Classics in 19th and 20th Century Cambridge: Curriculum, Culture and Community

By Christopher Stray

Eight essays in which Classicists examine the history of their own subject as taught and practised at Cambridge University in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the foundations were laid for the modern contours of the subject.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cambridge Philological Society
• Release date: Aug 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781913701307

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The essays in this volume are based on papers given at a Cambridge Philological Society seminar held at Newnham College, Cambridge on 25 May 1996.¹ They represent two well-established traditions of academic writing: the investigation by specialists of the history of their own subject, and the exploration of an institution’s history by its members. Both these traditions have had their characteristic weaknesses. The former has suffered from an ignorance of, or lack of interest in, the wider social and cultural contexts of its immediate subject-matter; the latter, from the celebratory piety which has glossed over dispute and kept skeletons firmly locked in their cupboards. Not so in the present volume, whose contributors are either willing, or positively eager, to identify connections without, and skeletons within. In the light of the recent tendency to deprecate local studies as parochial, it may be worth emphasising that subject-matter and analytical scope are two distinct things. To explore the microcosm is not necessarily to see it as an isolated world, or as no more than a monadic reflection of the macrocosm. Individual institutions act as carriers of widely-diffused traditions of knowledge and value (in this case, ‘classical’); but they shape them in their own way. The challenge is to identify the nature and causes of similarity and difference. The question is not whether one writes of, and from, local knowledge, but how.

One particular development in the recent history of ‘classics in Cambridge’ deserves to be highlighted, since it bears directly on the subject of this volume. Since 1984, the nature and history of classics have been explored under the auspices of Group X in Part II of the Classical Tripos.² Well down the alphabet from the nineteenth-century Sections (A-E) which are discussed in this volume, Group X was intended as a wild card which transcended their disciplinary boundaries. Some of the flavour of this exercise in postmodern provocation can be caught from its founders’ collaborative squib: Mary Beard and John Henderson, A very short introduction to classics (1995). More recently, Henderson’s Juvenal’s Mayor: the professor who lived on 2d a day (1998) has deconstructed the stereotyped image of Mayor as a lovable but misguided eccentric: an image which, while containing elements of truth, has functioned to discourage a serious analysis of his work and his motivations.

A similar concern underlies Mary Beard’s The invention of Jane Harrison (1999). But here there is a further twist: the mythicising was begun by the subject herself. Beard reads Harrison’s presentation of herself (notably in her Reminiscences of a student’s life, 1925) as a tissue of self-aggrandisement masquerading as self-deprecation. The career of Eugenie Strong, in many ways parallel to Harrison’s and in its earlier stages linked to it, is used by Beard to show how a different story of Harrison’s life can be told.

This theoretically-informed deconstructive agenda is not the only basis for such work. Similar results can be achieved by a straightforward concern to set the record straight, as with Pat Easterling’s recent discussion of Gilbert Murray, which illuminates by the simple, and unfashionable, strategy of taking him seriously as a literary critic.³ Other classical scholars of the late-Victorian era would similarly benefit from a fresh look. Sir Richard Jebb, Regius Professor of Greek, MP and spokesman for culture in several forums both within and without Cambridge, was widely admired in his lifetime. Perhaps because of this, he has sometimes been treated dismissively by later scholars.⁴

The late-Victorian and Edwardian world to which Jebb, Mayor, Harrison and Strong belonged may now seem ‘all so very different, and so unimaginably long ago’. Yet it is also part of the history – our history – of classical scholarship. And the feeling of a gap not to be bridged needs to be confronted with the cosiness of the local oral tradition in which these same scholars figure. In a curious way, the stereotypes I have been discussing are located at the crossroads of historical distance and institutional proximity. The essays collected in this volume demonstrate, I believe, that this crossroads is a fruitful as well as a dangerous place at which to meet.

¹The exception is David Gill’s paper, which was written especially for inclusion here. Thanks are due to Gill Sutherland and Pat Easterling of Newnham College for help with organisation, to Colin Austin for advice and help in more than one capacity, and to Paul Cartledge for continuing support. The task of editing was lightened by Frank Walbank, who read and commented on the entire text.

²Two of the essays in this volume (Breay, Raphaely) originated as student dissertations written for this course; on which, see further Beard’s chapter.

³Easterling 1997.

⁴Jebb is discussed by Charles Brink in his English classical scholarship (1985) 143–8, where he is accused of ‘tasteful floating’ (145). The only other recent discussion of Jebb is Dawe (1990).

I

THE FIRST CENTURY OF THE CLASSICAL TRIPOS (1822–1922): HIGH CULTURE AND THE POLITICS OF CURRICULUM

Christopher Stray

The present volume represents the first attempt to survey in any detail the organised study of classics in Cambridge.¹ No claim is made for systematic coverage: the studies collected here derive from their authors’ interests in particular areas within the field. In consequence the chronological coverage in different chapters varies, but it is worth noting that most of the chapters are concerned with the last third of the nineteenth century. This was not only the period in which the Tripos took on the form which it has broadly retained to the present day, but also the point at which Victorian classical scholarship shook off its sense of inferiority to Altertumswissenschaft. These were the last great days of classics as a central element in English high culture. Its leaders were public figures, some (in Cambridge Jebb, Sandys and Ridgeway) receiving knighthoods, while specialisation and the development of an academic career promoted scholarly work of increasing rigour. The orientation of classics was shifting from ‘liberal education’ to ‘learning’, and it was in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods that the Cambridge form of classics took on its distinctive shape. One of the objects of this introductory essay is to provide an overall chronological framework in which the contributions which follow can be situated. Its end-date marks not only the end of the Tripos’s first century, but the appointment of the third Royal Commission, which led to the setting up of the faculty system in the mid-1920s.

The almost complete lack of attention given to the history of the Classical Tripos is surprising.² The Tripos is, after all, with its opposite number at Oxford, the most prestigious classical honours course in Britain. These courses played a central part in two crucial and related processes in Victorian Britain: the transmission of culture and the reproduction of social élites. Each year they received cohorts of boys – largely from the public schools, whose curricula were dominated by classics throughout the century; each year they sent out cohorts of men who went on to positions in the Church, the law, and politics, and later in the expanding civil service at home and abroad. In a period when the study of classical antiquity lay at the heart of English high culture, the curricula and syllabuses of Literae Humaniores and the Tripos provided institutional maps of classics, albeit on rather different projections.

Figure 1. The Classical Tripos The only known visual representation: a drawing by John Lewis Roget, from his A Cambridge Scrapbook, Macmillan 1859.

Three phases are clearly discernible in the first century of the Tripos’s history. From its foundation in 1822 until 1854 it was tied to the Mathematical Tripos; students could read classics only after passing in mathematics at a high level. In 1854 classics was freed from this tie, but other humanities honours courses were founded which eventually challenged its authority and its recruitment. In 1879 it was reorganised into the bipartite pattern which survives today. Part I represented traditional amateur learning, Part II the specialised knowledge of the professional scholar, fragmented but covering a wide range and going beyond language and literature. Even this brief sketch raises questions: about the content and structure of the classical curriculum; relations between classics and other subjects; and the ideological tension between gentlemanly amateurism and professional scholarship. Something will be said about these issues as they arise in different phases.

I Sequential subordination, 1822–1854

The Tripos was established in 1822 after a campaign led by Christopher Wordsworth, Master of Trinity College, and the first examination was held in 1824. Why was it set up at just this point? Several other developments will have made it seem increasingly anomalous that the University had no degree examination in classics. By this time the Oxford examination in literis humanioribus was well established. Sixth formers at the reformed public schools were working to an increasingly high linguistic standard, the most remarkable case being that of Thomas Brancker, who in 1831 won the Ireland Scholarship at Oxford (defeating Gladstone amongst others) while still in the Shrewsbury sixth form. The expansion of the reformed public schools was linked to the growth of an urban bourgeoisie concerned to maintain social distance from its presumed inferiors. The establishment of classical examinations, at a time when entry rates to the ancient universities had been rising fast for several years, can be related to this enlarged intake. Classics was the preferred knowledge of gentlemen and of those who wanted their sons to be gentlemen. But what made it valued – its capacity to form the mind and mould the spirit – also made it dangerous knowledge. The hijacking of Roman exempla by the French revolutionaries had made that very clear – hence, in part, the shift to Hellenism in the late eighteenth century.³ The foundation of the Tripos can thus be seen as part of the conservative reaction to the French Enlightenment.

Cambridge scholarship at this time was typified by the editions of Greek plays produced by Dobree, Monk and Blomfield; all three being followers of Porson, whose close textual analysis remained a powerful exemplar of the Cambridge style. The university prizes were prestigious and lucrative, but they were confined to composition in Latin and Greek, and the German scholarship whose published results had been widely available in Britain since the end of the Continental Blockade in 1816 offered a powerful alternative vision both to the compositional tradition and to the narrowly linguistic style of the Porsonians.⁴ The contrasting styles are visible in the two classical journals edited in Cambridge in the 1820s and 1830s. The final issue of the Porsonian Museum Criticum appeared in 1826, a victim of the elevation of its editors Monk and Blomfield to bishoprics. In it they announced that a successor journal was hoped for from other hands; and this duly appeared in 1831 as the Philological Museum. But this Museum was a different animal altogether: a platform for the Germanic historical philology of the Liberal Anglicans Julius Hare and Connop Thirlwall.⁵ They, too, were soon lost to scholarship when they were given ecclesiastical positions. But while Hare went to a rich family living, Thirlwall was given the bishopric of St Davids only after being expelled from Trinity for publishing an attack on compulsory chapel attendance.⁶ The new philology was dangerous knowledge, and though seized on by Anglicans as a weapon with which the Word of God might be defended, eventually proved a corrosive of traditional belief.⁷

Both preferment and expulsion are significant. If the latter demonstrates that philology was a double-edged sword, the former reminds us that Oxford and Cambridge were the educational wings of the Established Church. Their teachers had no academic career structure to move through, the holders of chairs often being absentees who gave no lectures. A college fellow would normally hope to move to one of the 780 or so rural livings in the gift of the colleges: Hare’s departure for the living of Hurstmonceux was thus completely ordinary. And while some men continued to pursue their scholarly interests, many will have concentrated on pastoral duties and theology after taking up their livings. Not one of the works published by Hare after leaving Cambridge deals with the classical philology which had so occupied him at Trinity.

The man who expelled Thirlwall, Christopher Wordsworth, was also the prime mover behind the foundation of the Tripos. This glimpse of the disciplinary fist in the cultural glove brings us back to the element of danger and control mentioned above. The examination offered a powerful instrument of control which shaped both knowledge and knower through its regulation of eligible subject matter and the finely graded mechanism of the mark. We should notice here a clear contrast between Oxford and Cambridge. Oxford discouraged direct competition between individuals – in theory everyone could gain a First – whereas Cambridge was much more directly competitive. Hence the numerical order introduced in mathematics – Senior Wrangler, second, third, fourth Wranglers etc. – followed in the Classical Tripos by Senior (etc.) Classics. There were even titles for the lowest scorers: the Wooden Spoon in mathematics, the Wedge in classics.⁸

The powerful and long-established mathematical tradition at Cambridge adequately explains this stress on competition and marking (similar moves at Oxford in the 1820s were led by the mathematicians there).⁹ It also influenced the shape taken by the new Tripos, since Wordsworth’s original proposals were watered down so that the mathematicians would not block them. He had wanted original composition included in an examination taken after the Mathematical Tripos which would be compulsory except for the top ten Wranglers. The proposal approved in 1822, however, was for an entirely voluntary examination consisting of translation to and from Latin and Greek, with no historical papers and no original composition. This last was apparently regarded as being beyond the powers of those who had concentrated on mathematics. Wordsworth, Hare and Thirlwall were all fellows of Trinity, which in the 1780s had overtaken St John’s as the largest college in the university. Trinity had been conducting rigorous classical examinations for its fellowships since the turn of the century, and in a sense the Tripos was an extension of a college procedure to the whole University.¹⁰ The rising rates of matriculation in the 1820s may have relaxed intercollegiate tensions to some extent, and probably facilitated the introduction of the new Tripos. Nevertheless it seems likely that St John’s, which was noted for mathematics rather than classics, suspected that the Tripos proposals were a Trinity plot.¹¹

The sequential tie between classics and mathematics invites speculation: did mathematical thinking influence the style of classical scholarship? The Porsonian style, with its glorification of problem-solving within a delimited area, had an affinity with mathematics, as learnt in Cambridge; the Oxford Greats style was very different. And of course those who sat for the Tripos came to it from an exhaustive course of mathematics. But the influence was reciprocal, since from the mid-1820s on, many of those who took maths had their sights set on the new Classical Tripos which lay beyond. The mathematics dons were in effect teaching mixed-ability classes; and accordingly, in the later 1820s they began to rewrite and simplify their textbooks.¹² In 1849 the mathematical entry requirement was lowered, and an ancient history paper was introduced. This met a long-standing complaint. In 1836 Christopher Wordsworth junior had complained that the Tripos focused unduly on the manner, rather than the matter, of the ancient authors.¹³ As this suggests, the historical and philological emphasis of the Philological Museum represented a road not taken. Not until the 1880s would comparative philology and ancient history be given secure homes in the curriculum.¹⁴

II Autonomy and plurality, 1854–79

In 1854 the Tripos was finally detached from its elder mathematical sibling. Like many other changes, including the introduction of triposes in law, theology and moral sciences, this resulted from the recommendations of the 1850 Royal Commissions on the ancient universities. The new honours courses in the mid-1850s at first attracted hardly any students; nevertheless their mere existence affected both the authority and the definition of classics. The old sequential pattern was replaced by an array of courses from which students could choose.¹⁵ This general unsettling of tradition encouraged renewed calls for reform of the Classical Tripos, and in particular for the downgrading of composition and for increased attention to ancient history. There is a direct parallel in the concern among Oxford classicists, at much the same time, that the new modern history course would sweep the board unless Literae Humaniores was made less linguistic; hence the switch made in 1850 to the two-part sequence which persists today: a linguistic and literary course (Honour Moderations), followed by the philosophical and historical emphasis of Literae Humaniores.¹⁶

In the late 1860s, a time when reform was in the air nationally and the academic liberals were very active in politics, there was a flurry of pamphlets and flysheets on curriculum reform. Farrar’s Essays on a Liberal Education, which appeared in 1867, included a powerful dissection of the arguments in favour of classical education by Henry Sidgwick, who also contributed to the local battle of the flysheets.¹⁷ In his own chapter, Farrar attacked the continuing emphasis on verse composition in the public schools. At Cambridge, W.G. Clark and Robert Burn argued that this had distorted the Tripos curriculum; the university prizes and medals sufficiently rewarded such skills, and the Tripos itself should be reoriented in newer directions.¹⁸ Another bone of contention was the status of ancient history. The conservative Trinity don Augustus Vansittart described this as bringing ‘an alien and disturbing element into our great Classical examination’. He also objected to the inclusion of questions on ancient philosophy, for which, he suggested, the new Moral Sciences Tripos was a more suitable home.¹⁹ These debates often drew on the contrast with Greats; a comparison which was to be expected, since the Royal Commissions on Oxford and Cambridge had proceeded in parallel, initiating, in effect, a pair of linked discussions on the curriculum and organisation of higher education. In his flysheet, Vansittart wrote: ‘Let there be two schools – Oxford classics (philosophical) and Cambridge classics (philological).’ His argument was that anyone who wanted a broader-based curriculum should go to Oxford for it rather than trying to introduce it to Cambridge. The comparison persisted into the later nineteenth century, and was echoed in Housman’s notorious thumbnail sketch in his 1911 inaugural: Cambridge scholarship simply meant scholarship with no nonsense about it; Oxford scholarship embodied an erroneous tendency to import literary taste into the study of texts. Housman was referring to the middle years of the nineteenth century, as was J.P. Postgate when he wrote in the Classical Review in 1901: ‘Cambridge was as ever ready with a certain contempt for the inaccurate freedom of Oxford as Oxford for the stiff grammatical precision of Cambridge.’ Postgate added diplomatically: ‘Each has learned from the other; and accuracy is as much honoured at Oxford as style can be at Cambridge.’²⁰

In his own flysheet, Sidgwick summarised Vansittart’s argument thus: ‘If we endeavour to ascertain that men have understood and reflected upon the authors which they have read, we are mixing up with classics something which is not classics.’ Sidgwick’s discussion is notable both for this focus on the idea of the subject and for the way it refers to ‘Classics’ tout simple. He begins, for example, by asking ‘whether classics alone can form a satisfactory basis of education’. He goes on to reject the view that ‘Classics and ancient thought are things naturally distinct’.²¹ Sidgwick may have won the argument, but university politics was not a rational activity, and the insertion of history and philosophy into the Tripos continued to be bitterly resisted. For the conservatives, classics was the prime instrument of liberal education, and as such it was a linguistic and literary training in gentlemanly style rather than in learning facts about the ancient world. But at Cambridge this was defined as the pursuit of accurate linguistic knowledge and a sense of verbal style. This was the ‘pure scholarship’ which F.A. Paley in an 1868 pamphlet on the Tripos glossed as ‘accurate verbal scholarship’. Paley’s position is evident from his peroration: ‘What is classical scholarship? Is it a knowledge of the ancient authors, or only a smartness and quickness in construing and composing?’²² A generation before this, J.W. Blakesley had suggested that the typical product of the Tripos was ‘a hard-headed philologer’. That might suggest a theoretical knowledge of language, but what was meant was in fact an accurate and detailed command of the nuances of literary language, evidenced in both writing and translating Latin and Greek.²³

The proliferation of honours courses from the 1850s onwards brought with it new possibilities and problems. Competition was in practice limited for several decades, since recruitment to most of the new Triposes was very low. In some years, the Moral Sciences Tripos had no candidates at all. The Natural Sciences Tripos, on the other hand, increasingly attracted students away from the jewel in Cambridge’s crown and the oldest of all its courses, the Mathematical Tripos. The broadened scope of the Classical Tripos in the 1880s was perhaps more extensive than any other. Because of this, it raised questions of overlap and of choice. If one studied philosophy, it could be approached from Classics (Part II) or from Moral Science. In Oxford, the question was resolved by the incorporation of philosophy within Greats; in Cambridge, the horns of the dilemma were kept separate. In the next essay, Robert Todd investigates the dilemma by looking at the career and writing of Henry Sidgwick. Sidgwick was perhaps the most important single figure in the history of the University in the second half of the nineteenth century. Unable to maintain adherence to the 39 Articles of the Anglican Church, which was until 1871 a condition of the holding of almost all college fellowships, he resigned his Trinity fellowship in 1869. He became then, and remained until his death in 1900, a symbol of intellectual honesty and moral aspiration in the University. Sidgwick went through the Classical Tripos in the late 1850s, but in the following decade, his attention shifted to Moral Sciences. Why he did this, and how this was related to his views on the teaching of philosophy, is the subject of Robert Todd’s essay.

The emphasis on dexterity and speed in Cambridge stemmed from the influence of the mathematical exams, where manipulation and problem-solving were much prized. In some quarters, the increasing dominance of examinations was viewed with suspicion. Thus J.R. Seeley declared that Cambridge was like a country invaded by the Sphinx – men thought of nothing else but how to answer its questions.²⁴ In Oxford too examinations were becoming central to university life, but the direct comparison of individuals continued to be resisted. This may explain why private coaching took hold more weakly in Oxford than in Cambridge.²⁵

The 1840s and 1850s witnessed yet more classical journals which collapsed after a few years: the Classical Museum in 1850, the Journal of Sacred and Classical Philology in 1859. An academic community able to support such publications was still lacking. The crucial shift which was to lay the foundations for such a community took place between the mid-1850s and the mid-1880s, when able men began to look outside the Church for their careers. The beginnings of what we would recognise as academic organisation – societies, journals, specialisation and a career hierarchy – followed the intervention of the state, but were facilitated by the decline of religious faith.²⁶

III Liberal learning, 1879–1914

The second Royal Commission (1872) was officially concerned with university finance, but this raised fundamental issues of university organisation. By the time it reported in 1874, however, the debates of the late 1860s had already led to changes in the Tripos. The ‘middle’ or ‘intermediate’ Tripos of the 1870s was created by leavening the mass of linguistic examinations with papers on history and philology. This change was, however, soon overtaken by pressure from the Headmasters’ Conference for the division of Triposes, so that students could take more than one subject.²⁷ The conflict between advocates of [lingustic] ‘scholarship’ and [wider] ‘learning’ led to a compromise similar to that of the 1820s. Liberal education and ‘pure scholarship’ were represented in the new Part I, which was entirely linguistic and literary and which itself gave access to a degree. Part II was optional, open only to those who had passed Part I, and was divided into five Sections: literature, philosophy, history, archaeology and comparative philology. Of these, archaeology constituted the most obvious extension of the subject coverage in the curriculum. It became popular among women students, who were in general relatively ill-equipped to handle the traditional linguistic core of the Tripos.²⁸ This could be seen as the beginning of a brave new world; especially when we remember that in the 1870s, after the repeal of the Test Acts and the foundation of Girton and Newnham, women and dissenters had acquired access to Cambridge classics.²⁹ But the late-Victorian period is better seen as a transitional one in which pure scholarship and the world of the Anglican bachelor male remained dominant despite the inroads made by new students and new knowledge. Until 1895, for example, the literature course in Part II, unlike the other four Sections, was compulsory. The coordination of teaching on an intercollegiate basis, pioneered by the Trinity