Rome & Victorian Masculinity

LAURA EASTLAKE'S NEW VOLUME follows the Victorian reception of Roman influence by refusing to reduce it to an essence. She contends that it was used to frame a wide variety of masculine identities that accompanied different visions of empire. She outlines contested versions of both Rome and masculinity across eight chapters, providing a wide-ranging consideration of Rome as a Victorian mirror in which the British empire could locate, or avoid, different reflections of itself.

In the first chapter Eastlake traces the history of Latin in British education where it becomes "the maker and marker of elite Victorian manliness." She cites data from the Clarendon (1864) and Taunton (1868) commissions to the effect that education in Greek was dominant only at the most elite public schools, whereas Latin functioned as a more widely distributed mode through which boys learned their way to Victorian manhood. She moves then from statistics to literature, considering the use of Latin in three school-boy novels: Frederic Farrar's Eric (1858), Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days (1857), and Rudyard Kipling's Stalky and Co. (1899). She allows for differences between these texts, both in terms of their era and their ideology, seeing Farrar and Hughes as stipulating muscular Christianity while Kipling promotes New Imperialism as a masculine ideal. Yet in all three cases the acquisition of Latin serves as an early lesson in the ethics of masculinity. Those who learn it through cribbing or other devious means are well on their way to becoming devious men. Those who do the work, a work Kipling especially narrates in terms of imperial labor, begin the process of becoming upright men. The first chapter also considers the role of classical education for the sons of industrial wealth who dominate the end of the Victorian age. She considers opinions such as Charles Darwin's, who lamented the uselessness of his Shrewsbury education, but also contends that Latin often served to validate the masculinity of those whose status came from wealth rather than ancient lineage.

The second chapter relies on these same three schoolboy novels to illustrate the place of the Man of Letters as a necessary complement to the military hero. Without the poet to record the hero's deeds, as Virgil to Aeneas, the hero is destined to obscurity. Moreover, the Man of Letters becomes a conduit through whom masculine values are passed on to future generations, just as Victorian schoolboys learn about Aeneas by translating Virgil. Thus one path to manhood is that of learning to write and compete in the literary marketplace as a form analogous to martial conflict. Finally, Eastlake shows that, at least in Kipling's hands, the Man of Letters becomes privileged over the New Imperialist, as Stalky eventually takes on so much hypermasculinity that he becomes a figure that is useful to the Empire only so long as he remains outside of the metropole. The Man of Letters, however, is at home in both settings and controls how both he and the imperialist are publicly perceived.

Chapter Three delves into the relationship between elite classical education and politics, specifically in the strictly speaking pre-Victorian years of the nineteenth-century. Eastlake investigates French appropriation of Roman republican history during the Revolution and Roman imperial history during the Napoleonic era; in both cases, the French tended to assign Britain the role of Carthage. Consequently, in debating the legislation that culminated in the Reform Act of 1832, both Whigs and Tories studiously avoided any reference to ancient Rome. Quite simply, the language had become too loaded, so political discourse, despite being practically monopolized by the products of the public schools, conspicuously avoided Roman precedents. Eastlake uses primarily Thomas Macauley and Leigh Hunt to set up the silence, and Parliamentary debate records to substantiate it.

Chapter Four traces a mid-century reengagement with Rome by taking up Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels and their gradual movement from Julius Caesar to Cicero as classical exemplar. Even in the 1860s and 1870s, Eastlake claims...