“By Gentlemen for Gentlemen”: Classical Culture in the Victorian Age

Abstract

The stated mission of Pater the Classicist: Classical Scholarship, Reception, and Aestheticism is to “make the case for taking Walter Pater seriously as a classicist” (1). What, though, do we mean by “a classicist?” The question is a particularly important one, not just for understanding Pater but also for understanding the Victorian readers and interpreters of Horace discussed in the other book under review here, Victorian Horace: Classics and Class. It is important because Walter Pater (1839-1894) and the subjects of Harrison’s study lived in an era when, as Christopher Stray (1998) and others have shown, understandings of what classical studies and classicists were all about were undergoing a transformation: “Text-centred solidaristic affirmations of permanent humanist value” were beginning to cede the field to “a more detached investment of the classical world that went beyond the margins of the literary text.” At the same time, an “earlier world of gentlemanly amateur scholars” was beginning to give way to “professional researchers […] in university environments” (117) derived from the middle rather than the upper class.