John Stuart Mill on the Utility of Classical Greece
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 Romantic Tide Reaches Trinity: Notes on the Transmission and Diffusion of New Approaches to Traditional Studies at Cambridge, 1820‐1840
Therefore your Halls, your ancient Colleges, Your portals statued with old kings and queens, Your gardens, myriad-volumed libraries, Wax-lighted chapels, and rich carven screens, Your doctors, and your proctors, and your deans, Shall not avail you, when the Day-beam sports New-risen o‘er awakened Albion. No! Nor yet your solemn organ-pipes that blow Melodious thunders through your vacant courts At noon and eve, because your manner sorts Not with this age wherefrom ye stand apart, Because the lips of little children preach Against you, you that do profess to teach And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart. TENNYSON, Lines on Cambridge of 1830
History in Depth: The Early Victorian Period
THE first half of the nineteenth century in Britain-and perhaps the second quarter more particularly than the first quarter-was one of the most formative, searching, and basically determinative periods in the history of science. By 1850 most of the great problems had been posed, most of the tools needed to solve them had been invented, and most of the men who were to solve them had been trained in a professional way which their elders had invented only in the preceding generation. To be sure, these elders had not relied only on British sources of inspiration. Lagrange in mathematics, Bessel in astronomy, Fourier in physics were among the great stylists whom the early Victorians transplanted and transmuted. There is very little accurate information in print about this turbulent period. In most fields, there is not only no satisfactory general work, there is also no particular monograph whose scope and accuracy can be trusted. One must often determine every factual statement from original sources, not only in one's central arc of concern, but also in peripheral matters. In spite of the difficulty this situation causes in writing a simple narrative accurately, it is nevertheless clear in which areas the basic changes took place between 1800 and 1850. The first is the area of evidence. The mass of experiments to be explained was enormously greater by 1850. This accumulation was deliberate, not the result of some inherent sociological growth factor. In area after area, scientific spokesmen called for more data, and the scientific community laboured to respond. One thing noticeable about monographs in physics, for example, is how many there were which resembled monographs in chemistry. That is, they reported exhaustive tests on a wide variety of different substances and different forms of substances; they are a very different kind of reading from Newton's Principia. This might perhaps be expected in a man like Faraday, who was originally a chemist, but it appears also in the physics monographs of, for example, the astronomer John Herschel.s Then we remember that Herschel's desire in astronomy was to chart and classify every single nebula in the heavens: as demanding a search for huge amounts of individual data as one could wish. Herschel's original motive, however, is quite clear. It was to furnish overwhelming evidence for his father's disputed theories concerning the structure and evolution of the universe.P He did not, that is, collect catalogues of data for the sake of the catalogues themselves, but in order