Reading Greek Like a Man of the World: Reading Greek Like a Man of the World: Macaulay and the Classical Languages

1993 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wynne Williams
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Formal Schooling ◽  
Thomas Love Peacock ◽  
The World ◽  
Close Study ◽  
Senior Civil Servant

In his journal for December 31st, 1851, Thomas Babington Macaulay recorded an encounter with Thomas Love Peacock: ‘I met Peacock; a clever fellow and a good scholar. I am glad to have an opportunity of being better acquainted with him. We had out Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Sophocles and several other old fellows, and tried each other's quality pretty well. We are both strong enough in these matters for gentlemen. But he is editing the Supplices: Aeschylus is not to be edited by a man whose Greek is only a secondary pursuit’ (Life II, 556). This encounter is an illustration of the fact that in nineteenth-century Britain the close study of the Greek and Latin languages was far from being the exclusive preserve of professional scholars and teachers of the classics. Macaulay once wrote that he read Greek ‘like a man of the world’ (Letters III, 111), that is, as someone actively involved in public life, not cloistered in a university or a school. This applied to Peacock as much as it did to Macaulay. By 1851 Peacock had already published six of the seven novels for which he is best known today, but he had also spent about thirty years in the service of the East India Company, during which he had risen to the rank of Examiner: he was in effect a very senior civil servant. His formal schooling had ended when he was twelve, so that he was largely self-taught as a classicist. It was perhaps characteristic of such an autodidact that ‘he delighted to ask an Oxford first-class man who Nonnus was, and to find he could get no information’, and that he should pepper his novels with recondite classical quotations.

The Novel in English in Malaya and Singapore to 1950

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Asia ◽  
English Language ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
Civil Servants ◽  
East India Company ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
The Novel ◽  
English East India Company

This chapter looks at the representations of the former British Straits Settlements in English fiction from 1819 to 1950, discussing both British literary works that are located in South East Asia and English-language novels from Singapore and Malaysia. Although over the centuries, Europeans of various nationalities had located, intermarried, and established unique cultures throughout the region, writing in the English language at first remained confined to travel accounts, histories, and some largely anecdotal fiction, mostly by civil servants. English East India Company employees wrote about the region, often weaving anecdotal sketches into their historical, geographical, and cultural descriptions. Civil servant Hugh Clifford and Joseph Conrad are the two most prominent writers of fiction set in the British Straits Settlements during the nineteenth century; they also epitomize two opposing camps in representing the region.

John Stuart Mill and Royal India

Utilitas ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin J. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Political ◽  
Indian States ◽  
Policy Statements ◽  
Daily Occupation

Though John Stuart Mill's long employment by the East India Company (1823–58) did not limit him to drafting despatches on relations with the princely states, that activity must form the centrepiece of any satisfactory study of his Indian career. As yet the activity has scarcely been glimpsed. It produced, on average, about a draft a week, which he listed in his own hand. He subsequently struck out items that he sought to disown in consequence of substantial revisions made by the Company's directors or the Board of Control. He also listed items that achieved publication (mostly only in part) as parliamentary papers and they amount to about ten per cent of his drafts. The two lists, published in the most recent volume of his Collected Works, reveal, at the least, the ‘political’ despatches from which he did not seek to dissociate himself. The despatches were not entirely his work and authorship in the conventional sense may not be assumed. They were the product of an elaborate process, in which many hands were engaged. At worst, they were his work in much the same way that an Act of Parliament is the work of the Crown Solicitor who drafts the bill. At best they were his as are the drafts of a civil servant who believes in policy statements that he prepares for his political masters. The greatest English philosopher and social scientist of the nineteenth century was, in his daily occupation, an employee. His Company was charged with initiating policies for the Indian states and they were subject to the control of a minister of the Crown.

The nineteenth-century opium complex: From Thomas Love Peacock to Sherlock Holmes

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-18
Author(s):  
Josephine McDonagh ◽  
Briony Wickes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Commercial Activities ◽  
Opium War ◽  
Thomas Love Peacock ◽  
Detective Stories

This introduction to the special issue proposes that two discrete nineteenth-century histories of opium – a literary history, initiated by the drug confessions of De Quincey, and a colonial history, exemplified by the commercial activities of the East India Company (in which Thomas Love Peacock participated) in cultivating opium in Bengal for export to China, leading to the first Opium War – are common elements in a nineteenth-century ‘opium complex’, a set of interlocking practices of individuals and (quasi)state actors, extending across the globe. Sherlock Holmes detective stories are read as compressed registers of tensions that inhere in this complex.

John Stuart Mill on Civil Service Recruitment and the Relation between Bureaucracy and Democracy

2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 625-645
Author(s):  
Betto van Waarden
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Civil Service ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Civil Service Reform ◽  
The Public

AbstractAs a civil servant in the East India Company and witness to government expansion and reorganization in the mid-nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill developed an interest in civil service reform. In an essay supporting the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan Report and his later political treatises, Mill argued for competitive civil service recruitment. These writings have been relatively neglected by Mill scholars, but I posit that they elucidate a contested aspect of his theory. Mill advocated democracy and expert bureaucracy and, although researchers see tension between these systems, I argue that Mill saw them as compatible. Consequently, Mill's theory might be more consistent and complete than many believe, and the public administration debate should perhaps no longer be seen in terms of an opposition between expertise and democracy.

scholarly journals The Exemplary Life of Dimitrios Vikelas (1835-1908)

2007 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Michael Llewellyn Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Journey ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Education Culture

<p>This paper describes the "satisfying curve" of Dimitrios Vikelas' life journey, starting from Syros in 1835, moving via Constantinople, Odessa, and Syros again, to London, Paris and finally Athens. It explores Vikelas' multiple aspects, as merchant, writer, traveller, lecturer and essayist, Olympic founder, educationalist, book collector and philanthropist, all of which were united in the public-spirited man of letters (<em>logios</em>). It sets Vikelas in the context of the Greek commercial diaspora, the world of the London expatriate Greek community, and the dynamic society of late nineteenth-century Athens, beginning in the 1870s to act as a magnet to Greek expatriates. The author stresses two qualities of Vikelas: his belief in the idea of a progressive Greek state marked by advances in education, culture, tourism and standards of public life; and the self-awareness and experience which inform his autobiographical writings, not only his memoir <em>My Life</em> but also his last such work, <em>The War of 1897</em>.</p>

‘Otherwise in London’ or, the ‘Essence of Things’: Modernity and Estrangement in the Nineteenth-Century Cityscape

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Representation ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.

Mirrors, Masks, and Masculinity: The Homosocial Legacy from Dickens to Machen

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-275
Author(s):  
Molly C. O'Donnell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The World ◽  
Speech Genre

All the narrators and characters in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly are unreliable impostors. As the title suggests, this is also the case with Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors, which similarly presents a virtual matryoshka of unreliability through a series of impostors. Both texts effect this systematic insistence on social constructedness by using and undermining the specific context of the male homosocial world. What served as the cure-all in the world of Pickwick – the homosocial bond – has here been exported, exposed, and proven flawed. The gothic is out in the open now, and the feared ghost resides without and within the group. The inability of anyone to interpret its signs, communicate its meaning, and rely on one's friends to talk one through it is the horror that cannot be overcome. Part of a larger project on the nineteenth-century ‘tales novel’ that treats the more heterogeneric and less heteronormative Victorian novel, this article examines how In a Glass Darkly and The Three Impostors blur the clear-cut gender division articulated in prior masculine presentations like The Pickwick Papers and feminine reinterpretations such as Cranford. These later texts challenge binaries of sex, speech, genre, and mode in enacting the previously articulated masculine and feminine simultaneously.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George E. Dutton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Catholic Mission ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Main Figure

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.

Women and Agency in Bankim’s Rajmohan’s Wife and Tagore’s The Home and The World

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manju Dhariwal ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
English Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Status Of Women

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.

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