A Pedagogical Review of A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689-1939
By Edith Hall and Henry Stead (Routledge 2020)
How often do teachers of classics think about class? Not about their upcoming lesson, the anxieties of which abound — but about social class; and, in particular, about where classics falls in the complex, shifting, hierarchical social strata in ‘the West’ and around the world? For how many teachers is this front and centre? For how many a passing thought? For how many students is this central to their classics experience?
Some teachers, students, professors, and interested laypeople think about it every day, perhaps in respect to their own experiences as Classics students or practitioners; perhaps they became acutely aware that their socio-economic class didn’t measure up to Classics as a discipline. For some, Classics may have been the vehicle through which they ascended to a new class in the social order, now residing in an income bracket or profession of greater prestige than their parents. For others, this feature of classical study is simply unexamined. The relationship between classics and upper class is so natural that it is almost invisible.
A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689 to 1939 (Routledge 2020) by Edith Hall and Henry Stead corrects for this invisibility. In the epilogue, the authors claim to have “irrevocably” altered our understanding of the discipline of classics by replacing the traditional social history of the ‘elite’ British and Irish classics with an exhaustive study of the “presence of Greek and Roman culture in British working-class communities” from 1689-1939. (533)
This is “classics from the underworld”. Its heroes are “gardeners, stonemasons, circus acrobats, factory operatives… domestic servants… tramps, beggars, prisoners, thieves, inmates of mental hospitals… milkmaids, washerwomen, wool-sorters… butchers, grocers, mechanics, carpenters, errand-boys, tailors… janitors … fishermen, sailors… bakers, bricklayers… shepherds… grave-diggers.” (577) The impact of this study will be felt for years to come, and, I think, will change any teacher of Classics who reads it.
In my view, this book offers three things for the practicing Classics teacher: i) awareness of the ways in which class can be restrictive to universal access to the Greco-Roman classics both historically and in the present, ii) an engaging, lively, classroom-friendly history of working-class receptions of the classics in Great Britain and Ireland before the Second World War, and iii) a methodology for introducing and encouraging classical receptions into their own classes.
1. Class and Access to Classics
The first benefit is that this book corrects for ‘class invisibility’ in the study and teaching of Classics. The emergence of Classics as a defined discipline and order of education for young people is complex and non-linear, but Hall and Stead provide a clear, accurate, history of its piecemeal generation in the Isles.
Tracing the origins of the usage of both “classics” and “class” in seventeenth and eighteenth century British and Irish social history and linguistic usage, they show the connections made by sixteenth and seventeenth century British educational advocates between learning Latin and Greek and the character education of the upper class.
In an early guidebook for the curriculum of young ‘gentlemen’, the author says that his course of “refin’d Education” is not “… calculated but for One Class of People; [as if] I have accommodated my precepts to the Rich alone, and neglected to sute them to the Children of the Plebean.” (29) Nevertheless, the author says that his mode of education suits only those ready for it, and urges that every father “consult his Fortune and his Circumstances” and “Cut his Coat according to his Cloath” (29). Though the author makes it clear that anyone (in principle) could benefit from classical learning, the curriculum outlined will be more easily absorbed by those from the already ‘refin’d’ class.
Hall and Stead introduce the class tensions that arise between those who can afford to ‘purchase’ the ‘gentlemanly curriculum’ of years-long academic study of the Latin and Greek languages (i.e. the already aristocratic and the upwardly mobile and greatly expanding seventeenth century mercantile classes) and those who can’t. Those who access the classics via English translation do so at their own peril, the thinking went, because these translations (more accessible to the public, of course) paled in comparison to the classics in the original languages.
On the one hand, this serves an ostensible philological purpose—understanding the Greeks and Romans in their own languages improves our understanding of their thought and cultures—but, in practice, it also serves to exclude many from ‘authentic’, ‘respectable’ access to the Classics.
The aforementioned skeptics of English translation of the classics rely on elite fears of wide dissemination of the ‘pearls’ of classical wisdom. Attached to a 1700 English translation of Lucian’s Charon, the anonymous author included a prefatory dialogue on the merit of translation of the classics into ‘vulgar tongues’, representing the views of the skeptics under the character ‘Eumenes’. Eumenes scoffs at greater access to the classics:
For certainly Translations are the greatest obstructions of Learning immaginable [sic]: for to what purpose shou’d Men be at the expence of so much time and pains in studying Greek and Latine [sic], when they may read the same Books in their Mother Tongue? … Those rich Treasures of Knowledge and Learning are now unlock’d indeed, and scattered abroad among the Rabble; and the mischief on’t is, we do but cast Pearls before Swine who will trample them under their Feet, and turn again and rent us: for they have not Capacities to understand ’em so as to value them, but just so much only as to make ’em conceited and despise all the World as illeterate [sic] and ignorant.
(Quoted in Hall and Stead, 39-41)
Eumenes’s fears were realized. By 1790, there had been 27 editions of Alexander Pope’s English translation of the Iliad, 33 of the Odyssey. (49) John Dryden’s 1697 English translation of the Aeneid similarly flourished, became a classic in English besides, and went through numerous editions by 1800.
Despite the protestations of some members of the elite, the result of these popularizing efforts was greater access to the classics for the working public. Hall and Stead meticulously record British and Irish working-class engagements with the classics that grew out of these ancient authors now ‘Englished’—penny and thrift editions of the classics, the second-hand book market, street plays, Hellenistic fad diets (to achieve the ‘perfect’ classical body), the popularity of the public library lending system established in 1845, night schools, Mechanics’ Institutes, miners’ book clubs, etc. That these all occurred largely outside the formal teaching structures of the British and Irish school system (still under development, to be sure) is worthy of note.
How much have things changed? Much, to be sure, but a wide gap still separates the formal study of classics and the broader public. Contemporary initiatives aim to confront similar situations today: Classics for All, Classics Everywhere, Sportula, Magister Craft, Aequora. Still, how many Classics teachers have faced a snivel from colleagues or administrators when they sought to expand Classics’ appeal? How many have worried that such changes might cheapen the discipline? This worry may be more literal than we think.
2. History of ‘Democratic’ Receptions of the Classics
The second benefit I see in these pages for classics teachers is an engaging, exciting history of democratic receptions of the classics. Teachers will find a veritable multitude of fascinating, engrossing stories of ordinary, working-class British and Irish people finding, loving, hating, learning with, and learning from the Classics.
These portraits are powerful for the teacher, but perhaps more powerful still for our students. Too often students from the margins of society feel the great weight of class in their exposure to classics, rarely seeing themselves reflected in Classics and classical engagement. This book serves as an important corrective: here we find tailors, cobblers, self-taught miners, autodidactic seamstresses, prisoners, street performers, enterprising Methodist preachers, soldiers and sailors all picking up a precious bit of classical learning here and there, cherishing it or despising it, adopting it or renouncing it, all the while interweaving it with their humanity and their personal, family, and community history.
These examples span across a huge expanse of British and Irish history, from the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1689 to the beginning of World War II. We have the example of the self-made classicist Constantia Grierson (Cawley), a woman born into an impoverished, illiterate Irish family in Graguenamanagh, County Kilkenny, who won fame for her 1730 Latin edition of Tacitus, praised by Jonathan Swift and Addison Pope for its clarity and scholarship. In the same volume we have new exposition of David Jones’s 1937 In Parenthesis, a harrowing, blistering epic of trench warfare in World War I, a confusing, entirely unsentimental work full of idiosyncratic, un-pompous allusions to the Classics.
This range makes for a dynamic, multi-faceted text of numerous substantive classroom uses. Simply highlighting some of these figures via presentation and discussion can expand our students’ conception of what is possible with classical texts.
3. A Methodology for Introducing Classical Receptions in Class
Last, A People’s History of Classics provides practising Classics teachers a blueprint for devoting greater attention to classical receptions in their own classrooms. The benefit for this is clear: On the one hand, it more accurately honours the truth of classical engagement across the centuries than sole focus on ‘learned’ engagements with the classics; on the other, it helps students participate actively in their learning the classics. Understanding that they, too, have a part to play in the reception of classical texts and authors helps provide them with feelings of agency, autonomy, and importance, thereby motivating them to continue their studies.
The order of their book in turn helps to give shape to classroom use of a social and cultural history of Classics.
They divide their book in four parts (section titles amended by me): Canons, Communities, Underdogs, Work. In Canons, the authors consider the genres, media, and collections of ancient authors used in working-class engagement with the Classics. In Communities, they look at the uses of Classics in crafting larger group identities among the lower and working-classes, focusing on how Classics supported or subverted already existing group identities, profiling the Nonconformists, Methodists, Mechanics’ Institutes, the Workers Educational Association, the Plebs League, among others. In Underdogs, they focus on particular lower or working-class persons who made connections and use of the Classics in expressions of “class dissatisfaction and frustration, disaffection, anger, deprivation, psychological trauma,” but who also used Classics as tools for “uplift” in the social scheme and self-education, self-motivation, and personal enrichment. Last, in Work, the authors consider how people use classical themes and learning to make sense of, criticise, or ennoble their remunerative work: cobblers, pottery workers, and miners are profiled as outstanding examples of lower-class people who use classical learning to combat boredom, anxiety, and satisfy their curiosity.
These sections are helpful in thinking about how we, as teachers of Classics, can start to include some of this social and cultural information in our classes as supplemental and, eventually, foundational elements of our teaching practice. How might we include one substantive working-class classical reception per theme, unit, or module in our classrooms? How could we connect these receptions to a working-class Canon—spoken word, storytelling, mythology, philosophy, popular music? A profile of which working-class Community (trade unions, religious communities, night schools, veterans’ continuing ed, internet groups, book clubs) might deepen our students’ appreciation of social and cultural history and, further, include more voices across class divides in our classrooms? What underdogs (e.g., classicists of colour, self-taught/working-class classicists, amateur archaeologists, auto-didactic women classicists, non-Western classicists) might we highlight? Lastly: how could we include receptions of the classics in people’s work lives themselves to help our students connect classical learning to the diverse ‘labour situations’ of their families and communities?
These are big questions, not answered here. They ask us to deepen our classics teaching and engagement in new, powerful, rewarding ways. This book gives Classics teachers a push – a “democratic makeover”, as the authors call it.
I heartily recommend this book to teachers wishing to deepen their classics teaching and expand its appeal across class divides. My hope is that a book centered on classical receptions in the USA of similar clarity, comprehensiveness across class and racial divides, and vision is soon to follow.
