The organizing theme of this volume and of the conference from which it originated and the publication within a year of one another of Mr. Richard Jenkyns's The Victorians and Ancient Greece and my own Creek Heritage in Victorian Britain are symptomatic of our having arrived at an important turning point in the pursuit of Victorian studies. As scholars of history, literature, art, ideas, and culture, we are at long last beginning to investigate topics that were actually of the most fundamental significance to the educated elites of nineteenth-century Britain and without which their culture and intellectual universe would have been radically different. It has taken us a very long time to reach this point of departure. We have remained overly interested in questions that seem relevant for our own rime or major figures whose work has entered die literary or philosophical canon. We have almost unwittingly continued to interpret die nineteenth century through the dwardian categories of “Victorianism.” That has even been die situation with critics, such as Walter Houghton and Basil Willey, who refuted much of the Edwardian image but did so without rejecting the very presuppositions from which Edwardian writers had launched their attack. In a unique manner the study of Victorian classicism and related topics will allow us to break through the old interpretive and evaluative categories, because classicism was an issue about which Edwardian critics and later scholars had little to say. We come to Victorian classicism widi rather fewer presuppositions than to many other topics in Victorian intellectual and literary history.

One of the most dramatic moments in Victorian literature is that in the Apologia pro Vita Sua in which Newman first expresses doubt about the tenablehess of his position in the Anglican Church. It was die summer of 1839 and he was proposing to spend die time quietly, reading in his favorite subject, die history of the early church. As he began to go more deeply into the matter, however, he became uneasy, and by the end of August he was seriously alarmed. “My stronghold,” he says, “was Antiquity; now here, in the middle of die fifth century, I found, as it seemed to me, Christendom of die sixteenth and die nineteenth centuries reflected. I saw my face in that mirror, and I was a monophysite.” It is true, the impact of this passage is somewhat diminished for the modern reader by his uncertainty what a Monophysite is. Even after he has done his researches and learned that a Monophysite is one who believed in the one, not the two, natures of Christ, he is little better off, for Newman was not concerned widi the doctrinal question. He was concerned with the relationship of the parties one to anodier and with the fact that, if an extreme version of a position was heretical, then a moderate version of that position was heretical too. “It was difficult,” he wrote, “to make out how the Eutychians or Monophysites were heretics, unless Protestants and Anglicans were heretics also; … There was an awful similitude, more awful, because so silent and unimpassioned, between die dead records of die past and the feverish chronicle of the present. The shadow of the fifth century was on the sixteenth. It was like a spirit rising from the troubled waters of the old world, with die shape and lineaments of the new.”

Reflecting on the extreme difficulty of the practice of literary criticism as it was invoked by the conception and composition of Literature and Dogma, Matthew Arnold wrote the following sentence: “It calls into play the highest requisites for the study of letters; – great and wide acquaintance with the history of the human mind, knowledge of the manner in which men have thought, of their way of using words and what they mean by them, delicacy of perception and quick tact, and, besides all these, a favourable moment and the ‘Zeitgeist.’” This sentence is a mirror, a language-metaphor, of Arnold's critical mind. Without verbal fanfare, with the utmost directness and simplicity of statement, it encompasses its subject in an original, relevant, and satisfying way. The “highest requisites” for the literary critic are adequate working hypotheses about the human mind – not a formal philosophy or theory of mind, but a set of working hypotheses, empirically acquired and tested and always subject to empirically justified revision, that are both practical and trustworthy; genuine sophistication in the subtleties of language, its nuances, conventions, and diplomacies – again not scientific or philosophical expertise, but a knowledge acquired through experience of historical usage and of the tendency of language to contract and expand itself and to alter its character and significance as it moves in and out of differing contexts; a sensibility diat is especially responsive to literary fact and moves with practiced ease and dependability among literary phenomena; that degree of self-awareness that recognizes the peculiar aptness and applicability of one's talents to the needs and possibilities of one's era. Add to these “highest requisites for the study of letters” only a very few of Arnold's methodological principles – concentration on the centrality of the subject or action to the way in which a piece of imaginative literature actually works, reliance on “inward evidence, direct evidence” rather than on “outward evidence, indirect evidence,” recognition that “poets receive their distinctive character, not from their subject, but from their application to that subject of the ideas …

What was the state of classical Greek studies in early Victorian Britain? The anonymous author of a series of Platonic translations-with-commentaries has this to say in the February 1834 issue of the Monthly Repository:

Considering the almost boundless reputation of the writings of Plato, not only among scholars, but (upon their authority) among nearly all who have any tincture of letters, it is a remarkable fact that, of the great writers of antiquity, there is scarcely one who, in this country at least, is not merely so little understood, but so little read. Our two great ‘seats of learning’ of which no real lover of learning can ever speak but in terms of indignant disgust, bestow attention upon the various branches of classical acquirement in exactly the reverse order to that which would be observed by persons who valued the ancient authors for what is valuable in them: … with the exception of the two dialogues edited by Dr. Routh, we are aware of nothing to facilitate the study of the most gifted of Greek writers which has ever emanated from either of the two impostor-universities of England; and of die young men who have obtained university honours during the past ten years, we are much misinformed if there be six who had even looked into his writings. There are, probably, in this kingdom, not so many as a hundred persons who ever have read Plato, and not so many as twenty who ever do.’

The Victorians would have been remarkable if they had resisted the temptation to find lessons for, and parallels with, their own situation in the history they wrote. The story of Athens in the fifth century B.C. was particularly enticing in this regard. The small state that defeated the Persians at Salamis, that rapidly became the leader of Western civilization, that brought to birth advances in art, in philosophy, in practical science, that struggled toward democracy, that attained imperial power but then began to decline, seemed obviously to prefigure the destiny of the small state that defeated France at Waterloo, that brought to birth the Industrial Revolution, and so on. In this paper I will examine the implications for their own times that various Victorians found in the lives and works of the Greek tragedians. I will show how two different groups interpreted Aeschylus so as to appropriate his prestige for their own view of life; how the figure of Sophocles was used in the debate over aestheticism; and how Euripides' philosophical sophistication and ambiguity were felt to have a special relevance for troubled thinkers at the end of the century. Trying to summarize so much critical diversity is rather like trying to reduce an opera to a melody or two; but, to change metaphors, the field is new, and first maps are always crude.

In 1947–48 Vernon Rendall wrote the first essays on George Eliot's use of the classics in her novels and supplied the first tentative list of authors she was acquainted with: Aeschylus, Aristotle, Epictetus, Homer, Nonnus, Pausanias, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Xenophon in Greek; Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Livy, Persius, Plautus, Quintilian, Tacitus, and Virgil in Latin. Rendall pointed to Sophocles and Horace as Eliot's favorites in each language. She is like the tragedian in that “Sophocles does not let himself go” in “the delineation of the passions”; and she “never lets herself go.” Horace is not only the Latin poet she most persistently alludes to but also the one she most nearly assimilates in the wit and point of her style. Of the other Greek writers, Aeschylus provided George Eliot with that concept of Nemesis which pervades her novels. The Latin writers supplied her with happy tag phrases diat punctuate the speech of feckless gentlemen – “A quotation or two adorns the whole man,” according to Heine – like Arthur Donnithorne and Arthur Brooke; in addition, they allowed George Eliot to give Politian and Scala ammunition for academic warfare in Romola. In his comments on Sophoclean control, Horatian wit, Aeschylean Nemesis, and classical allusion, Rendall initiated the study of George Eliot's use of the classics. He broke ground for others to excavate.

In December 1865 the sculptor Thomas Woolner gave a memorable dinner party which, in a Victorian version of the Homeric games, generated a sportive clash between two of the age's heroes. The guests included William Ewart Gladstone, Alfred Tennyson, William Holman Hunt, and the Bristol physician John Addington Symonds. The son of this last entered later in the evening (as did F. T. Palgrave), and it is from the letters of the younger John Addington Symonds that we have a detailed, lively account of the stormy proceedings. The major feature of the evening was the persistency with which Tennyson and Gladstone gravitated toward polar attitudes whatever the topic of conversation, whether the issue under discussion was political or literary. As the younger Symonds entered the dining room, the assembled company had just begun to consider Governor Coote Eyre and his brutal suppression of the Jamaican uprising in which twenty Europeans had been killed and over 600 natives killed or executed. As Gladstone condemned the slaughter with the moral passion and oratorical skill by which he dominated Parliament, Tennyson kept interrupting not with counter-arguments but with obbligato, sotto voce prejudices: “We are too tender to savages, we are more tender to a black man than to ourselves. … Niggers are tigers, niggers are tigers.” Repeatedly the two men differed over this and other matters, “Gladstone with his rich flexible voice, Tennyson with his deep drawl rising into an impatient falsetto when put out, Gladstone arguing, Tennyson putting in a prejudice, Gladstone asserting rashly, Tennyson denying with a bold negative, Gladstone full of facts, Tennyson relying on impressions, both of them humorous, but the one polished and delicate in repartee, the other broad & coarse & grotesque.”

… a great difference of opinion has prevailed among the moderns concerning what the ancients intended by the lotus: for the history of it, as it has come down to us, is mixed with fable, from having previously passed through the hands of the poets.

The name ‘lotus’ was applied by the ancients indifferently to a number of quite different families of plants, notably (1) the true lotus … (2) the shrub or tree Zizyphus, Jujuba, whose berries were eaten by tribes in North Africa (3) trefoils, clovers, and melilots. … The lotus which men really ate was what I have called the true lotus, of which there are two varieties to be considered: (1) Nelumbo, the Indian lotus, and (2) Nymphaea, the Egyptian lotus, both of the family Nymphaeaceae.

Across the span of a single decade, Robert Browning and Wilkie Collins published, respectively, a poem and two novels with similarly innovative structures. All three works are multiple narratives; that is, they are narrated by several of their characters who function both as actors and witnesses. All three were immediately popular, and all three continue to be regarded as major achievements of their audiors. The Woman in White, serialized in All the Year Round from 1859 to 1860, quickly became the talk of London and remained so preeminent among Collins's novels that in his will he requested as his epitaph, “author of The Woman in White and other works of fiction.” The Ring and the Book, begun in 1864 and inspired by a source that Browning found in 1860, was issued in four volumes, two in 1868 and two in 1869. Like The Woman in White, it was widely discussed and admired, exalting Browning's reputation even among readers who had earlier been critical. The Moonstone, begun in 1867 and published serially in All the Year Round during 1868, was not initially as popular as the other two, although its publisher reported that “crowds of anxious readers” waited for the latest serial installments; but today it is Collins's most celebrated novel, often (though inaccurately) cited as the first detective novel in English.

Yet another year has passed, and we once more gratefully take this opportunity of issuing a supplement to our Checklist. This addition is smaller than the previous ones, containing only 114 entries, compared with an average of close to 350 in the previous supplements. However, this listing does contain 69 completely new entries, bringing the total of new discoveries to the astonishing figure of almost 700. Of the new letters now listed, many have been brought to our attention through the survey of Browningiana in the United States being coordinated by Dr. Eleanor Hoag under the auspices of the Armstrong Browning Library. We applaud this initiative, and look forward to the planned extension of the survey to other countries; as noted in last year's introduction, it seems very probable that letters exist in Germany and Japan, of which we have no knowledge.