This is an excellent coverage of the Victorian reception of classical Greek literature, language, and art. It extends itself a bit in time, looking back to the Romantics (Shelley and Byron both playing significant roles) and forward to the Modernists (Eliot and Jones, in particular) to better situate the Victorians themselves. By restricting itself to the Victorians proper -- principally English, a few Scots and Irish -- the book gains strength, because the interconnectedness of that intellectual world prevents the observations from being a detached set of discrete observations: Jowett, Farrar, Disraeli, Gladstone, (George) Eliot, Pater, Ruskin, Wilde, Hardy et al. were all influencing and being influenced by each other (which is, of course, why we recognize "Victorian" as having a more substantive value than just a chronological tag).

Jenkyns has a wide and deep understanding not only of the period but of the classical sources in question, and is effective in delineating the differences between the Victorians' views and ours, notably of classical tragedy and Homer.

This is in many ways an irretrievably vanished world: between that world and ours is fixed the great gulf represented by Dodds (The Greeks and the Irrational) and Milman Parry, to say nothing of the evacuation of classical education from the general curricula of humane letters; but that doesn't mean that it's not both interesting in itself and enlightening as a contrast to our own. ( )

Beware that "Victorians" refers to "British Victorians" only, and this book was written by Oxford professor who assumes the reader is very familiar with Britain during that period, especially the writers and critics of the time. Most of them are mentioned by last name only, as if everyone knows who Quiller-Couch, Symonds, Macaulay, Jowett, Niebuhr, and so on, were. Jenkyns' book is very academic and dry. It's basically a collection of old arguments and opinions written by the likes of John Ruskin (I have heard of him) and Walter Pater (no idea), with smatterings of poetry and bits from novels.

What is NOT here is a book about the everyday lives of people of the period, and how they were affected by the Greek Revival. That's what I mean about academic: it's limited to the world of scholars and critics, poets and writers, and a handful of artists (who he seems to find mostly bad, I'm afraid). Nothing from outside the wall of the ivory tower is examined here.

In the Preface, the author states "I mention both important and unimportant people, the former for the part that they played in giving the age its character, the latter because they often reflect that character more simply than their more eminent contemporaries. I am not writing a history of scholarship..." And yet, that's exactly what he has written. Important vs. unimportant people? He assumes we know what this means. To me, it sounds as though he's a bigot, and not in any way a social historian worth reading. He calls homosexuals "inverts." Inverts??? This book was written in 1980. Inverts?

I suffered through this book three times before I finally extracted something worthwhile: it's that difficult to decode. I was trying to get an understanding of the Greek Revival: why it suddenly became popular in paintings (Alma-Tadema, Leighton) (sorry about the last-name-dropping!) and theater. There was a small army of artists painting Greek-ish murals in hundreds of new town halls and civic buildings popping up all over late 19th C. America. What's the history of that? I did find some useful information here, eventually, but it was heavy going.

Recommended only if absolutely necessary. ( )

Richard Jenkyn's book is a thorough and unhurried exploration the influence of ancient Greece on Victorian society. Despite being a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall of Oxford University (very classical), he succeeds in being even handed and has written an altogether fascinating book.
He sees a source of Victorian Hellenism in late 18th century romanticism with it's ideas of the "noble savage", shepherds and shepherdesses, the rural idyll etc. with ancient Greece fitting easily into this environment.

Of course, the rationalism and science of the 19th century industrial revolution was notably unromantic, setting up a tension that runs through the Victorian period, and which he illustrates so well. As he says, "...that scientific thought, hard remorseless and factual, was draining magic and fantasy out of the world." and he quotes from Peacock's essay, "The Four Ages of Poetry", "We know too well that there are no dryads in Hyde Park nor naiads in Regent's Canal. But barbaric manners and supernatural inventions are essential to poetry." So the modern poet (i.e. Victorian poet), ignoring the achievements of historians and philosophers, is merely "wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance."

Or to really turn things on their heads, he quotes Fitzgerald, "As I often think, it is not the poetical imagination, but bare Science that every day more and more unveils a greater Epic than the Iliad." Now perhaps the industrialist and scientists are the new Heroes?

In some respects he shows the Classics to be a refuge from the frantic change in Victorian society. The 19th century Mediterranean still retained it's timeless ancient landscapes of olive orchards and vineyards and offered a stark contrast to what was widely seen as the industrial ruination the British landscape and traditional life. A recurrent theme was to see late Victorian England as late Ancient Rome comparing unfavourably to a vital classical Greece. Somehow things had passed their best, the freshness of youth had gone and art had lost it's ancient purity. Both Ancient Rome and Victorian England were imperial, and the guardians of the empire were the classically educated British public school and Oxbridge elite. A classical education was undoubtedly a social advantage and it showed an allegiance to the autocratic, aristocratic, Platonic ideal of the philosopher kings and their administrations.

He shows that the new democratic, industrial and commercial world of the middle and lower classes, had little in common with their Hellenistic masters other than the uniform longing for a lost rural past. Dickens for example was a popular writer with no classical coolness (Jenkyns points out that his novels would not have been so good if they had) who hankered after earlier simpler pre-industrial times. Tolkien's hero Bilbo Baggins is not a hero in the classical mould, but is nonetheless a hero of a peculiarly understated, unassuming British type.

Jenkyns shows that the Germans didn't domesticate the Homeric model to such an extent and followed the idea more closely with the the "healthy, vigorous animalism" promoted by Nietszche, something that never quite fitted the stuffy restrictive Victorian atmosphere. They rather escaped into the exoticism of the aesthetes using a degraded classicism and orientalism as a cover for titillating art and fantasy writing.

Some writers could see value in the old and the new worlds. As he says, "Mill wanted to call the old world in to redress the balance of the new: classical literature should be studied he said, "not as being without faults, but as having contrary faults to those of our own day"; and conversely ancient states exhibited "precisely that order of virtues in which a commercial society is apt to be deficient." In other words, you need classicists to administer the democratic ideals of free speech, liberty and equality before the law.

It's interesting to think what Homer would have made of all this. He actually believed in immortals and demi-gods and unlike Gladstone didn't have to rationalise his belief with Christianity or an industrial revolution. ( )

This is a wonderful book—everything reception criticism should be. ( )