R.'s volume, the first in a new CUP series, Classics after Antiquity (which aims to ‘unsettle’ assumptions about the relationship between the present and the classical past), is a beguiling book, peopled with a dizzyingly varied array of characters, from bishops and generals to school-masters and authors of burlesque. R. writes seductively and has a fine eye for colourful anecdote. His study opens with a lurid sequence involving dissection classes, festering corpses and incompetent grave-robbers. Body-snatchers serve as a provocative analogy for Victorians in pursuit of the classics. Yet R.'s subjects, it emerges, want very diverse things from their relationships with antiquity, social advancement, in some cases, but in others a realm for the free play of satirical fantasy or justification for an expensive, bloody and controversial war.

Following a curiously brief introduction, R.'s first substantial chapter begins by charting the careers of a number of oddball classicists, notably the brilliant Theodore Buckley, whose aspirations to produce a landmark study of Apuleius came to a miserable end in opium-induced squalor, the brusque headmaster John Selby Watson, who murdered his wife, and the churner-out of plagiarised but profitable school textbooks, T.K. Arnold. The fascinating details R. has unearthed in relation to these diverse individuals build up a complex picture of the value and potency attributed to classical education in Victorian Britain. Buckley's story, in particular, is a poignant one of intellectual potential thwarted in the socially competitive world of 1840s Oxford. R. suggests that many of his subjects were cruelly misled, pursuing classics in the belief that this was a sure route to social and economic success, only to encounter, like Thomas Hardy's fictional Jude, bitter disappointment.

Certainly, many schools profited from the belief that a classical education was the indispensable attribute of a gentleman, a wise investment for an ambitious parent. The weight attributed to classical achievement in exams instituted in the 1850s for the Indian Civil Service (a weight jealously guarded, as R. notes, by Benjamin Jowett, keen to defend the advantage enjoyed by his own students) implied a significant correlation between classical scholarship and fitness to serve in colonial government. This is a point R. might have made more of (drawing, for instance, on P. Vasunia's work). At the same time, a number of bishops were said to owe their preferment to their fine command of ancient Greek (as evidenced in their editions of Greek plays). But these were generally men who also enjoyed extensive social capital, well connected, from relatively prosperous families. Andrew Amos's 1845 lecture, repeatedly cited by R., is not primarily concerned to claim that ‘the brilliant scholar would find no doors closed to him’ (p. 15). Amos, a man at the heart of the establishment, aims rather to celebrate the power of a classical education to guarantee its possessor's intrinsic social distinction – and to make clear that such an education, because of its social kudos, will reflect well on a man of business.

Claims like those of Amos need to be seen as part of a defensive discourse, shoring up the position of classics in the curriculum of schools and universities, at a time when it was perceived to be increasingly under siege from proponents of other subjects, notably, maths and science. Indeed to link classics and social mobility might itself have endangered attempts such as that undertaken by Stephen Hawtrey to teach Latin in a school for the poor (as is surely implied by Hawtrey's own insistence in 1868 on Latin's tendency to reinforce rather than subvert social order). Certainly Jowett in 1879 underlined the role of the ‘Universities’ in enabling talented individuals to rise ‘from poverty and obscurity’ (p. 34). R. has gathered information about the social background and career paths of samples of students at Oxford, and of Archdeacons (helpfully presented in the form of appendices but discussed only briefly in the main text), to show how classics often failed to provide a route to advancement. It is not clear, however, on what basis these particular (small) sample groups have been chosen, nor, for instance, how classics students might compare with their peers in other disciplines.

Chapter 3, ‘In Search of an Empire of Memory’, adopting a more kaleidoscopic approach, offers a finely nuanced exploration of the multiple ways in which classical antiquity, particularly Homer, was invoked in relation to the Crimean war. If ‘civilization and wealth’ had been brought to the Crimea by the ancient Greeks, as contemporary historians contended, then they could and should be revived there by the modern British, once barbarous Russian rule had been beaten back. Robert Brough, a savagely brilliant author of burlesques, mobilised Jason and Medea to offer a critique of the Crimean campaign (and of gender politics on the home front). Duncan McPherson, doctor and amateur archaeologist, perhaps the most finely realised character in R.'s study, toiled ceaselessly to care for wounded and sick soldiers – and to hunt down classical remains in an ambitious series of archaeological digs. Yet, as McPherson himself eventually realised all too well, the end result of the military presence in Crimea was the destruction of antiquities (the museum in Kertch was vandalised by soldiers, its contents smashed) rather than their resurrection.

Classics, like other academic subjects, became increasingly professionalised over the course of Victoria's reign; its works of scholarship, produced by men in university posts, assert their authority in impersonal prose, underpinned by weighty scholarly apparatus. It is against this background that the gloriously subversive figure of Samuel Butler should be seen, as R. persuasively claims in Chapter 4. Butler argued, in his wildly controversial book, The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897), that the epic attributed to Homer was in fact the work of a woman from Sicily (who incorporated recognisable elements of the landscape around Trapani into the poem). His approach was emphatically based not on scholarly authority but on personal instinct and the anecdotes of Sicilian fishermen – and scandalised the academic world, already suspicious of an author notorious for his earlier satirical work. In counterpoint to the unpindownable Butler (and a number of out-and-out fraudsters, such as Constantine Simonides), R. homes in on a speech of Richard Jebb, Regius Professor of Greek in Cambridge, as emblematic of the classical establishment and what R. regards as its attempt to assert its monopoly of the proper understanding of antiquity. Here a monolithic notion of the classical tradition comes into focus (R. usefully relates this to the changing role of the notion of ‘tradition’ in the shifting religious politics of the nineteenth century).

Seeking to unpack the ideology of exclusivity, which he sees as underlying Jebb's notion of the classical tradition, and to underline the dangers it might pose well into the twentieth century, R. rather unfortunately misinterprets a speech made by the ancient historian K.D. White in 1959. The ‘dark forces’ against which White invokes ‘our classical inheritance’ were not those ‘of black South Africa’ (as R. contends, presenting White as a white supremacist) but those ‘… unleashed by … cults of the Will’ (as C. Stray has noted in his BMCR blog), suggesting a reference to the Nazis, perhaps even to the National Party in South Africa. No supporter of Apartheid, White later went on to teach at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria.

This is a slim volume; the role and status of figures such as Amos and Jebb could have been usefully fleshed out, while a longer introduction might have offered greater scope to explore the very significant (and much debated) changes to the educational landscape, which took place between 1837 and 1901. The strength of R.'s thought-provoking book is less his emphasis on the (unsurprising) implication of classical education in practices of social exclusion but rather his entrancing exploration of the variety of ways in which classics was co-opted, contested and above all personalised in Victorian Britain.