Britain's Imperial Muse

The Classics, Imperialism, and the Indian Empire, 1784-1914

C. Hagerman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137316424
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Britain's Imperial Muse explores the classics' contribution to British imperialism and to the experience of empire in India through the long 19th century. It reveals the classics role as a foundational source for positive conceptions of empire and a rhetorical arsenal used by commentators to justify conquest and domination, especially of India.

1

Classical Education and Britain’s Imperial Elite

A.P. Thornton once described Kennedy’s Latin Primer, a standard public school text for much of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, as ‘one of the winding sheets of empire’. This was hyperbole, meant to underscore his assertion that Britain’s elite educational institutions had lost their vitality by the 1920s and 1930s, and were no longer instilling the proper imperial spirit in graduates. By implication these same institutions – and the classical curriculum symbolized by Kennedy’s Primer – had been very successful at instilling that spirit during the empire’s 19^th-century heyday. Elsewhere Thornton was even more explicit. He referred to elite education in Britain’s public schools and universities as an ‘elixir of empire’: a powerful cultural force inculcating particular imperial ideas and values in Britain’s elites, albeit in a sometimes mysterious, often uneven, and entirely unscientific manner.⁶²

This belief in an important connection between education and empire has been taken largely for granted in imperial history, especially among those interested in the ‘official mind’ or imperial mentalité of Britain’s elites. P.J. Rich for instance borrowed Thornton’s figure for the title of his book tracing how the ‘secret curriculum’ of the public schools – the rituals and secret societies that created a cohesive corporate identity and provided a degree of social control – were carried out to the colonies and replicated by old boys in imperial service.⁶³ J.A. Mangan took a different tack, illustrating in detail how games, so much a part of public school life, developed qualities of character essential to Britain’s imperial success, and how and with what effect this ideal was exported through the empire. Though interested in different aspects of the connection between elite education and imperialism, Rich and Mangan agree that such a connection existed. They also appear to agree that the classical curriculum was one aspect of elite education that had little to no meaningful impact on students and by extension the empire.⁶⁴

There is no debate on the extent to which that curriculum pervaded elite education in Britain throughout the long 19^th century. Private tutors, grammar and public schools, private academies and the great universities all drew from the same classical well.⁶⁵ Hence M.L. Clarke’s claim that the 19^th century was ‘the golden age, if not of classical scholarship, at least of classical education.’⁶⁶ For Britain’s ‘elites’ – the upper, professional, and increasingly the upwardly mobile among the middle classes – it was all but inescapable, occupying a significant portion of their intellectual life between the ages of six and twenty. The real question of course, is not who got a classical education, or even where they got it, but what, if anything, it conveyed and to how many students?

For the majority of those who make the history of education their primary area of study the answer is unequivocal. With the exception of a few older works such as Clarke’s Classical Education: 1500–1950 (1959) and V. Ogilvie’s The English Public School (1957), the literature on 19^th-century education, exemplified in monographs by Mack, Bamford, Barnard, Sanderson, Honey, and Chandos, tends to privilege the powerful 19^th-century voices ranged against classical education.⁶⁷ Dismissing the spirited and tireless defenders of the classical citadel as reactionaries, most scholars invoke eloquent critics and reformers such as Sydney Smith, F.W. Farrar, T.H. Huxley, Herbert Spenser et al. These men deplored classical education as inappropriate and or ineffectual and are credited with inaugurating the transition from an ancient ad hoc education ‘system’ dominated by the outmoded classical curriculum, to a more modern curriculum and increasingly ‘national’ system of education. It is easy to see the attraction of this interpretation – from the somewhat constrained perspective of modern scholars focused on the development of Britain’s national public education system. It is far less satisfactory with respect to the broader significance of classical education in elite culture from the late 18^th through early 20^th centuries.

Christopher Stray is certainly the most important recent commentator on the subject. In an influential body of work centred on his landmark book, Classics Transformed, he has stressed the essentially social function of classical education in the public schools and universities.⁶⁸ Classical education was traditionally the preserve of the elites.⁶⁹ Like so many 19^th-century and later commentators, Stray characterized classical education as a ‘grammar-grind’, a particularly uninspiring and odious form of grammatical instruction in Greek and Latin based on repetition, rote learning, translation, composition, and corporal punishment. While he acknowledged that this system produced a small number of highly accomplished and passionate classical scholars, in his estimate, the vast majority loathed it and took nothing from it but the ability to display enough classical knowledge to proclaim their membership of the social elite. That is to say, classical education had no meaningful intellectual outcomes for the overwhelming majority of students.

This view, taken also by Mangan and Rich it must be said, obviously stands very much at odds with the connection sketched by Thornton at the outset of this chapter, and by other historians of empire such as V.G. Kiernan and P.J. Marshall, and even more deeply involved commentators such as Clive Dewey, Richard Symonds, and Judith Plotz.⁷⁰ It is likewise contrary to the opinions of a significant subset of scholars who have made classical reception their primary area of study. M. Bradley, C. Edwards, P. Freeman, R. Jenkyns, and N. Vance all credit classical education with a meaningful intellectual and cultural impact on a relatively wide cross-section of Britain’s elites.⁷¹ More specifically, A.A. Markley saw classical education as the key both to the Victorians’ interest in ancient Greece and their capacity to remake ‘the Greeks into an image agreeable to them’.⁷²

Still other recent writers on classical reception, such as Goldhill, Hurst, Larson, Mantena, Reisz, and Vasunia, predicate their arguments on classical education providing something more substantial than the ability to deploy artful classical tags at socially beneficial moments.⁷³ How else could Britain’s elites so effectively exploit the cultural authority of the classics to buttress various political ideologies, to justify empire, and to convince themselves and others of their right to rule? These arguments also imply that this deeper, though not necessarily profound, knowledge extended to a significant fraction of those who had a classical education. For some reason, however, those most active in this area of classical reception studies have had relatively little to say on the subject of classical education per se. And so the image persists of the intellectually inconsequential grammar-grind, producing ‘mentally negligible’ quantities of the Wooster, Glossop, and Fink-Nottle ilk.

This apparent impasse between scholarly perspectives dissolves if we admit the inadequacy of an epigram such as ‘grammar-grind’ to describe the complex and uneven reality of classical education or its outcomes in the long 19^th century. The term is misleading shorthand that masks simplistic, one-dimensional understandings of classical education behind a veil of alliterative charm. One can be convinced by Stray’s compelling assertion that classical education served very important and very specific social functions and even concede that this was its most significant outcome through much of our period, without denying that it had other important outcomes for many students, including that subset whose lives became entangled with the empire.

What follows is not an attempt to provide a comprehensive picture of classical education in its myriad settings and forms throughout Britain during the long 19^th century. Nor is it intended as an argument for its systemic success in creating passionate, knowledgeable classical scholars. It is instead a selective foray among these varied settings, institutions and personalities, intended to reduce the grammar-grind to its proper place as an element of classical education rather than the definition thereof. Only then will it be possible to speak in a constructive way about its intellectual outcomes for different types of students and by extension its potential significance for British imperialism and the Indian Empire.

Contemporaries believed that classical education conferred certain concrete moral and intellectual benefits in addition to the tremendous and very practical social advantages so masterfully revealed by Stray.⁷⁴ Though the weight of inherited tradition no doubt played a part in the attraction of classical education to the established elites and those with social ambitions, classically educated fathers saw and stressed these other attractions, even if the educational choices they made for their sons had as much to do with the old school tie as with its curriculum. So too did a majority of educators, whatever their eventual concessions to the games mania and demands for more modern and ‘useful’ subjects.

In the most quotidian sense, classical education was attractive because newspapers, parliamentary debates, literature, art, and architecture, not to mention polite conversation, abounded with classical quotations and allusions, which only those in the know understood.⁷⁵ It is fair to say that the classics constituted a sort of ‘secret knowledge’ that held great attraction to those who were not among the initiated, such as the Devon tradesmen who wanted their sons to learn Latin because it was so common in newspapers during the 1860s.⁷⁶ Moreover, classical attainments were the prerequisites of study at the great universities, where Greek remained a matriculation requirement until after the First World War. Indeed, as John Massie wrote in an 1890 retrospective on the role of the classics in ‘professional’ education:

The classics have always been, more or less the handmaids to the faculties of theology, law and medicine; they have held the key to the church, the bar, the diploma, the civil service, the schoolmaster’s desk, and the college fellowship. To a very considerable extent they hold the key still.⁷⁷

In an only slightly more ephemeral sense, contemporaries believed that classical education offered valuable mental training. Such thinking appeared in the works of 18^th-century educational critics such as Vicesimus Knox and continued through the 19^th century.⁷⁸ In 1888 the future Bishop of London, Mandell Creighton, could still write to his son and claim that ‘learning these languages is the best exercise in carefulness, attention, accuracy, quickness of perception and such like qualities.’⁷⁹ There likewise persisted a widespread belief that the classics afforded valuable lessons in morality, restraint, service, self-sacrifice, and honourable conduct.⁸⁰ From William Rose, a frequent contributor to the Monthly Review in the 1780s, to Edward Copleston, Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1810, and Dr Thomas Arnold of Rugby, and Eton Assistant Master Oscar Browning in the middle of our period, through John Stobbart in 1912, commentators repeated this argument.⁸¹

All this seems to suggest an important and clear connection between classical education and fitness for public life and leadership in the minds of commentators throughout our period. It is not too much of a stretch to argue for a widespread notion that classical attainments were essential characteristics of a ‘Gentleman’.⁸² In laying out the regulations for Fort William College in 1800, Wellesley made just such an assumption. As a condition of admission to what he envisioned as a sort of finishing school for members of the ICS he stipulated that each student must ‘produce a testimonial … and to pass an examination in Greek, Latin, and arithmetic, before the principal and professors, sufficient to ascertain his having previously received the usual school education of a gentleman.’⁸³ Thomas Babington Macaulay felt that a gentleman – including those ruling India – must have a sound grasp of Greek, which presupposed a command of Latin.⁸⁴ It is no coincidence that when admission...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Classical Education and Britain’s Imperial Elite
• 2 Classical Discourse: Imperial Dimensions
• 3 Classical Discourse and British Imperial Identity: the Nature of Empire
• 4 Classical Discourse and British Imperial Identity: the Civilizing Mission
• 5 Classical Discourse and British Imperial Identity: the Imperial Character
• 6 Classical Discourse and the Decline and Fall of Empires
• 7 Classical Discourse and British Conceptions of India
• 8 Classical Discourse in British India I: Coping with Life in India
• 9 Classical Discourse in British India II: Secret Knowledge
• Conclusion
• Notes to Text
• References
• Index