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13 - Hellenism, Hebraism, and Heathenism in Nineteenth-Century England

Connop Thirlwall, George Grote, and the Religions of Antiquity*

from Part VI - Intellectual Superstars

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2023

Simon Goldhill
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft
Affiliation:
Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge
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Summary

The major fault-line in Victorian engagement with the Bible and antiquity lay between believers and unbelievers, across a wide array of perspectives. Something of this is traced here, from the rationalistic legacy of Bentham to Pusey’s consciously reactionary repudiation of his own early immersion in German scholarship.Consequently, literature about the Bible and antiquity could be polemical, but solvents could be found, not least ones that were associational and personal. Most importantly, friendship could provide such a bond: this chapter traces that which began at Charterhouse School between George Grote and Connop Thirlwall and which ended only with their deaths. Grote is now much better remembered than Thirlwall, but both wrote important histories of ancient Greece that would be translated into German, a great tribute given their own indebtedness to German scholarship. In a review of Curtius’s history of ancient Greece, Arnold criticised both Grote and Thirlwall for failing to reach the new standards set by more recent German scholarship. Within a year of the death of Thirlwall, Anglo-German classical scholarship was being written in an altogether new key.

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Chapter
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Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity
The Shock of the Old
, pp. 358 - 384
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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