Like everybody else, the Victorians tried to make sense of themselves and their own times by looking at other epochs and constructing pattersn of similarity and difference. [vi]
t is easy to credit the Victorians themselves, pioneer technocrats and scientists, contemporaries of Darwin and Huxley and Clerk-Maxwell, with originating what is now the rather old-fashioned, embattled scientific modernity which establishes its credentials by scoffing at the classics, classical education, literature and the past. Even before Victoria was born, progressive Edinburgh reviewers, including the mathematician John Playfair, sneered at Oxford's overwhelmingly classical curriculum as an educational instrument of doubtful utility. The classicists retaliated, and the debate was still going on more than forty years later in Newman's Idea of a University. [1]
But the survival of the Romans at least was not just a matter of a few dog-eared undergraduate texts. The Romans had been a practical people like the Victorians, with successful soldiers, engineers and administrators. It was hard for mathematicians or engineers to repudiate them completely, even in the name of progress or technology, when from Bath to Northumbria the remains of elaborately constructed buildings, defensive walls and roads, evidence of Roman technological achievement, were still visible after so many centuries. [4]
Bibliography
Vance, Norman. The Victorians and Ancient Rome. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
Last modified 15 January 2007