In the November 1888 issue of Modern Language Notes, there is an item entitled, appropriately enough, “Should a Poet Be a Philologist?” The poet in question is Robert Browning and the problem at hand is the line, “Cowls and Twats” from Pippa Passes.

This paper is intended to suggest how an educational system produced a literary community and discursive practice that represented itself as essentially distinct from the realm of political power. My subject is the foundations in the English Public Schools of the modern British literary community and literary value as we have known it from Romanticism through modernism – value measured by the self-consciousness, introspection, individuality, and putative autonomy that are challenged if not already defeated by the forces of post-modernism. But before examining what happened between Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays of 1857 and Cyril Connolly's A Georgian Boyhood of 1938, I shall provide a brief historical summary for readers unfamiliar with the English public schools.

It is possible to approach the question of novelists' use of classical references and quotations from the point of view of the authors themselves, examining their reading and education, and the private as well as public implications of this learning; or we can take the point of view of the texts and their intertextual connections, to enrich our reading of the novels concerned by showing how they reach out to other works, ancient and modern. In contrast, this article discusses what we can deduce about novelists' expectations as to their readers' competence in the classics by examining references in some of the great, widely-read novels of the middle years of Victoria's reign. Most of the examples to be cited which require any linguistic competence rely on Latin, and most of this Latin was familiar and learnt by rote by people of a certain background, gender, and education, and so I shall call it “schoolboy Latin.” The novelists referred to are Thackeray, Trollope, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Dickens, George Eliot, and G.J. Whyte Melville, who are divided in their respect for the Victorian habit of Latin quotation and are correspondingly lavish or parsimonious in their use of it.

Steven Marcus has observed, “On any account, the 1830s are a decade of critical importance” (15). The period is prominent in the industrial era for several far-reaching if not entirely satisfactory pieces of legislation, including the Reform Bill of 1832, Althorp's Factory Act of 1833, and the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 established the principle of popular election in all corporate boroughs with the exception of London. The decade is marked, as well, by the quantification of social problems, which is represented by the statistical societies founded in Manchester in 1833 and in London in 1834 and by the Journal of the Statistical Society in 1838. These manifestations of the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy reflected the shift from cottage to factory production that marked the Industrial Revolution.

In 1853, a group of earnest Englishmen proposed an experiment that seemed revolutionary – a college in London specifically for the education of working men. Since there was, at that time, no national program of education for the young in England, this surprising proposal for the education of adults, not in technical skills, but in the traditional liberal arts, was all the more remarkable. And yet the plan succeeded and was praised not only by champions of the working class, but by others as well. Moreover, the success of the Working Men's College seemed simple and direct, quickly achieving the clear-cut scheme according to which it was founded. In fact, in a most fortunate irony, the College survived in spite of its declared principles. It was as much a social as an educational success. Despite its high intellectual ideals, cordiality more than classics kept the London Working Men's College alive.

“Victorian Learning on Sex”: nearly every term in this sequence baffles me. I am friendly with “on,” but the others, especially in company with one another, are alien. It is a pitiful thing for a grown-up to admit that he is befuddled by the term “sex,” but I also do not know what “Victorian learning” is or why we are interested in it.

Pater speaks here for a perception shared, differently, by George Eliot and Matthew Arnold. Deep respect for Greek learning as the font of humanism led Arnold to suspect that myth held more truth than did mere philosophy. As if in agreement, Eliot's novel, The Mill on the Floss, asks what that more might be. Is myth a religious expression? an illustration of fate? a model of nature? or of some irreducible essence within the grain and texture of reality eluding definition? All may apply. The gross sum of rural life in the novel, a “grovelling existence which even calamity does not elevate” (238; bk. 4, ch. 1), nevertheless possesses an obscure power that Eliot both dignifies and parodies through sustained allusions to the Ariadne myth. In addition and more particularly, Ariadne expresses Maggie Tulliver's otherwise mute impulses and suppressed motives, the same function it performs for Eliot's later heroines in conflict. This evidence of the myth's extended hold on Eliot's imagination strongly suggests that it spoke for personal as well as fictional experience. Here in her bildungsroman, myth begins to provide her with a vocabulary to express antagonism between nature and culture – to put this roughly – or between passion and idea that Eliot herself confronted and returned to time and again in her novels.

In 1861 Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900) delivered his famous Lectures On the Science Of Language at the Royal Institution in London. Published the following year, this popular and influential volume provided a classical exposition for a widely accepted and comforting account of the role played by language in the creation and subsequent preservation of new knowledge. This view, based largely on German comparative philology, was embraced by George Eliot and G.H. Lewes even though it bore stiking resemblances to the lexical ideas and practise of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and William Whewell (1794–1866), representative figures of an earlier generation of philosophical Idealists – Kantians, admiring commentators on Plato, and both of them powerful defenders of the Anglican Church and Tory traditionalism. There was something about Müller's “great and delightful book” (as George Eliot called it) which appealed to distinguished Victorians of every intellectual stripe. Among the auditors at the Royal Institution were “Germano-Coleridgian” clergymen (Bishop Thirlwall, Dean Stanley F.D. Maurice), poets and philosophers (Tennyson, John Stuart Mill, the Duke of Argyle), and a distinguished group of scientists, headed by Michael Faraday. All were excited and enthusiastic, despite their very different intellectual positions. Linda Dowling suggests why:

Muller's lectures on language … were deeply reassuring. They managed to suggest that even though the new philology had reconstituted language in wholly new terms as a phonetic totality independent of representation and of human control, language somehow remained unchanged in its power to guarantee human identity and value. (“Victorian Oxford” 161)

In his Autobiography, published posthumously in 1873, twenty years after it was first drafted, John Stuart Mill writes a series of logical essays on ideas. The people who appear in the book do so as personifications of these ideas rather than as palpable characters. This writing strategy leads Mill to make ideas rather than people exciting, and this unusual hierarchy makes his autobiography not only a fascinating book but a peculiar one as well. One in fact wishes that Mill had thought of the title The Autobiography of an Idea sixty years before his intellectual grandson, Louis Sullivan, used it for his autobiography. Mill composes his autobiography of personified ideas with a series of logical essays on his remarkable education and on his political and philosophical writing. Consequently, deductive writing forms these essays, a kind of writing that is not surprising for a logician and an essayist but rare for an autobiographer.

Founded in medieval monasticism, the University of Oxford has always been nervous about women on its premises. For six hundred years, the other sex was comprehensively shut out. It was not until 1879 (some time after Cambridge) that a token few female students were admitted at the collegiate enclave of Somerville (Mallet 432). Oxford dons were bound to formal celibacy until the 1870s. And even after the erosion of this rule, women continued to be seen as fatal presences at the university: a fear burlesqued in Max Beerbohm's novel Zuleika Dobson (1911), where the arrival of one sexually desirable girl drives the whole of Oxford's undergraduate population to lemming-like suicide in the Isis.