̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Jim Secord

Returned ‘Tree of Life’ notebooks go on display

zs332 — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 08:18:21 +0000

‘Darwin in Conversation’ reveals how the famed naturalist’s global network of correspondents shaped his ideas around the evolution of life on planet Earth.

Past versus present in an age of progress: the Victorians

lw355 — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 12:00:33 +0000

It was the age of industrialisation and political revolution, compulsory education and the dominance of the novel, the start of the postal service and the invention of the train, the excitement of evangelical Christianity and the critical challenge to the authorities of the past. Above all, it was an era that knew it was a time like no other, a time of radical progress and visionary reform. As the Victorians were forging remarkable economic and technological innovations, they were also obsessed with understanding their own history. In archaeology, geology, history, theology and evolutionary biology, how the past was understood was revolutionising the present – and shaping the future in which we now live.

For the past five years, a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust has taken a fresh look at the development and impact of the competing views of the past in 19th-century Britain. ‘Past versus Present: Abandoning the Past in an Age of Progress’, a project carried out by the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group, has broken new ground in transcending the disciplinary boundaries that are themselves an intellectual legacy of the Victorians.

It has proved to be a wonderful experience for all concerned, and a model of how productive and exciting a long-term interdisciplinary project can be. Each member of the project has found their work developing and expanding its horizons, and the group has provided a remarkably supportive space for exploring the richness of Victorian culture. Historians of modern Britain (Professor Peter Mandler) have been brought together with historians of science (Professor Jim Secord), and classicists (Professors Mary Beard and Simon Goldhill) with experts in literary criticism (Professor Clare Pettitt), along with eight postdoctoral fellows and three graduate students, to explore the full range of the Victorian experience, representation and comprehension of the past.

Central to the group’s activities was the weekly meeting where we read and discussed Victorian material, secondary sources and our own research in progress. These were generous but heated debates, where each member had something different to bring to the table. ̽��ֱ��varied ranges of knowledge and approaches were thrashed out, sometimes painfully. These led to regular workshops with invited guests from around the world, which in turn produced editions of journals and other publications (see below for the two most recent books).

Our projects looked at major defining questions of Victorian culture that can be properly treated only by a multidisciplinary team: from what the Victorians learned in school and university, to the poetry or novels they wrote; from how the new technologies of archaeology transformed biblical scholarship, to how imperial administrators changed policies from conquering and looting to ruling and maintenance of national cultural heritage; and from explorations of contemporary political violence to explorations of the influence of the ancient world on contemporary political idealism.

̽��ֱ��project has left a mark in the field of Victorian studies. It has raised the profile of hitherto neglected bodies of knowledge which the Victorians took for granted but which we do not, largely because of our different disciplinary map. We have gained a new appreciation of the paramount significance for the Victorian imagination of classical languages and archaeology, of Egypt and the Far East, of geology and the Biblical texts.

Although the project inevitably calls itself by the buzzword ‘interdisciplinary’, we were actually studying a period when the disciplines were just beginning to be formed and professionalised. In effect, much of the work was not so much interdisciplinary, as learning to reach back behind the disciplines to different regimes and organisations of knowledge. In exploring the Victorian attitudes to the past, we were exploring how the current scholarly map was formed. In investigating a Victorian sense of heritage, we were discovering the intellectual heritage that all modern academics share.

Interdisciplinary research has to be the answer when it comes to understanding the Victorians, writes Professor Simon Goldhill, one of the researchers involved in a £1.2 million project on Victorian Britain that is reaching the end of its five-year programme.

Professor Simon Goldhill

Dr Sadiah Qureshi

From Illustrated London News, September 16, 1845

Victorian appetites

A fascination for imported Zulus and the living curiosities of the modern world, an obsession with the beauty and perfection of ancient Greece and Rome – two very different sides of Victorian appetites, and the subject of recently published books by members of the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group.

In 1853, 13 Zulus were brought and displayed as “the savages at Hyde Park Corner” (where Dickens saw them), to perform dances, rituals and songs for a public of gazing English men and women. At first, such shows tended to be small-scale entrepreneurial speculations of just a single person or a small group. By the end of the century, performers were being imported by the hundreds and housed in purpose-built “native” villages for months at a time, delighting the crowds and allowing scientists and journalists the opportunity to reflect on racial differences, foreign policy, slavery, missionary work and the empire.

In the recently published Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Dr Sadiah Qureshi provides the first substantial overview of the Victorian penchant for exhibiting live human beings, especially those from exotic foreign climes.

̽��ֱ��book is full of startling stories and stunning images, but what makes it so interesting and important is its revelation of how science and popular culture developed hand in hand where race, anthropology and geography are concerned. We are still inheriting the impact of the Victorian fascination with race, and this book reveals that history with vibrant and incisive insight.

If Dr Sadiah Qureshi explores how the Victorians looked at the exotic, disturbing and denigrated ‘others’ of Victorian thinking – the natives, the savages, the racially inferior – Professor Simon Goldhill looks at the Victorians’ projection of an ideal, glorious origin for Western culture in classical antiquity. Just as the Victorians stared with horrified distance at “the savages”, so they wondered at the perfection of Greek bodies, the order of the Roman Empire, the beauty and profundity of classical poetry.

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity demonstrates how classics made up the furniture of the mind for Victorians, educated, as they were, in Greek and Latin and surrounded by classical imagery.

But, more significantly, this book also shows how classics became the way of enacting the most pressing cultural anxieties of the period. Whether it was Oscar Wilde and his chums looking back to Greece for sexual liberation, or painters turning to classical nudity to ground their aesthetic vision, or historians and novelists arguing the politics of democracy or the role of the early church, it was always a detour through the ideal of classical antiquity that framed their thinking.

̽��ֱ��Victorians prided themselves, anxiously, on being an age of progress, but progress was often judged and understood according to the ideal model of the ancient past – the Greece, as Nietzsche paradigmatically put it, which is the only place where we are truly at home.

These newly published books show how complex a business Victorian self-definition and self-understanding is: between public shows and grand opera, anthropology and history, religion and novels, science and painting, an image of what Western culture is, and should be, was being forged – and we are all still the heirs of this work of historical self-consciousness. Both books are the product of many years of research – and both have been fundamentally affected by their gestation within the interdisciplinary milieu of the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group.

Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2011) by Dr Sadiah Qureshi is published by ̽��ֱ�� of Chicago Press

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity (2011) by Professor Simon Goldhill is published by Princeton ̽��ֱ�� Press

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

‘What have the Victorians ever done for us?’

tdk25 — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��19th century has also given us almost all our most familiar institutions, our ideas about ourselves and our history, and the very fabric and rhythm of our lives.

From the rituals of royal celebrations, through Sunday afternoon museum-visiting to our unquestioning assumption that the hour of the day will be the same in all parts of the country – all these and more were the brain-children of those ever resourceful Victorians. Before the late 19th century ceremonials such as coronations and royal funerals were tawdry and often badly-organised affairs; the pomp and pageantry we now enjoy is no throw-back to some distant ‘Merrie England’ (indeed Merrie England itself was a Victorian invention), but to the modernizing court of Victoria and Albert. Likewise the idea that twelve o’clock should strike at the same hour in Glasgow or Exeter as it did in London hardly seemed pressing until the demands of railway timetabling made it so.

To take this from a Cambridge perspective, many of the subjects we now study (from philosophy to engineering) were first defined by energetic Victorian reformers. So too was the division of the Tripos into two parts, the basic university career structure, the idea that undergraduates should all follow the same terms between the same dates, the possibility that dons could marry or that women could study. There is a good chance that restricting the pleasure of ‘walking on the grass’ over college lawns to fellows only was also a Victorian innovation.

A group of Cambridge researchers has recently been awarded more than a million pounds from the Leverhulme Trust for a five-year project to investigate Victorian Britain – and particularly how the Victorians created such a radical version of the future, at the same time as they agonized over their relations with the past.

Entitled ‘Past versus Present: Abandoning the Past in an Age of Progress’, the project has taken as its logo a wonderfully evocative engraving of the 1870s by Gustav Doré, itself illustrating an earlier whimsy by Lord Macaulay. In 1840 Macaulay had imagined, far into the future, that ‘a traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Pauls.’

It is an image that captures the nuance and sophistication of Victorian thinking about the passage of time. Not only does it conjure up a future in which the present will have become the ruined past, but it heralds too the possibility of staggering geo-political change. For here the erstwhile imperial subject from the distant colonies is treating the wreckage of London’s past imperial greatness as a suitable theme for some dilettante sketching – much as the 19th-century elite would themselves take pleasure in sketching the ruins of (say) ancient Greece or Rome.

̽��ֱ��project will be exploring different avenues across the whole range of Victorian engagements with the past, and trying to make connections between them. At its heart is an intriguing paradox. For, at the same time as 19th-century technology and economic developments were raising the prospect of a giant leap into the future, exactly the same tools and processes were opening up – through archaeology, geology, education, biology – all kinds of new pasts in incredible profusion and vexingly contradictory detail. Darwin was controversially theorizing the origin of mankind, at the same moment as archaeologists in the ‘Near East’ were digging up material traces of the biblical past and Heinrich Schliemann was claiming that he had found proof that the stories of the ancient Greek Homeric epics were actually true – attracting in the process a fan club that extended as far as Prime Minister William Gladstone.

How did people accommodate all these different pasts – and possible futures? It was a problem that engaged not only the elite of Victorian society, but – in an increasingly democratic world that was generating ‘popular history’ in large quantities for the first time – a wide spectrum across all social groups. Big questions were debated. What was the fate of empires (one vivid answer was of course provided by the Doré engraving)? What was the history (and future) of socialism? But these questions were raised in other forms too. What deserved to be in the local museum? Should old buildings be demolished to make way for ‘improvements’? What did fossil-collecting reveal about the country’s past? Should endangered animals or people be preserved?

Hasn’t all this been done before? Not in this way. Of course, there are all kinds of distinguished scholarly studies of parts of this agenda, and the project inevitably builds on those. But what the generous grant makes possible is some new, interdisciplinary ‘joined up thinking’ about the Victorian period. In a new designated research space in the midst of the main Arts’ Faculty site, the project brings together researchers from different disciplines, each with a stake in the 19th century. This means not only historians in the strict sense of the word (Peter Mandler of Caius provides the lead here) and historians of science (with Jim Secord, of Darwin fame), but also literary critics (headed by Clare Pettitt of Newnham and Kings College, London) and crucially classicists (Mary Beard and Simon Goldhill of the Classics Faculty, both of whom work on the history of classical scholarship). So far they have been joined by three post-doctoral fellows and three more are in the process of being appointed.

̽��ֱ��aim of this project is to transcend the boundaries that now tend to divide those working on the Victorian period, putting classics and theology – burning concerns to almost all of the Victorian elite – back into the centre of the picture. By thinking about what history meant to the 19th century, we may also become clearer about what it means to us.

For more information, please contact Professor Mary Beard atmb127@hermes.cam.ac.uk or any member of the group; details atwww.victorians.group.cam.ac.uk

Modern Britain was invented sometime between 1830 and 1900. It's not just a question of industrialization, compulsory education, the right to vote (at least for men) or the growth of towns, important as all those particular processes were.

̽��ֱ��project will be exploring different avenues across the whole range of Victorian engagements with the past, and trying to make connections between them.

Professor Mary Beard

brizzle born and bred from Flickr

match making

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes