Conclusion

This final chapter examines the cultural implications of a new century and the outbreak of the Great War for notions of masculinity. It considers the writings of commentators like Robert Baden Powell and A. C. Benson to show that questions of how best to prepare Britain’s youth to face the ‘vast energies and problems’ of the modern world were also, inevitably, questions about the role and relevance of a classical education in that process. The final section glances forward to examine the processes by which receptions of Ancient Rome persist, and are remade during the Great War and a new modern era of total war. Far from attempting to ‘finish’ the meaning of Rome or to homogenize its uses as part of a single theory of what Rome meant to the Victorian male, this chapter emphasizes the ongoing pluralities and complexities inherent in the Roman parallel.

The Decadent Imagination

This chapter examines how aesthetes and decadents staked a competing claim to those Roman narratives of corruption and contagion outlined in Chapter 7. Beginning with a detailed analysis of Marius the Epicurean (1885), it shows how Walter Pater and his contemporaries sought to delink aestheticism from Gibbonian narratives of decline and fall, and to reclaim aesthetic masculinity from associations of moral and masculine deviance. The second part examines decadent authors such as Oscar Wilde, Villiers de L’Isle Adam, and George Moore, who adopted an equally recuperative, though more controversial approach to the ancient Roman past. Revelling in the more illicit and disturbing aspects of Roman history with a playfully self-parodic humour which is typical of the movement as a whole, and frequently voicing their affinity with the most notorious of Roman emperors—Nero—decadent writers appear be invested in a very genuine attempt to disassociate decadent ideologies from Gibbonian models of degeneration and decline.

Reading, Reception, and Elite Education

This chapter examines representations of identity formation in boys through acts of reading and particularly through acts of learning to grapple with the Latin language. This relationship between manhood and reading is evidenced in both the content and the semantic structures of schoolboy fiction. For Tom Brown, Eric, and Stalky—each of whom attend a different calibre or type of Victorian school—Latin is both the process through which boys become men and the designator of that manliness, with senior male figures like Thomas Arnold often being constructed as Caesar-like figures at the top of an ascending scale of maturity and seniority. Rome is often presented as both the maker and the marker of elite Victorian manliness in both its physical and intellectual varieties. Yet this chapter is also interested in changes and challenges to the classical curriculum in the nineteenth century as competing styles of masculinity emerged in the form of the captains of industry and science.

Liberal Imperialism and Wilkie Collins’s Antonina

This chapter outlines how the British empire from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries was transformed from a naval, commercialist enterprise, for which ancient Greece and the maritime Athenian empire had proven a much more fitting parallel, to an expansionist, land-based project, which drew increasingly on Roman models. It outlines how imperial expansion from the 1840s catalysed a shift away from the mercantile manliness of previous centuries, towards the privileging of militaristic masculinities more in keeping with a robust, expanding empire. The second part of the chapter looks in detail at Wilkie Collins’s first published novel Antonina (1850), which, in a marked departure from the ‘antique fictions’ of earlier nineteenth-century novelists, embraces Rome in order to celebrate a liberal imperial style of masculinity and a hybrid Romano-Germanic cultural identity for Britain’s imperial male.

Napoleonic Legacies and the Reform Act of 1832

This chapter examines the use of ancient Rome for articulating national values, synthesizing the public image of statesmen, and constructing partisan ideologies in the nineteenth-century political sphere. If the schoolroom was a space in which boys were taught to wield the language and literatures of ancient Rome like weapons in defence of the boundaries of elite male culture, uses of Rome in the political sphere should fluctuate so dramatically between enthusiastic adoption and outright rejection over the course of the nineteenth century. It accounts for such uneasy receptions of ancient Rome in Victorian political discourse by setting them in the wider context of Anglo-French tensions. It suggests that French revolutionary and Napoleonic uses of Rome are crucial for explaining both the very direct engagement of British political commentators with the Roman past immediately after Waterloo, as they sought to detach Rome from associations of revolution, radical republicanism, and violent popular protest; and secondly, the abandonment of such strategies in the period leading up to the Reform Act of 1832, as the Roman parallel became contested and unstable.

Rome, London, and Condemning the Metropolitan Male

This chapter explores the possibilities that ancient Rome afforded to writers of the fin de siècle for exploring the nature of the London metropolis, which was at once the glittering capital of empire and a site of overcrowding, disease, and perceived degeneration. Through an examination of contemporary journalism, literature, and the late Victorian popular theatre phenomenon of the toga play, it traces the growing anxieties among conservative critics like Max Nordau about the moral and physical condition of the London metropolitan male, who became increasingly linked with narratives of decline and fall and with Rome’s more corrupt emperors.

New Imperialism and the Problem of Cleopatra

This chapter demonstrates how, by the closing decades of the century, Rome had eclipsed both Greek and Germanic pasts as a model for figuring ideal imperial masculinity. This is most apparent in late Victorian writing about Egypt. Britain’s newest imperial acquisition in 1882 was also, significantly, the backdrop for ancient Rome’s triumph over the East and over Egypt’s most famous queen, Cleopatra. This chapter demonstrates how Henry Rider Haggard’s novel Cleopatra (1889) and the various stories now referred to collectively as ‘Mummy Fiction’, dramatize the extent to which British imperial identity and experience had become aligned with Roman examples by the end of the century. The New Imperialist is cast as a modern-day Caesar or Antony in his relationship with empire, as territorial and sexual desires become conflated and focused on the figure of Cleopatra herself.

Imperial Boys and Men of Letters

This chapter examines the Roman influences upon the muscular Christian virtue and hardy imperialist outlooks which sit at the heart of much Victorian schoolboy fiction including Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and Kipling’s Stalky and Co. (1899). It then examines more closely constructions of an equivalent intellectual—or literary—masculinity embodied in the Man of Letters, whose identity, like those of his cousins the muscular Christian and the Victorian imperialist, is also derived from classical exemplars, but whose manliness is encoded more subtly, even metatextually, into works like Kipling’s Stalky. It argues that the refiguration of writing as a heroic act equivalent, and even superior to fighting, held a particular appeal for Victorian culture which perceived itself to have a uniquely modern relationship with the written word.

Introduction

This introductory chapter presents the theoretical and methodological approaches used in the book as a whole before identifying in the works of early Victorian writers like Thomas Arnold, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Babington Macaulay a sense of the privileged insight of the Victorian male into the ancient Roman past. Yet despite the self-confident bombast of such writers on the modernity and liberality of the age, the nineteenth century also experienced unprecedented social, cultural and educational changes which resulted in the fragmenting of masculine identities. It therefore theorizes a way of understanding Rome as a contested space, with an array of possible scripts and narratives that could be harnessed to frame models of masculine ideality, or to vilify perceived deviance from those ideals, and allows for an understanding of masculinity as being rooted in the power of reception.

Caesar, Cicero, and Anthony Trollope’s Public Men

This chapter charts an increasing, if conflicted, desire in British political discourse generally, and the writings of Anthony Trollope specifically, to re-engage with Caesar, Cicero, and the history of the late republic after a generation of avoiding the more incendiary associations of the Roman past outlined in Chapter 3. Through examination of Anthony Trollope’s deeply political Palliser novels, it maps some of the associations of Liberal, reformist energy and enduring respect for political tradition which Trollope associates with Caesar and Cicero respectively in an age where the rise of Napoleon III threatened to reignite some of the more dynastic French associations of the Roman parallel.