Books
Lily and the lineout calls Hugh Wright reviews ‘Teaching Classics in English Schools 1500-1840’ by Matthew Adams Published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing December 2015 ISBN 9781443881142
Matthew Adams, the author of this erudite but highly readable study, is an Old Boy of Bradford Grammar School, and, in his acknowledgements, he thanks no less than eight who taught in the Classics department while he was there. Their influence was more widespread than might be imagined, since the lineout calls in my college Rugby team were those ordained at BGS by Eric Ewbank, the classicist in charge of their First Fifteen. A good many in The Queen’s College team had been coached by him at school and were also reading Mods and Greats: the rest of us bowed to their wishes. Matthew Adams traces a ‘remarkable continuity of educational practice from the sixteenth century to the end of World War One’. There is a good case to be made for this end date to be moved to a point in living memory, as both Matthew Adams and I can attest from personal experience. The two World Wars slowed up change in schools, and academic standards were often maintained right into the 1950s by doing things as they had been done before, certainly in the study of classics. Though himself a brilliant classicist, Maurice Bowra, when a governor of Cheltenham College in the 1930s, advocated the abandoning of Greek there. The change was widely interpreted as signalling a drop in academic standards and Greek was quickly reinstated, with Bowra readily acknowledging his mistake. Teaching Classics in English Schools has as its end point ‘the Rugby School of Thomas Arnold’s prime years’. The author had to finish somewhere, but Classics remained strong and in a wide variety of schools long after the 1840s, not least in the great grammar schools which get their name from teaching classical grammar above all else. Many are mentioned by him, if not in the text then in the 568 notes printed after it. (This book with its fourteen pages of bibliography is nothing if not thorough!) The author’s obvious love of his subject is doubtless fuelled by the annual reunions of the Classics department from his school, where the Classical Sixth would often top forty members. Such a tradition certainly deserves this special study of its origins and its contribution to education in England. The story in Wales, Scotland and especially Ireland is important also, but Adams wisely confines himself to England. There are ample reminders in this book that the teaching of Classics was not only noteworthy in Thomas Arnold’s Rugby. Shrewsbury School was the birthplace of headmaster Kennedy’s
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amazingly successful Latin Primer, first published in 1843 and still alive today. The schoolboy mind rejoiced in the fact that its title can so easily be changed, with two strokes on the capital L, to Kennedy’s Eatin Primer. Shrewsbury’s proud classical tradition goes back to its foundation by King Edward V1 in 1552, and Adams gives a full account of its Classics department in the 19th century. He quotes Charles Darwin telling how he learned his lines of Homer in morning prayers. Amid all the praise of the benefits of this kind of learning, we should not forget Darwin’s comprehensive condemnation of it. ‘Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind than Dr Butler’s school as it was strictly classical, nothing else being taught except a little ancient geography and history.’ That chimes with what Adams tells us about Eton in the 1860s when, of its 31 staff, 26 taught Classics. Despite Darwin’s opinion, as Adams points out in his Introduction, ‘It was widely accepted that an intimate association with the finest minds of antiquity could only improve a pupil’s appreciation of taste, elegance and beauty of mind.’ This was the view of Edward Thring of Uppingham, whom he quotes, and of numerous others. Throughout the period covered by the book, Latin was the lingua franca of the educated world. Academics, priests and doctors would converse in the ancient tongue in which the serious work of scholarship was written. Fluency in it was therefore essential for promotion in Church and state. Discussion of this is not a declared subject of this book, but much about it can be read between the lines, and the study of Classics retained a close connection with the clergy of the Church of England beyond 1840. This link was personified in the high priest Headmasters of the great Victorian schools, especially those that became princes of the Church. James Prince Lee, for instance, was thought to be the most brilliant of Arnold’s proteges. He became Chief Master of King Edward’s School, Birmingham in 1838, and in his ten years in the post produced two future bishops of Durham and an archbishop of Canterbury, Edward Benson, who had en route been the founding Master of Wellington College. In his turn, Prince Lee himself left teaching to become a bishop, when the new see of Manchester was carved out of the diocese of Chester. Adams has chosen the year 1500 as his starting point, the beginning of the century in which the Renaissance and its
