Classics in 19th and 20th Century Cambridge

Curriculum, Culture and Community

Christopher Stray

• Publisher: Cambridge Philological Society
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781913701307
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire antique

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.

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 b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter I: The First Century of the Classical Tripos (1822–1922): High Culture and the Politics of Curriculum
• Chapter II: Henry Sidgwick, Cambridge Classics, and the Study of Ancient Philosophy: The Decisive Years, 1866–9
• Chapter III: The Early Years of the Cambridge Greek Play: 1882–1912
• Chapter IV: Women and the Classical Tripos 1869–1914
• Chapter V: Nothing But Gibberish and Shibboleths?: The Compulsory Greek Debates, 1870–1919
• Chapter VI: The Invention (And Reinvention) of ‘Group D’: An Archaeology of the Classical Tripos, 1879–1984
• Chapter VII: Winifred Lamb and the Fitzwilliam Museum
• Chapter VIII: The Cambridge Greek and Latin Book Club: A Brief Antiphonal Account, With An Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover