicist could be.
17 Classical Underworlds
Classical culture proved perennially fascinating to the darker underbelly of British society; 'canting' languages spoken in prisons, known as 'St. Giles' Greek', have often included substantial quotas of classical vocabulary. This chapter surveys three different but often intersecting spheres where ancient myth or exotic ancient languages excited the bodies and imaginations of people shunned by respectable society-criminals, sex workers, and the insane. Illegal bare-knuckle boxing presented itself to its cross-class audience as a recreation of ancient athletics; Petronius and Martial were scoured by 18th-century masturbation clubs, which exploited lower-class prostitutes of both sexes, in Fife and London; sex and crime collide in the more risqué of the poses plastiques, semi-pornographic shows featuring near-naked young women in mythical poses (Andromeda tied to her rock; Venus Arising), best documented on Merseyside and at the Coal Hole Tavern on the Strand. In the latter they were organized by impresario Renton Nicholson (1809-1861). Erstwhile prisoner, Nicholson discovered his métier as the producer of such lurid strip-club entertainments;as 'Lord Chief Baron' he presided, in judge's regalia, over subversive mock trials based on celebrated sleaze cases of the day parodying judicial Latin. Amongst the several 'madhouse classicists' the most flamboyant is the London barman Edward Oxford, who allegedly tried to assassinate the young Queen Victoria in 1840, but whose supposed madness was cured after he learned languages including Latin and Greek in the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum at Bethlem. His memoir (1888) is a class-conscious piece of social analysis. It bears several traces of Oxford's classical education in the asylum, including his comparison of a travelling winkle-seller to ancient ascetic philosophers, and his discussion of a wealthy snobbish female under the soubriquet 'Volumnia'.
17 Class and the Classical Body: Fig leaves of antiquity
In terms of cultural importance, there were few more famous international celebrities than Eugene Sandow in the early 20th century. His was a household name on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. He wrote or co-wrote a number of best-selling books and set up physical culture academies in London and other major British cities and personally trained royalty including King Edward.In his purportedly impoverished Prussian youth, Sandowtells us that he made his living for a short time as a traveling wrestler. He also posed-with and without fig leaf and Roman sandals-for classicizing erotic portraits, first on canvas then on celluloid. By 1893, however, he was telling a journalist that 'it is impossible to be a prize-fighter and a gentleman'. The body-builder, wrestler, model and quondam circus act recognized early on arrival in Britain the potential of harnessing the cultural legitimacy of the classical world, and its powerful and lucrative association with gentility. Sandow's enigmatic cultural presence in the early 20th century serves as an illuminating introduction to the conceptual contradiction with which an investigation of the relationship between the ancient Greek and Roman Classics and social class in Britain presents us: the contested nature of ancient Greece and Rome in terms of the definition and enhancement of cultural value-their role as one of the most conspicuous forms of cultural and intellectual capital. The chapter concludes with some reflections prompted by Sandow and his use of Classics to build the mainstream international brand of 'physical culture' from its less salubrious origins in the Big Top.
18 Classical Radicals
The sense that classical knowledge could function as a magic wand with which even the poor could crack open the class system and raise their social and financial status, as well as the inherently argumentative and political character of many ancient texts, have always made them especially attractive to disaffected and rebellious individuals: one of the first uses of the term 'working classes' appeared in 1818 in a radical newspaper known as TheGorgon, because it claimed to defend its readers against their upper-class exploiters, as the Greek mythical hero Perseus used the head of the Gorgon to turn his opponents into stone; the man who edited this journal, a shoemaker's son named Robert Carlile, published another radical paper entitled The Gracchus after the Roman brothers who had tried to redistribute land to the poor of ancient Italy; the term 'communism' was invented by a radical Christian socialist of the 1840s who circulated his call to revolution in a newspaper entitled The Promethean; or, the Communist Apostle. This chapter outlines some of the ways in which classical lore inspired or was harnessed to radical causes by lower-class rebels and revolutionaries. It begins with a Dublin fisherman who addressed his complaints about heavy taxes to the oppressive forces in his city-the Dublin Corporation, excise-men, judges and magistrates-to the many heads of the Lernaean hydra, in a complicated allegory set in a city which combines features of Ancient Athens and Rome. The hydra became a frequent symbol of the oppressions suffered by workers under capitalism, in a radical inversion of the Early Modern trope of the insubordinate poor as the hydra, brilliantly explored in Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have shown in their excellent book The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2000). The chapter also looks at three the classical influences on radical figures in British culture at three times of particular left-wing agitation: (1) the impact of Athenian democratic ideals and rebellious heroes in Plutarch on the Society of the Friends of the People, whose leaders were charged with sedition in the 1790s, especially Joseph Gerrald and Robert Wedderburn; (2) Thomas Cooper, the imprisoned Chartist who in the 1840s adopted the voice of Calanus, the Brahmin whom Alexander the Great visited in India, to prophesy global liberation and universal suffrage; and (3) the Clydeside communist Lewis Grassic Gibbon's novel Spartacus (1933), which was one of the inspirations behind the American communist Howard Fast's novel of the same name (1951), adapted into the famous Stanley Kubrick movie (1960).
19 Communist Classics
In 1936 Jimmie Miller (b. 1915) was an unemployed motor mechanic and a passionate communist. His passion for communism was perhaps only matched by his love of theatre and his appreciation of what it could do. In a second-hand bookshop in Leeds, the 21-year-old Jimmie discovered a copy of Aristophanes' comedies in English translation. It was just two years after he first met his long-term creative collaborator, Joan Littlewood (1914-2002)-the most influential female British theatre director to date. Within a decade of meeting Littlewood, Miller would not only prove himself to be a gifted playwright, but also tour the UK and Europe with left-wing theatre groups, receive an invitation to study at the Soviet Academy for Theatre and Cinema in Moscow, get drafted into the British Royal Navy, desert from the Navy, grow a beard, become Scottish (born and bred), and change his name to Ewan MacColl. A decade or so later, he would even become the celebrated folk-singer and activist of the same name, who sang with and married Peggy Seeger, the daughter of the even more widely celebrated US folk musician, Pete Seeger. This chapter is about Joan Littlewood's and Ewan MacColl's creative engagement with Aristophanes'Lysistrata and how the rising tide of international communism influenced the ancient play's reception.
The theatre companies, Theatre Union (which initially developed MacColl'sAristophanic play), and Theatre Workshop (which continued to perform it variously as Lysistrata and Operation Olive Branch), were deeply committed to creating workers' theatre for and by working people. They rehearsed the play in a crypt, with the permission of a communist priest, as bombs dropped on the city of Manchester during the Blitz. Aristophanes' potent blend of politically venom, bawdiness and hugely irreverent satirical comedy served as an important influence on the workers' theatre group. Their identification of Athenian theatre as a theatre of the people encouraged a fearless engagement and active collaboration with the theatrical traditions of the past, which helped Theatre Workshop make such a dramatic impact on British and World theatre.
D. Working Identities
20 Gods and Heroes of the Proletariat
Working people in England and Ireland had been imagining themselves as ancient gods and goddesses since the street pageants organised by local guilds in medieval times. A Christmas play in Ireland as early as 1528 featured a play about Ceres performed by bakers, and another featured Vulcan performed by smiths. In the 18th century, the procession staged annually at the Shrewsbury Show included journeymen and apprentices parading through the streets-the tailors led by Cupid, the cobblers by Crispin and Crispianus, and the smiths by Vulcan. While boys at public school were invited to identify themselves with ancient gods and heroes through the names of the sports teams and dormitories, working people, however illiterate, were often intimately familiar with the full panoply of ancient mythology and history, as the spectacular ship's head figures (HMS Apollo [1805-see fig.], Leonidas, Themistocles, Minerva, Penelope, Phaethon and many others) in the Portsmouth Royal Naval Museum, the fire insurance emblems in the London Museum, along with the internal décor of Mechanics Institutes and factories, amply demonstrate. By the late 19th century, such mythological allusions were being turned to polemical political ends in the rich classical symbolism of Trade Union banner art, which features fables from Aesop, Hercules' labours, Grecian personifications of Labour and Crafts, and Helios' horses introducing the sunshine of socialism, as well as ancestral bakers, smiths, builders and miners in ancient Greek and Roman costumes. Neptune or Triton began to appear, in full costume, on the dockers' picket line, waving his trident at the employers and police; the most famous instance was a major feature of the press reporting on the 1898 dockers' strike in East London which laid the foundation of the TGWU, but the tradition had begun with on-ship rituals in the 17th century and can be documented as late as the 1930s during industrial unrest in English shipyards.
21 Miners' Classics
In the 1940s Joe Guy worked full time down the mine at Sacriston Colliery as a datal worker. We only know about Joe because in 1952 he won a place on a course set up by the National Union of Mineworkers and Durham Colleges' Board of Extra-mural Studies, which achievement was recorded in COAL magazine, the PR organ of the National Coal Board. Joe, so the story ran, was 'a typical Durham miner' in all ways apart from one 'small accomplishment'-'he has taught himself to read Greek and is a regular contributor to a theological magazine'. The course held at Durham University was designed to prepare promising workers for management and Trade Union leadership positions. Unlike Hardy's Jude Fawley, Joe was welcomed within the high walls of academic study and, in spite of numerous logistical, social and economic barriers, managed to achieve a high level of scholarship.
As the COAL feature suggests, the eccentric way Joe spent his leisure time made him an untypical miner, and (both in terms of physical and mental stamina and intellectual capacity) he was clearly an exceptional individual. Although untypical, his example is no anomaly. It provides evidence (where evidence is relatively scarce) for clusters of miners-constituting a significant minority-who were both willing and able to negotiate hard-going routes to classical and academic attainment. In this respect, Joe was following a long tradition of self-educating men in mining communities, first usually encouraged and supported by non-conformist religious enterprise, and later more frequently by politically motivated organizations. Their extraordinary ordinariness has meant that they have been absent from both the historical record and popular consciousness. Joe's example, therefore, brings into focus a number of the difficulties associated with conducting research into Classical Reception among socially and culturally marginalized constituencies.
In addition to staking out the diversity and extent of British miners' engagement with ancient Greek and Roman culture in the 19th and 20th centuries (from the Welsh miners who explored the ancient world in collectively owned reading rooms, to the classical poetry of the Spennymoor citizen and pitman poet, Sid Chaplin, b. 1916), this chapter reflects on the skewing of modern perceptions of working-class Classics to the extent that it is common to question their very existence.While, as Richard Hoggartreminds us in The Uses of Literacy (1957), it is important to avoid the temptation 'to see every second working-class man as a Felix Holt or a Jude the Obscure', it is also important not to underplay what we might call the lower levels of classical attainment. The often mythologizing and formulaic 19th-century biographical genres tend also to exaggerate the extraordinariness of working-class classical learning, when in most 19th-century communities, including pit villages, any education beyond the 'three Rs' involved at least learning some Latin. This chapter dwells unashamedly on the sometimesextraordinary achievements of ordinary men and women.
22 Shoemaker Classics
In Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia (35.85), the author tells the story of a painter named Apelles, who receivesartistic advice from a shoemaker and retorts: 'Sutor, ne ultra crepidam' ('a shoemaker [should not judge] beyond the sandal'). This chapter is all those shoemakers who dared to do just that. The 'gentle craft' in ancient and modern worlds alike has been the humble origin of many men who later came to social prominence, and/or cultural and economic success. The cobbler at his stall, working with awl and hammer and last was a central figure in every British community. The rise of the boot and shoe factory and the mechanisation of the shoemaking process from the mid-19th century saw the craft dwindle, and with it the numerous stories of social ascent from the cobbler's stall.
In chapter 2 we met Bristle, the Trojan cobbler who in Settle's The Siege of Troy ends up the city's governor. Audiences would have derived humour from the stereotypical representation of the cobbler as the philosopher king of the working class. One such, James Lackington, son of a Wellington journeyman shoemaker and a weaver, established a 'Temple of the Muses' in Finsbury Square, London, in the 1770s. He proudly advertised it as 'the cheapest booksellers in the world' and it was a sanctuary and inspiration for young lower-class wannabe men of letters, including the poet John Keats. Samuel Bradburn (1751-1816),'the Methodist Demosthenes'Professor William Carey (1761-1834), the path-breaking Orientalist scholar, and Samuel Drew (1765-1833), the esteemed Cornish metaphysician, all began their working lives as shoemakers. James Eyre Weekes, (fl. 1745-56), was a shoemaker poet in Dublin, who published in 1746 a poem In imitation of Horace's Art of Poetry (1746). But perhaps the most gifted classicist of all the sons of Crispin was William Gifford (1756-1826), who rose from his cobbler's stool to become the hugely influential editor of the Tory London Quarterly Review and a celebrated poet and translator. His translation of Juvenal'sSatires (1802) was taken up and reprinted in the 20th century by J.M. Dent and Ernest Rhys in their Everyman's Library series. Just why this trade in particular provided such a glut of influential men and intellectual powerhouses in our period of study will be explored, and the role of classics within their extraordinary social rises examined in detail.
23 Potters
The taste for classically ornamented ceramics was central to the boom in the British pottery industry throughout the long 19th century. This chapter draws on new research into the archives in the Stoke potteries and elsewhere to enquire into three ways in which class-consciousness affects our reading of these artefacts. First, it asks asking how much we know about the training of the workforce (many of them children and women) who pressed, moulded, enamelled and painted the Greek gods and Roman heroes on the hundreds of thousands of vases, plates, figurines and tiles produced by companies including Herculaneum on Merseyside, Dillwyn's in Swansea, Enoch Wood's and Samuel Alcock's in Stoke (as well as Wedgewood's and Minton's there), and Peston's and Denny's in Scotland. Second, it discusses the distinctive radicalism of the pottery workers, which became particularly apparent in the 1830s and 1840s at the height of the Chartist agitation. And third, it discusses the rare attempts, especially in the Dillwyn Works in South Wales, to produce 'Grecian' ware inexpensive enough to be purchased even by miners and other manual labourers, and the role of most of the more expensive ceramics in the self-definition of the middle and upper classes, able to afford luxury classicising goods far beyond the means of the men, women and children who made them.
24 Working-class Poets
From the 17thcentury there have been working-class British poets identified by their primary trade, for example the Thames ferryman John Taylor (1578-1653), who was presented to the public in 1630 as 'The Water Poet'. The phenomenon becomes more common from the beginning of the 18th century following the success of the agricultural labourer Stephen Duck (1705-1756), alias 'The Thresher Poet', and 'Lactilla', the Bristol Milkmaid (Anne Yearsley). The trades represented range from the relatively common 'weaver poets' such as Robert Tannahill (1774-1805), to the singularly niche William Cruickshank, 'The Rhyming Molecatcher'. The breadth of trades represented in this way across Britain-particularly in Scotland and Northern England, where content-hungry magazines and anthologies were being printed-allows this chapter to address the classical and classicizing cultural activity taking place among the less familiar working-class occupations.For 18th- and 19th-century labourers-aside from a few notable exceptions-writing poetry was something which had to take place around their primary bread-winning industry, in their leisure time. Such 'leisure time' was more plentiful for those working-class men and women with a mobility issue, or other form of physical or mental disability, which kept them from the physical labour. The ancient tradition of the connection between visual impairment and poetic and artistic facility (Blind Homer, Lame Vulcan) takes on a different light.
The turn to verse is also repeatedly attributed by working-class poets in prefatory statements to some kind of breakdown in health, or need to retire from their former strenuous labour. Frequently the poetry written by labourer poets has nothing to do with the ancient Greek and Roman Classics, but has a focus on lived rather than cultural experience. There is, all the same, a significant amount of classicism for which to account. This chapter demonstrates the full extent of classical influence on working-class poets, and discusses its content and style, and concludes with a reflection on the presence and absence of classical forms and subject- matter in relation to commercial viability, political activism, audience expectation, and regionalvariation.
25 Soldiers: Diomedes on the Somme
The poetry theme is continued in the concluding chapter of our book. Amongst the men listed on the memorial to the poets of World War I in Westminster Abbey, the only one who had been trained as an ordinary private, not an officer, was David Jones. In 1937, after his first major nervous breakdown, and as another world war was becoming inevitable, he published In Parenthesis, a Modernist epic recounting his experiences in his first deployment alongside semi-literate Welsh and English soldiers, from Christmas 1915 to the brutal battle for Mametz Wood in July 1916. In Parenthesis was held by Eliot, Auden and Graham Greene to be the most important World War I poem of all.
Jones struggled to find an innovative poetic form, with classical and Arthurian roots, appropriate and adequate to his memories of routine conflict between the officer class and their subordinates, extreme terror and deafening combat. He found solutions in his sense of his responsibility as heir to all previous war authors, including Homer and Virgil. Jones succeeded in creating a literary evocation of the lowest-ranking British soldiers' experience of WW1 by testing the limits of poetry as the other War Poets understood it. His unique prosaic poetry sounds as if it is straining as it tries to do justice to this uneducated comrades' experience of psychic and physiological bombardment. Moreover, only in Jones amongst the 'War Poets' does the formal, aesthetic revolution we call Modernism, which was the ideological expression of the historical, economic and socio-political contradictions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, become welded to the historical events in which those contradictions tragically exploded in open military conflict. Similarly, Jones' classicism is far more idiosyncratic and creative than that of the more conventional middle- and upper-class poets examined in Elizabeth Vandiver'sStand in the Trench, Achilles!(2010).It is also bound up with his identity as an Anglo-Welshman fighting in the Welsh Fusiliers, descendants of Tacitus' Caractacus, who had been used in enlistment campaigns and with whom the Welsh-speaking Lloyd George was often elided (see above, chapter 12). Finally, Jones' loyalty to the projectof representing in poetry the world of the soldier-indeed, turning its terror and squalid everyday rituals into a classicising epic sacrament which has been repeated since the dawn of ancient history-extends to the demotic and obscene speech of his Dai Greatcoat's (a modern version of the Homeric Diomedes') audacious and extreme colloquialism.
Epilogue
In this short coda we ask how our findings-the messy, complicated, fragmented and variegated experience of classical antiquity by the historical British working class, inspirational and depressing by turns-can help us think about the place of the ancient Greeks and Romans within the modern curriculum. Our book refutes wholesale the argument that classical education is intrinsically elitist or reactionary; indeed, it emphasises the historical instrumentality of the 'legacy' of Greece and Rome in progressive and enlightened causes, both personal and political. Understanding the ancient world can not only enrich the imagination and socio-cultural literacy but also citizenship skills and the power of argumentation and verbal expression, as our case-studies prove irrefutably. Our book, therefore, is not just about the past, but a rallying cry to modern Britain to support the case for the universal availability in schools of classical civilisation and ancient history.