The shaping of character: The classics as a remedy for cultural despair in Victorian England

In an essay on Grote's History of Greece, John Stuart Mill remarked: ‘The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings.’¹ We may find this statement surprising, but Mill's contemporaries would not have. Just as nineteenth-century European scholars focused on the ancient Orient and its religions largely because they thought modern Eastern cultures static or degraded and of incidental value, so too, as Suzanne Marchand has pointed out, many members of the European educated elite thought the same was true of their own culture, ‘which is why the study of classical antiquity was dominant in educational institutions and why religious reformers emphasized the virtues of Jesus and the apostles, rather than those of contemporary Christians’.²

In nineteenth-century England, appeal to classical antiquity was used to remedy cultural despair, yet in the course of the century the programme was collapsing, as there arose an increasingly acrimonious struggle between the claims of science and those of classical antiquity with regard to the explanation for the uniqueness and success of Western culture. Nowhere is this clearer than in the attempts of promoters of classical education to provide a model of character development. Character development was something that had almost always been a core role of the study of classical antiquity and, as the claims of Christianity in this role began to be questioned in Europe from the end of the eighteenth century, it took on a new urgency. Frank Turner notes that Greek antiquity began to absorb the interests of eighteenth-century Europeans as their Roman and Christian heritage began to come apart, attempting to identify ‘prescriptive signposts for the present age in the European past that predated Rome and Christianity’.³

To understand the extent of classical studies in the curriculum of the English educational system, however, we need to recognise from the outset how class-bound education was in England. By contrast with Germany, for example, where Humboldt's reforms of 1810 were designed to open up tertiary education to the middle classes, in England in the first half of the nineteenth century education was seen as a privilege, and there was a widespread belief among the elite that too much education would produce overqualified and unemployable people.⁷ The resistance to general education was reflected in literacy levels: in 1850 the literacy rate (reading and writing) in Prussia was 85 per cent, that in Britain just 52 per cent.⁸ Museums, at the forefront of general educational programme in Germany, laboured under a class-ridden ideology in Britain. The trustees of the British Museum, predominantly members of the aristocracy and Anglican clergy, were staunchly resistant to displaying its specimens to the public, and by contrast with French and German museums its collection was sadly lacking any professional oversight on questions of classification and nomenclature. One of the defenders of these arrangements, Sir Robert Inglis, insisted that wealth and rank were essential for the trustees if they were to solicit patronage for a public museum.⁹

Such an attitude was nevertheless in conflict with a transformation of British culture from the 1820s. As John Herschel put it in his influential Preliminary Discourse on Natural Philosophy of 1830: ‘The observation of the calm, energetic regularity of nature, the immense scale of her operations, and the certainty with which her ends are attained, tends, irresistably, to tranquilize and re-assure the mind, and render it less accessible to repining, selfish, and turbulent emotions.’¹⁰ This therapeutic understanding of science was matched in the rapidly expanding urban centres of the industrial north of England, where scientific reading and enquiry was taking over from literary, political or classical studies as the leading form of recreation among the literate,¹¹ and from the 1830s, there was a significant increase in reviews and discussion of scientific books in the widely read journals of the day. Moreover, in the course of the nineteenth century, science was extended outside the confines of serious research, and was installed at the centre of leisure, for both adults and children. In the case of adults, natural history and machines predominated, whereas in the case of children, as well as pedagogic material there was a new focus on such children's daytime activities as rock collecting, shell collecting and the identification of plants, and the night-time activity of star-gazing.¹² At the same time, there arose non-elite educational institutions outside the public schools and universities. The new Mechanics' Institutes, which flourished between the early 1820s and the mid-1840s, provided evening teaching for the working class. They were not sponsored by wealthy aristocrats, as in the case of the Royal Institution, for example, but were voluntary associations.

Classical education and education in mechanics might just seem two different independent educational streams, one associated with an aristocratic elite, the other with the middle and working classes. But there are two absolutely central issues on which they come into competition: their contribution to civilisation and their role in character formation.

The appeal of classical education, for example to reformers like Matthew Arnold, lay in its portrayal of history as a source of objective values, a call to secular living in a way that involved no moral traumas as traditional religious values were abandoned.¹³ But for an increasing number of writers in the eighteenth and particularly in the nineteenth century, it was science, not Christianity or classical culture, that provided the path to civilisation. As early as 1759, for example, Linnaeus was remarking that ‘only the Sciences distinguish Wild people, Barbarians and Hottentots, from us’.¹⁴ A century later, in 1866, Thomas Huxley writes of science saving civilisation from barbarism, talking of a ‘new nature’ created by science and manifested ‘in every mechanical artifice, every chemically pure substance employed by manufacture, every abnormally fertile race of plants, or rapidly growing and fattening breed of animals’. This new nature, we are told, is ‘the foundation of our wealth and the condition of our safety from submergence by another flood of barbarous hordes; it is the bond which unites into a solid political whole, regions larger than any empire of antiquity; it secures us from the recurrence of pestilences and famines of former times; it is the source of endless comforts and conveniences, which are not mere luxuries, but conduce to physical and moral well-being’.¹⁵ At the same time, general lessons for history were being drawn from the new role given to science. In 1877, the eminent German physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond was suggesting that the fall of the Roman Empire was due not to social, political or economic conditions but to a lack of science: Roman imperial culture rested ‘on the quicksand of speculation’.¹⁶ Historical progress was due to science alone – ‘the history of natural science’, he writes, ‘is the actual history of mankind’ – and it was science ‘that made mankind mankind’.¹⁷

On the question of the shaping of character, in England, a great deal hinged on the diminishing esteem that Anglicanism attracted in this respect. The Anglican Church gradually lost its religious-political monopoly from the end of the eighteenth century, with the Catholic emancipation of 1829 coming about largely because Parliament no longer believed that the Established Church had any unique claims to precedence on religious matters. At the same time, with the rise of the Evangelical movement from the late eighteenth century, we enter a period of sharp and intense public criticism of ecclesiastical institutions on moral, intellectual and spiritual grounds. The aim was to re-Christianise these institutions, however, not to replace them with something non-Christian.¹⁸ The question was how Christianity could be reformed so as to fulfil its traditional tasks in a radically altered environment. And paramount among these tasks was the moral formation of character. This was something that had a number of different dimensions, and it was generally considered that it was not a question that could be left open until the appropriate remedy could be found within Christianity. Since the Renaissance, classical learning had played an indispensable supporting role so, other things being equal, it could perhaps carry the load in the short term. Questions of the shaping of character were intimately associated with those of civilisation, and if classical antiquity came to be separated from civilisation in favour of science, then the question of character formation would become much more complicated.

We can distinguish three developments in English universities in response to the questioning of Christianity as a means of the shaping of character. First, the promotion of classics had served in this role, usually as a supplement to Christianity in the English elite educational system, and it continued to do so at Eton and Oxford for example. Second, there was what was in effect a replacement of classics by science as a means of shaping character, a development centred on Cambridge. Third, there was a rejection of the whole concept of the shaping of character, which was associated with a minority aristocratic interest which could have no standing in a democratic society. Such a view was above all that of the Utilitarians, and the way in which scientific and medical education were pursued at University College London, for which Bentham provided the inspiration, was quite different from the character-forming concerns of the two traditional English universities.

The education of the Cambridge undergraduates was not confined to intellectual pursuits, and the elite mathematicians were encouraged to be elite sportsmen as well: it was a crucial part of the ethos that intellectual endeavour had to be balanced against physical exercise, and the elite mathematics students were often elite athletes as well. Such exercise was largely collective and competitive: individual exercise was discouraged, except for long walks. By the 1840s the combined pursuits of mathematics and sport had become constitutive of the liberal education through which good undergraduate character was formed.²⁰ Here it is not so much that science has been integrated into English culture, but rather than it has begun to play a direct role in shaping that culture, through the educational formation of the country's elite: the names of the top mathematics students, the ‘wranglers’, for example, were published in the newspapers, particularly The Times, from the mid-1840s, occasionally accompanied by short biographies.²¹

In short, by the middle decades of the nineteenth century in England, science education emerged as a competitor to classical education as a means of character formation. Nevertheless, the idea of classical education as the route to the formation of a moral character still had many defenders in nineteenth-century England. In response to attacks on the classical teaching of the English universities, for example, the moral qualities that it supposedly fostered were set out in detail. Edward Copleston, later Provost of Oriel College, writes: ‘A high degree of honour, a distain of death in a good cause, a passionate devotion to the welfare of one's country, … are the first sentiments, which those studies communicate to the mind.’²² And the connection between Greek studies and a certain conception of morality did indeed seem to be a real one: in his 1872 Notes sur l'Angleterre, based on his travels to England in the 1860s, the French critic Hippolyte Taine remarked how French schoolchildren were superior in their knowledge of Latin, but English ones far surpassed them in Greek, and he was surprised by how religious they were compared to the French. This would have confirmed Matthew Arnold's claims, in his Culture and Anarchy (1869), that Hellenism and Hebraicism were mutually reinforcing, and as such an indispensable part of any educational programme that aimed at the formation of character. For Arnold, as Turner points out, ‘the assertion of the rational, calm character of ancient Greek culture allowed Arnold to embrace a moral spirit more flexible than that of Christianity without seeming to encounter moral license’.²³

By contrast, character formation in the case of science would seem to have no bearing on the formation of moral character, and in his disputes with Anglican divines,²⁴ John Stuart Mill, arguing that the system of morals espoused by Anglican divines simply reflected their own conservative prejudices and dogmas, in effect pits a scientific model of morality, Utilitarianism, against a morality based on character. But Utilitarians were loath to renounce questions of character completely. Bentham had explored questions of personal motivation, albeit in a very sketchy and inconclusive unpublished piece,²⁵ and Mill raises questions of character on a number of occasions, even praising ancient literature in its presentation of values absent from modern commercial society.²⁶ The problem is not that Mill ignored questions of character, but rather that he failed to show how considerations of character might be reconciled with a consequentialist construal of morality. His Logic, for example, contains a section on ‘ethology’, that is, ‘the science of character formation’, which deals with life history and how it contributes to character. But while he clearly made an effort to develop an ethology, he got nowhere.²⁷ His Logic went through several editions, but the ethology section was never essentially modified, and in 1843 he wrote to Alexander Bain that his ‘scheme had not assumed any definite shape’.²⁸ Bain subsequently noted that Mill had ‘dropped thinking of it’.²⁹ Bain himself, notably in his The Senses and the Intellect (1855), had examined behaviour in terms of the particular circumstances in which people find themselves and the effect on psychology, including moral psychology. Mill was enthusiastic about Bain's book, for here might have been a route into ‘character’, but it came to nothing and indeed it is far from clear how Utilitarianism could have been reformed in this direction, and in particular whether the ‘scientific’ approach of psychology is the place to be looking for guidance if one believes that considerations of character are indispensable.³⁰

The crucial point for Mill was that not only did both science and morality share a concern with how one's judgements can be objective, but achieving objectivity in the two cases ran along similar lines: both relied on an appeal to evidence, for this is what objectivity consisted in. In the case of science the evidence took the form of garnering inductive support for a theory. In the case of ethics, it took the form of a comparative assessment of the harmful or beneficial consequences of different actions: it was the consequences of the actions that mattered, not the character or intentions of the actor. This at least is what Utilitarianism's critics took as its understanding of moral guidance for behaviour. And in practical terms, particularly in the legal and political realms, this was as good a characterisation as any. Not only that, but its success as an instrument of reform depended on it, for considered in this way Utilitarianism was a natural fit for a culture that looked to science as the source of guidance on how to arrive at objective judgements. In effectively removing considerations of character from moral reasoning, in spite of the efforts of Grote and Mill to promote classical culture, Utilitarianism ended up marginalising any role for it in the shaping of the population, just as the association of the progress of science with the progress of civilisation put science, rather than classical culture, at the centre of civilisation.

The idea of European shared values was the biggest cultural casualty of the War. If the values of classicism and science were to attempt to recover their earlier standing, they needed to be promoted in new ways. Classicism had been promoted throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a variety of ways, including translations, vernacular poetic imitation (brought to perfection in Swinburne's beautiful Atalanta in Calydon³⁵), children's literature, popular performances such as puppet shows, the poses plastiques of ‘Beauty and Strength’ performers with their remarkable imitations of Greek statues, feats of sporting prowess that invoked comparisons with Hercules and Atlas, trade union banners and (albeit here very much in competition with Oriental themes) Staffordshire pottery.³⁶

In the aftermath of the War, the earlier forms of promotion could no longer be relied on. The response of science was twofold.³⁹ Professional scientists such as Rutherford quickly put their war work behind them, playing down the military applications of science, and promoted their work (in Rutherford's case nuclear physics) as the most socially disengaged of the pure sciences. At the same time, in writers such as H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon, a new and extremely popular genre of futuristic science fiction had been created, in which, whether utopian or dystopian fantasies were at issue, it was science that was the key to self-understanding. Classicism could offer no renewal along these lines and popular interest in antiquity had in fact begun to shift away from Greece and Rome to Egypt in the course of the nineteenth century, particularly with the publication of John Gardner Wilkinson's very popular Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (1837), Jean François Champollion's lavishly illustrated Monuments de l'Égypt et de Nubia (1835–45) and Auguste Mariette's spectacular discovery of the vaults of the Serapeum in November 1851. Egypt subsequently became a fashionable winter resort for Europeans and Americans, Egyptophilia coming to a head, as far as popular culture was concerned, in the 1920s with Howard Carter's discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. As the archaeologist James Breasted remarked at the time, the Tutankhamun discovery ‘received a volume of world-wide publicity exceeding anything in the entire history of science’.⁴⁰ The classical world could offer nothing to match this.