On 30 December 1873, a thirty-three-year-old schoolmaster named Arthur Sidgwick made a momentous entry in his diary. “[M]arried at nocton to charlotte sophia wilson,” he wrote, drawing a thick black line under these words in order to mark the transition to a new era of his life. Underneath, he added a phrase in ancient Greek: “lovingly, with her lips, she made holy my shame.” He glossed this in English, in brackets, as “fact.”Footnote 1
Sidgwick's wedding-night annotation stands out amid archival silence on the subject of Victorian wedding nights.Footnote 2 It challenges us to move away from a lingering stereotype of Victorian repression and towards a wider range of possibilities for how we perceive nineteenth-century middle-class mores surrounding marriage, heterosexuality, and gender roles.Footnote 3 But it also opens up a wider field of inquiry about relations among men and women in a society whose expectations for gender and sexuality were changing rapidly and significantly. Arthur Sidgwick's diary is an extraordinarily dense source of which his sex life is only a small part. It traces his daily movements within the family home, a selection of elite, all-male educational institutions, and other gendered spaces from the mid-1860s until 1912. As on his wedding night, Sidgwick, and many men like him, often used Greek to voice their desires and anxieties with respect to gender and sexuality—much as in Oxford, where Sidgwick taught for thirty-five years, classical education was the fault line along which women's admission to the university was contested.
This article delves into Sidgwick's diaries and into the social and cultural world of late-nineteenth-century Oxford. Through closer attention to how ancient languages structured the terms on which women were to be included—or not—in the ancient universities, it provides a new perspective on changes in women's educational and professional opportunities, in the institutional structures of universities, and in the masculine character of Oxbridge life. The second half of the nineteenth century was a critical period in the formation of Britain's modern higher education system, as universities were founded and significantly reformed; and as academics, students, politicians, and donors debated among themselves and in the press what a university education was for, who should have access to it, and what it should include. William Whyte has rightly called for historians to reorient their focus away from Oxbridge to the many civic universities founded in Britain in the decades before 1914: cast in a completely different mold to Oxford and Cambridge; offering courses in modern, “practical” subjects; and educating men and women alongside each other.Footnote 4 Nevertheless, reexamining Oxford in its age of reform affords two key insights: that the two internal political debates of the period—the future of the institution's predominantly classically oriented curriculum and its inclusion of women—were really one and the same, and that the ways individuals like Sidgwick positioned themselves as political actors in that debate were a matter of daily lived experience, interpersonal relationships, and emotional impulses as much as carefully thought-out intellectual, political, or ideological points of view.
Many scholars have treated separately the cultural status of the classics, the culture of elite educational institutions, and middle-class gender relations in this period, showing the second half of the nineteenth century to be particularly dynamic on all these fronts. Classicists have had much to say about how writers, philosophers, teachers, politicians, and others read and reinterpreted classical texts, translating them into English and into an idiom that would speak to their present. Some have told the story of the academic discipline of classics; others have used a classical lens to interpret literary texts, performance traditions, and lives, often ones that are in some way countercultural.Footnote 5 Historians of education have traced changes in Oxford's and Cambridge's curricula and cultures, showing how teaching became increasingly professionalized, how students’ experiences of the universities changed, and how these transformations affected the wider culture.Footnote 6 Historians of women and gender have demonstrated how this period saw the fracturing of the ideology of separate spheres, how middle-class men and women increasingly inhabited the same social and professional spaces, and how these changes created cultural crises—to which the spaces of higher education were no exception.Footnote 7 Approaching these themes from the perspective of an individual life in which they butted up against each other constantly allows us to see how they were connected. For many highly educated men, immersion in the classics was a way of life rather than a body of knowledge. It shaped career paths in secondary and higher education as well as the negotiation of relationships between women and men in a particular cultural environment in which it was not yet clear whether gender segregation or integration would be the main mode of social interaction. Focusing on the culture of classics—and how it played out politically and socially in Oxford, one particularly classically focused institution—helps us to appreciate the wider stakes of what might otherwise appear to be relatively small changes in curriculum, student intake, and the careers of professional academics.
Recently, literary critics such as Sharon Marcus and David Russell and historians such as Deborah Cohen and Seth Koven have sought to understand the connections between affect and social relations, the sometimes unexpected ways in which sympathies are established—or firmly rejected—and how people sought to explain or codify forms of social and affective relations in terms often unfamiliar to our own.Footnote 8 Historians such as Chris Hilliard, Stuart Jones, and Gillian Sutherland have shown that a highly specific, case-oriented approach is productive in understanding the history of educational institutions: how ideas are related to lived experience and material considerations; how, due to their small scale, colleges and universities operate through the actions of and relationships between particular individuals.Footnote 9 The theoretical and methodological frameworks these historians and critics have offered are also helpful when it comes to reading sensitively beliefs, emotions, and moral convictions that the archive does not easily divulge.Footnote 10
Arthur Sidgwick, then, is an instructive figure on which to center this account of a moment of social and institutional change. Fairly typical for a reform-oriented professional university teacher of the period, he nonetheless had an extensive social network and left behind an unusually large quantity of personal papers. His family connections to secondary and higher education ranged from his Yorkshire grammar-school headmaster father to his brothers William, an Oxford political economist, and Henry, a Cambridge moral philosopher, and his brother-in-law E. W. Benson, a schoolmaster who ultimately became archbishop of Canterbury. But as Barbara Caine has suggested, even figures who had unusual advantages and opportunities can offer important perspectives on the wider world they inhabited.Footnote 11 Sidgwick was not an “ordinary person” in one sense, but in another he is a good example of a certain kind of teacher at elite institutions: a layperson with a largely secular outlook who moved easily between the secondary and higher education sectors but spent his whole career in teaching; who participated in local politics and civic life but did not have the ear of the prime minister; who supported his family in comfortable middle-class, if not lavish, style.
He had a career path that would have looked familiar to others of his generation. After school at Rugby—the archetypical reformed public school, epitomizing the masculine virtues of muscular ChristianityFootnote 12 —Sidgwick attended Cambridge, where he excelled at mathematics and classics and was a member of the Apostles, the secretive essay society. He returned to Rugby to teach Greek for sixteen years, publishing a number of textbooks, including Greek Prose Composition, still in use today. From the beginning of his career, he was committed to Liberal politics and to education reform and the professionalization of teaching. He published widely on pedagogy, favoring an approach that engaged students emotionally and taught them to be good people as well as good classicists.Footnote 13 In 1879, he moved to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, among a generation of Oxford dons hired out of the public schools after colleges permitted their fellows to marry in the late 1860s. As women like Sidgwick's wife Charlotte and the couple's three daughters moved into a new middle-class neighborhood north of the city center, they populated a new girls’ secondary school and, ultimately, women's colleges within the university. They changed the character of the city's middle-class society.Footnote 14
Women had increasingly been entering higher education around the country, but in Oxford many fellows and students took up arms against this monstrous regiment. Women were barred from university spaces like libraries; sermons were preached against their admission to the university.Footnote 15 Even progressive dons like Sidgwick—who fully approved of women's admission to the university, suffrage, and a wider program of equality and democratization—had their misgivings. Having benefited from what they saw as an exceptional environment of intense friendships forged within intellectually rigorous single-sex institutions, they were troubled by what they might lose through coeducation, even as they stood by women's equality in principle.
These tensions manifested themselves in four distinct, gendered spaces of Sidgwick's life: Sidgwick's relationship with his wife, a strikingly intimate partnership about which he mostly wrote in a Greek she could not read; his close friendships with men, expressed in part in the shared knowledge of Greek that characterized the formative all-male environments that predated their marriages; his relationships with the male undergraduates he taught at Oxford, for whom he recreated the kind of intimate, homosocial atmosphere he had enjoyed as an undergraduate; and his work with a campaign to admit women to Oxford, in which the status of Greek as a marker of elite socialization came into question. Communication in and about ancient languages—the “Greek prose composition” Sidgwick practiced on a daily basis—figured centrally in his efforts to preserve all-male spheres, while classics structured more broadly the lines upon which middle-class intellectuals negotiated and resisted both coeducation and the wider disintegration of separate spheres as a shared social value. I explain why Sidgwick—a member of the last generation to see ancient Greek as a living language rather than a technical subject of research—would have encoded the intimate details of his wedding night in Greek, but also how Greek and Latin forged in-group bonds among elite men, how lack of classical languages kept women out of the universities, and how, ultimately, the decline of Greek as a widespread cultural touchstone contributed to women's greater participation in elite education and thus in the public intellectual and professional world more widely. At once a language of intimacy and one that proclaimed social status and imperial identity, Greek shows us how men like Sidgwick navigated the intersection of the personal and the political.
Focusing on Arthur Sidgwick's diaries presents pressing methodological questions. These are not confessional ego documents that easily lend themselves to being read as literary texts, so it is not clear whether or how they relate to the extensive literature on Victorian diaries, which focuses on the formation of individuality and interiority.Footnote 16 Yet there are in fact many diaries from the long nineteenth century—from Gladstone's, to Leonard Woolf's, to the suffrage activist (and Henry Sidgwick's wife's sister-in-law) Frances Balfour's—which like Sidgwick's record professional appointments, social engagements, travel plans, world-historical events, and more intimate details, but whose confessions historians must literally read between the lines, in order to interpret the symbols, codes, and foreign languages in which they are written. In their tabular format, Sidgwick's diaries resemble accounting ledgers, and in keeping track of things like daily outdoor exercise they have a similar self-regulatory function. But they are also much more than a story about Victorian self-discipline.Footnote 17 Reflecting the institutional contexts Sidgwick inhabited, they help us to understand the nature of sociability and politics within these small, semi-permeable worlds: where ideas are exchanged and decisions made in chance meetings or over dinner. A document like Sidgwick's diaries can thus be an unexpected key not only to a historically specific way of life, but also to the structures and cultures of British power.
Writing about Marriage in Greek
On the evening of 1 June 1873, in a “small study” at Rugby School, mathematics master James Wilson introduced his close friend and colleague Sidgwick to his sister, Charlotte. Wilson and Sidgwick came from similar social backgrounds—both were the sons of headmasters—and supported progressive politics and new pedagogical methods. Sidgwick would hardly have been the first teacher to marry the younger female relative of a friend and colleague. His sister Minnie had married her much older cousin, Edward Benson, who also taught at Rugby; his brother Henry would later marry Eleanor Balfour, the sister of his former student, Gerald Balfour. At the time of their meeting, Charlotte Wilson was twenty years old and Arthur Sidgwick was thirty-three. Charlotte was probably the first woman outside Sidgwick's family and their servants with whom he became intimately acquainted. He recorded in his diary that he fell in love with her at first sight. In Greek, underlined for emphasis, he wrote, “At that time I first saw the woman who was mine; and seeing, I loved.”Footnote 18 Two and a half months later, the couple was engaged; by the end of the year, they were married.
From this first moment, Sidgwick used Greek to describe his feelings for Charlotte and the rhythms of their courtship, a pattern that persisted throughout the many decades of their marriage. This unscholastic resort to an ancient language can tell us a great deal about how Sidgwick perceived his marriage, and how the range of his affective bonds shifted to accommodate this new, significant, relationship. At the outset, as Sidgwick became physically closer to Charlotte, he used lines of Greek verse to note the beauty of specific physical features, such as her hair or her hand. He expressed increasing emotional intimacy in terms of time spent together talking and reading, and in terms of access to her private thoughts: he noted that he had read her diary, and he copied in his diary excerpts from her letters. On 27 August, the day they became engaged, he wrote, “on this day God gave me the love of charlotte [sic].” From then the word “love” appeared constantly, in English and in Greek, its repetition signaling overwhelming emotion that was difficult to express articulately. He alternated the Greek words philia, meaning the equal love of friendship, and eros, meaning one-sided desire or longing for an object, suggesting the intermingling of emotions that classical Greek thought typically separated.
Following the engagement, a new expression of intimacy became possible. Sidgwick added a new record-keeping symbol to a small column between the date and the diary entry: |, which he glossed as “philēmata,” Greek for “kisses.”Footnote 19 Sidgwick's descriptions of the courtship show a series of formalized steps of increasing intimacy, and a language of love referring to Greek poetry and mythological imagery: knowledge obtained from literature rather than from experience, similar (as shown below) to the language he and his friends would have used to describe their masculine and sometimes homoerotic friendships.
When Sidgwick drew the bold, black line separating his wedding day from everything that happened after, a new symbol appeared in the diary's pages. Turning the | on its side to make —, Sidgwick glossed this symbol as “aspasmos or sunousia,” Greek euphemisms for sexual intercourse. It is best read in connection with another symbol, μ, which given its pattern of recurrence and its absence in the months prior to the births of the Sidgwicks’ children likely stands for Charlotte's menstrual cycle. The confluence of these symbols suggests Arthur's investment in an ideal of marriage as the initial step in creating a family, and sex within marriage as something to be celebrated for its role in the creation of children, consistent with the patterns noticed by scholars who have sought to overturn a perception of Victorian middle-class marriage as sexually repressive.Footnote 20 But Sidgwick continued to record aspasmoi throughout his marriage, diligently tracing their patterns of frequency as late as 1910, when he was seventy and Charlotte would have been fifty-seven, presumably past childbearing age. It is clear, therefore, that he was fascinated by the instances of intercourse in themselves, not only for their purpose in tracking fertility and pregnancy.
Charlotte's voice is not so well preserved. Arthur notes that she kept a diary in the courtship period, but it has not survived. What can we know of how she felt about this marriage? We know that she came from a conservative, evangelical family and that she was educated at home by an inadequate governess.Footnote 21 As an adult, she supported political causes—Russian émigré intellectuals, the Liberal Party—but unlike many Oxford dons’ wives she did not undertake any public political activism.Footnote 22 According to her relatives, Charlotte was shy and self-effacing, her intelligence and sense of humor unnoticed by those outside her immediate family.Footnote 23 In a small manuscript collection of sonnets, she evokes—more circumspectly, but as effectively as Arthur's diaries—how her engagement awakened new emotions and permanently changed her life.Footnote 24
This is all to say that we cannot know how Charlotte “really” felt about her husband, how seriously he took her, and how equally he treated her, whether she was a wholly willing partner in decades of aspasmoi. But we can guess from Sidgwick's quotation of Charlotte's love letters in his diaries that during their courtship she was an equal participant in expressions of rapture, devotion, and desire to become more intimate and that she had some knowledge of what was expected of married people on their honeymoon. On one page, six weeks before the wedding, which Sidgwick covered with “CHARLOTTE” in enormous block capitals and many instances of the philēmata symbol, he also quoted her as saying “we shall not sleep much the first nights.”Footnote 25 This does not mean that Charlotte knew what sex was. But it does suggest that it was conceivable for a woman like Charlotte to evince anticipation of sensual pleasure, and that when they married a couple might not be strangers to expressions of intimacy.
Still, it is worth exploring further Arthur's dedicated tracking of sex and menstruation with symbols glossed in a language Charlotte could not read, and of his more extended, also Greek, descriptions of his romantic and sexual life. He marked 30 December 1873 with the μ symbol, which is probably why “lovingly, with her lips, she made holy my shame” presumably alludes to non-procreative sex. This is one of very few records we have of what might have transpired on a Victorian wedding night, and it challenges any assumption that John Ruskin and Effie Gray's abortive attempt at consummation, or E. W. Benson's paternalistic domination of Arthur's sister Minnie, should be taken as paradigmatic of a Victorian middle-class marriage.Footnote 26 Sidgwick's notation of the event is the most graphic description of sex that appears in his diaries. In hiding it in Greek, he resembles other upper- and middle-class liberal men with diaries who encoded statistical, rationalist approaches to intimate bodily and erotic details: from Gladstone's symbols representing his struggles against pornography and sexual temptation, to Leonard Woolf's tracking in codes and foreign languages of his wife's menstrual cycle and vital statistics (figure 1).Footnote 27
Arthur Sidgwick Papers, MSS Eng. misc. e. 656, Bodleian Libraries, 172. By permission of the Sidgwick family.
But there is a lyric quality to Sidgwick's description of sex, here and in later instances, that makes it seem other than regulatory and paternalistic. As the marriage progressed, instances of aspasmoi more often accompanied records of the couple's joint commemoration of their engagement and wedding anniversaries, which Sidgwick recorded with increasing regularity as the years went by. He often referred to the engagement day as “OUR day”; some years, they went on a holiday that seemed to remind Sidgwick of the holiday he took with Charlotte's family to Norway during which they became engaged.Footnote 28 On one holiday in the Alps in 1884, he wrote a short poem in Greek on a day he also marked with an aspasmos symbol: “but having undressed their bodies, into the marsh swiftly/they rushed together, both husband and lovely wife/so that in the streams they might escape the burning heat of the sun/and take delight in their bodies amid the folds [of the mountain].”Footnote 29 For Sidgwick, Greek may have been encoding, but it was also deeply expressive—perhaps more so than English.
After all, Sidgwick was a professional expert in the ancient Greek language. After he left Rugby, he taught it to Oxford's classics students for decades, and for fun he composed his own comic verse in Greek. Friends and students recalled that Sidgwick spoke Greek as if it were his native tongue.Footnote 30 Greek words and symbols might have come to him just as naturally as English ones, and when confronted with a topic rich with emotion, too difficult to express in English, he might have turned to another language he knew just as well.
But there is more to it than that. Men who attended the elite “public” boarding schools and Oxbridge—a growing proportion of the middle class in this period—had an easy familiarity with Greek. Greek united men of a certain social group, and represented the formative educational experiences they shared. In realms from statecraft to sex, elite Victorian men saw themselves as heirs to a classical Athenian cultural patrimony, the dexterity of their Greek compositions testifying to their assimilation to that ideal. Even progressively minded classicists such as Sidgwick and his friends, who criticized the narrow hold of classical languages upon school and university curricula, shared many years of institutionalization in public schools and colleges and thus a culture founded in the classical languages and their inextricability from a certain kind of elite male adolescence.Footnote 31 Sidgwick's communications with male friends and students carved out a discursive space accessible to this group only.
We can see this in two letters Sidgwick sent to close friends—his brother, Henry, and his former student, Gilbert Murray—on the occasion of their marriages. When Murray, then Professor of Greek at the University of Glasgow and a talented Greek compositionist in his own right, became engaged to Mary Howard, the daughter of the Earl of Carlisle, in 1889, Sidgwick sent him a four-page letter entirely in Greek. Though Sidgwick always peppered his letters to Murray with Greek tags, this one stands out in its sustained use of the language. Repurposing a language associated with high culture to gossip about a society marriage, it has a light-hearted, flippant tone, from the form (coining new words such as the present participle “damnoblastanidzōn”) to the content (joking about how the officiant, the somber master of Balliol Benjamin Jowett, would get on with the very different personalities of Murray's in-laws).Footnote 32 Disguising the rituals of marriage in a code for consumption only among elite men allowed Sidgwick and Murray to discuss these important, serious subjects irreverently. Murray's future wife and in-laws are objects of curiosity and teasing, a far cry from other letters Sidgwick sent in English, in which he sent his “love” and “remembrances” to Mary; offered his condolences when Murray's mother died; used the first-person plural pronoun to refer to himself as part of a family unit; and referenced his children's friendships with the Murrays.Footnote 33
Similarly, there is a letter that Arthur sent to Henry Sidgwick upon his engagement in 1875. At the bottom of the letter, Charlotte has written that she will follow with her own note, indicating that the content—mostly written in English—was not confidential. But the English is interspersed with Greek iambics, more serious in content than the Greek Arthur wrote to Murray and (as the letter claims) necessary to “relieve” Arthur's “dancy” mind so that he could write a relatively “sane” English letter. Despite the difference in tone from Murray's letter, this also separates a masculine, Greek sphere from shared, connubial English.Footnote 34 Just as, in the Victorian middle-class home, the study was a masculine domestic space carved out from the mixed-gender domesticity of the rest of the house, so was Sidgwick's correspondence in Greek with his male, also-married friends carved out from communications and personal relationships he and his friends shared among their wives and families.Footnote 35 It recalled a shared experience of masculinity prior to their marriages, centered on educational contexts.
This informs how we might read the Greek in Sidgwick's diary account of his marriage. Like letters, diaries were semi-private documents. Sidgwick notes that he showed his diary to various intimates such as his brother and sister and close friends at university; he read the diaries of close male friends and his wife.Footnote 36 As in the case of the letters, by recording some pieces of information in Greek Sidgwick was able to show his diary to both men and women while reserving some information only for men. This provides some rationale for Sidgwick's tendency to encode information relating to sex in Greek. It was not unusual, after all, for men writing about sex in this period to shield the most anatomical details “in the decent obscurity of a learned tongue,” whether in medical writing, pornography, or private communications.Footnote 37 Sidgwick may have been drawn to express erotics in Greek because of the language's beauty and because ancient Greek poetry provided a model for how to express erotic or romantic feelings. But use of Greek was also part of a widespread cultural phenomenon in which, as theorists and historians inspired by Foucault's critique of the repressive hypothesis have contended, elite men sought to hide information about sex from the eyes of women and members of the lower classes, while simultaneously sharing it freely with each other.Footnote 38
Hellenism, Masculinity, and Sidgwick's Friendships
Educators and academics like Arthur and Henry Sidgwick and Murray had used classical languages to demarcate gender in this way since they were boys and young men in other elite educational institutions, forming particularly close friendships that persisted later in life even as they also formed relationships with women. Students at Trinity College, Cambridge, the Sidgwicks were both members of Cambridge's exclusive essay society, the Apostles (so called because they limited themselves to twelve active members), whose particular approach to friendship between men might have shaped their views on the subject. The Apostles met weekly on Saturday evenings in a member's room. Each week, a question was proposed for discussion, ranging from “Ought all Education to be conducted on an analytical system?” to “Was Humpty Dumpty justified in assuming his position in view of the consequences?” No-holds-barred discussion would follow, after which members would record votes for or against the original proposition. The questions and votes often included key terms in Greek or Latin, reflecting a shared body of knowledge grounded in ancient philosophy, particularly Plato and Aristotle.Footnote 39 “Absolute candour” was the society's watchword: with all the hubris of brilliant undergraduates, they believed that people as intelligent as they, if able to speak freely to their friends, could ascertain Truth on a variety of subjects.Footnote 40
The organization's secrecy and self-conscious commitment to friendship engendered fiercely tight bonds between its members: Sidgwick met with outrage from fellow Apostles when he mentioned in his memoir of Henry that his brother had been a member of the society.Footnote 41 Famous Apostles friendships included Tennyson and Arthur Hallam, and the Bloomsbury friends E. M. Forster, J. M. Keynes, and Lytton Strachey; the Sidgwick brothers and their friends formed similar bonds.Footnote 42 Annual dinners and an up-to-date address book kept by the society's secretary ensured that these bonds persisted after Apostles left Cambridge and were obliged to renounce active membership.Footnote 43 Needless to say, in a Cambridge prior to the foundation of the first women's colleges, all members were men. Though Bertrand Russell proposed that the group admit women as early as 1894, this did not come to pass until the mid-twentieth century.Footnote 44
In Sidgwick's time, Apostles looked to each other—instead of to their families—for emotional support in trying circumstances, such as a crisis of faith or the death of a loved one. Their feelings are recorded in letters that give passionate expression to the closeness of their bonds.Footnote 45 Henry Sidgwick's biographer Bart Schultz has identified the Apostles’ habit of sympathetic listening as a “feminine” quality, but it easily sits alongside other expressions of emotion possible only in homosocial contexts, such as the confessional fervor of followers of the Oxford Movement.Footnote 46 It allowed these young men, embedded in all-male educational contexts, whose access to women was limited by practicalities and social pressures, to find all their emotional and personal needs fulfilled in each other, intensifying the importance of these bonds long after the onset of marriage and family life.
As an undergraduate, Sidgwick took on his share of the formal business of the society, reading essays on a range of philosophical and theological questions. But more noteworthy is his dedication to maintaining its formal structure: serving as secretary for almost the entire duration of his active membership, organizing alumni dinners, preserving members’ photographs in an album he donated for the purpose.Footnote 47 Later, Sidgwick brought a similar level of enthusiasm and logistical involvement to a variety of voluntary associations for which he served as secretary and donated photo books. If for Henry Sidgwick the Apostles were the beginning of a commitment to rational philosophical inquiry, and to education that would facilitate it on a wider scale, for Arthur the Apostles may have inculcated a belief in the benefits of friendship and community: the merit of the society lay not necessarily in the questions it asked but in the fact that it brought people together to ask them. It may also have been the start of a belief that friendship and community flourished best among others with a similar level and kind of education and outlook—namely, one rooted in the ancient classics, to which all the members’ educations had exposed them and which significantly undergirded the ethical and philosophical questions they sought to explore.
As the second half of the nineteenth century wore on, the intense intimacy of the Apostles began to cast them in a suspicious light. High-profile sex scandals made the public increasingly aware that establishment figures and institutions could be the sites of shocking “offenses against nature,” and sexual activity in single-sex schools figured as a trope in texts from pornography to the mainstream media.Footnote 48 In 1858, the year before Sidgwick matriculated at Trinity, the headmaster of Harrow, Charles Vaughan, resigned when a parent threatened to send evidence of Vaughan's affair with a pupil to the press.Footnote 49 In 1872 and 1873, Eton masters William Johnson and Oscar Browning, both Apostles, lost their jobs in part because they were perceived to be dangerously intimate with their students; Browning subsequently returned to Cambridge and became an enthusiastic patron of the new generation of Apostles. Beatrice Webb suspected Cambridge classicist G. L. Dickinson, another Apostles doyen, of introducing a philosophy of sexual anarchy to the group—an accusation with some rationale behind it.Footnote 50 Dickinson, who wrote extensively in his The Greek View of Life about Hellenic veneration of male beauty, was a significant influence upon E. M. Forster, whose generation of Apostles openly factored the attractiveness of potential members into their selection process.Footnote 51
The Apostles were an extreme case, convinced of their own exceptionality. Moreover, the ways of thinking about same-sex desire as part of one's identity to which Dickinson, Forster, Keynes, and Strachey had recourse by the end of the century did not yet exist when Sidgwick was an undergraduate.Footnote 52 Even so, eroticism often entered the emotionally intense friendships of these men who knew no women and who, as students, were sheltered from the threat of legal reprisal that might weigh on more public figures. Drawing on the ancient texts to which their linguistic knowledge gave them access, they invoked the classical Athenian ideal of paiderastia, which provided an emotionally engaging and culturally acceptable model for homoerotically inclined men to characterize their desire. Men such as Browning, Walter Pater, and John Addington Symonds, all very close in age to Sidgwick, couched academic and autobiographical writing about homoerotic desire squarely within a classical tradition, favoring models of same-sex desire that were age-unequal, had some pedagogic content, and emphasized distant appreciation of beauty over sexual contact.Footnote 53 This was such a widespread discourse among a certain group of highly educated, literary men that historians of male homosexuality have suggested that it was the primary avenue of reception of the classical tradition in the Victorian period.Footnote 54 Indeed, if we turn a few pages back in Sidgwick's diary, we find that before he met Charlotte Wilson, he filled it with praise for one Arthur Lushington, a Rugby sixth-form pupil. “O, most beautiful and most enticing of all boys!” he wrote in Greek on 7 April 1868.Footnote 55
Seeing this, some scholars have characterized Sidgwick as homosexual: his recorded desire for a young man, as in the case of Symonds or Oscar Wilde, overshadowing his marriage and giving him a place within the late-nineteenth-century story of the development of male homosexual identity.Footnote 56 But Sidgwick—unlike Symonds, but like most other men of his age and class, including Browning and Pater—did not come to see himself in this way. The role homoerotic desires played in his life instead indicates different conclusions about the uses of Greek as an elite male affective language and its relation to single-sex education and the wider world of gender relations.
Sidgwick and Symonds had met on a trip to Germany in 1863. They were very close in the late 1860s and early 1870s, reading together certain classically influenced texts widely seen as touchstones for the formation of homosexual identity, such as William Johnson's poetry collection Ionica. The two men seem to have identified with a common conflicted experience of same-sex desire, puzzling over the ethical implications of their feelings and whether and how to act upon them.Footnote 57 Symonds and Henry Sidgwick impressed upon Arthur the practical risks as well as the immorality of spending too much time meditating upon Lushington's beauty, while Sidgwick urged Symonds to destroy poems he thought too explicit.Footnote 58 In response, Symonds locked those poems in a box and flung it into the river Avon. Sidgwick made a similar dramatic gesture, writing “auto da fé of poems” in his diary in February 1869.Footnote 59 Shortly thereafter, his paeans to Lushington disappeared from his diary, and he never wrote about beautiful boys again. Unlike Symonds, who, despite marrying in 1868, pursued sexual and romantic relationships with men and became a significant theorist of “sexual inversion,” Sidgwick invested himself in married life. His comments about “distractingly perfect” boys belong to an earlier era of his life, when he was in close contact with other men using the same language to talk about their desires. Subsequently, the evidence suggests that he only used erotic language about Charlotte, in an original way that departed from how classical languages were used both in homoerotic and in sexological contexts.
Sidgwick's records of his married sex life might suggest that the late nineteenth century was as important a period for the development of modern heterosexual as it was for male homosexual identity. The Greek expression of affect and erotics to which Sidgwick and his friends might initially have turned in intimate Cambridge gatherings had a long and sometimes unexpected afterlife. It might continue to undergird close friendships with men and a shared masculine community grounded in a common social and educational background and centered on educational institutions, and it might lend an erotic cast even to male relationships and communities that were not explicitly sexual. But it might also, as in Sidgwick's case, be translated into terms that could accommodate intense cross-gender sexual and affective commitments. And there could be a tension between these meanings, particularly as homosexuality became an option for men like Symonds, Browning, Dickinson, or, later, Wilde who wished to emphasize their commitment to masculine communities. For many Oxford and Cambridge dons, and particularly for Sidgwick, these questions about the cultural meanings of male friendship were fundamental to establishing the stakes of coeducation.
Teaching Greek and Sociability at Oxford
As Daniel Orrells has persuasively suggested, Greek played an important role in demarcating relations between men and women in public as well as in private.Footnote 60 After all, well into the twentieth century, Hellenism figured on highly public, political stages as a discourse through which to express Britain's imperial cultural identity and as the distinctive element of the education formative of powerful men in various professions.Footnote 61 In Oxford, a wide-ranging degree course in classical literature, history, and philosophy with a heavy emphasis on Plato—known as literae humaniores, or “Greats”—had been at the center of the curriculum since the 1850s. But the discipline of classics and the demographics of the university began to change from the mid-1870s on, with profound effects for the culture of an institution whose most enthusiastic classics teachers liked to imagine themselves in the elite masculine mold of Plato's Athens.Footnote 62 As classicists became more than language teachers, importing from Germany new methods in philology, history, and archaeology, pedagogical questions arose for those who thought classics should be the foundation of a liberal education.Footnote 63 As scientists, economists, and politicians argued that there was not “time” to teach classics, and as higher education expanded—incorporating students whose schools had not drilled them in Latin and Greek from the age of seven as well as new universities with different institutional priorities—dons like Sidgwick wondered how classical education would figure in a reformed university, particularly one in which the admission of women was increasingly a subject of debate.Footnote 64 While Sidgwick did a great deal of work for an organization that advocated women's admission to Oxford, confronting head-on the question of how to teach the subject to students who had not had a classics-focused secondary education, he remained troubled by the notion that with the old way of doing and teaching classics would be lost the intimate, intellectually exciting, and de facto masculine atmosphere that he had prized as an undergraduate.
The old way of classics education is suggested by Sidgwick's published writing: editions of Greek plays designed for school use, theoretical lectures and essays about pedagogy, textbooks about Greek reading and composition.Footnote 65 Sidgwick criticized other textbooks’ practice of teaching composition through isolated, boring sentences, priding himself on the narrative force of his stories to be translated into Greek, and—packed as they were with wars and rebellious slaves—their appeal to the adolescent male demographic.Footnote 66 He stressed the importance of exercises that would allow the student to express himself in his “ordinary vocabulary or thought-range,” instead of the stilted language required by other textbook writers.Footnote 67 His interest was always in engaging students—whom he assumed throughout his lectures and essays about pedagogy to be teenage boys. By the turn of the century, Sidgwick must have seemed a throwback, still teaching language while his Oxford colleagues and students emended texts, drew upon papyri and material culture, studied the origins of mythology, and pondered the Homeric Question. He admitted that it was for a younger generation of teachers to decide how to bring the new research into the classroom.Footnote 68
His pedagogical philosophy also ranged outside the classroom, encompassing long walks, the drama society, and other trappings of extracurricular life as components of the kind of intimate and intellectually serious community that would inculcate young men with virtue and citizenship.Footnote 69 At his Oxford college, Corpus Christi, he sought deliberately to build such a community. The college of the late nineteenth century could be thought of as a little republic: tutorial fellows like Sidgwick each had a vote on its governing body, determining its policy and concerning themselves primarily with the education of the young. Sidgwick was one of the most influential citizens of Corpus Christi, and was remembered long after his death for having made it “the most sociable and united of colleges.”Footnote 70 He cemented those bonds through similar uses of Greek and styles of masculine friendship to those that characterized his relationships with men his own age. His Greek could be found everywhere in college life, from toasts at official dinners to the pages of the Pelican Record, the alumni magazine he founded in 1891. As with his letters to friends, the Greek comic verses that Sidgwick composed for the Pelican Record spoke only to those in the know. Some poems referenced insular local news, such as one which alerted readers to the tragedy of the Pelican Essay Club's minute-book going missing; others were clever parodies, or used puns and other humorous linguistic devices, such that only someone highly competent in the language would have got the joke.Footnote 71 College lore had it that when Sidgwick met with his students, often taking them for long walks in the hills outside Oxford, he would “demand conversation in the language of ancient Greece”—perhaps because this was good practice for exams, about which Sidgwick was vicariously competitive; perhaps because he simply found it amusing.Footnote 72 In any case, it was predicated both on a shared body of knowledge and on an assumption of social ease that simply could not have existed between a male teacher and female student, or between a male teacher and students of different social backgrounds.
In an era in which curfews confined undergraduates to their colleges after 9 p.m., the activities of student societies did not have to take place in an ancient language to be shielded from female eyes. But humor also structured the terms on which Sidgwick engaged with his male students in English. He was particularly involved in two college student societies: the Pelican, an essay society; and the Owlet, which met to read English literature aloud together. He did much of the formal work of keeping these societies running, much as he had for the Apostles: serving as president or secretary, donating a photograph album to the Pelican and a minute-book to the Owlet, organizing annual dinners.Footnote 73 The minutes of both societies, often in his handwriting and filled with his jokes, suggest that he enjoyed being a center of attention, beloved by the students.Footnote 74 He encouraged colleagues to take part in the Pelican's and Owlet's activities; together, they created a routine of residential college life in which high ambitions for their students’ academic success combined with exploration of a variety of subjects outside the still-rigid curriculum—as well as drinking, smoking, and after-hours carousing. Their meetings in college common rooms constructed a kind of masculine domestic space antithetical to the domestic space of the home, much like the gentlemen's club or officers’ mess.Footnote 75 If women were invoked, it was only as a mythical ideal. Once, Sidgwick singlehandedly sustained a Pelican in-joke, which involved venerating an embroidered banner a student's female love interest had sent him as if it were a holy relic, for an astonishing decade.Footnote 76 It seems that he entered into such knights-and-ladies games with more enthusiasm than the undergraduates who were still in the adolescent, homosocial stage of their lives. No records suggest that he mentioned his family within college confines.
In part, these juvenile undertakings give credence to the twentieth-century classicist Gilbert Norwood's contention that “many ‘dons’ are simply sixth-form boys who have ‘kept on.’”Footnote 77 Those like Sidgwick who had spent their lives moving between public school and college ensured that the institutions shared a common culture, whatever the age of its participants. But their actions also had a more elevated, idealistic subtext. Through years of dedicated play, Sidgwick won the admiration of undergraduates, who with him as ringleader pursued learned discussion, Shakespeare, and sport amid the silliness, instead of other favorite undergraduate pastimes such as binge-drinking and destroying college property.Footnote 78 This was one kind of university reform, a new vision of the community a student could encounter when he went to university: one that was primarily organized around learning, in and out of the classroom; that sought to inculcate democratic habits of thinking and discussion; and in which faculty, like the masters of a reformed public school, played a significant part. It was for Greek toasts at Boat Club dinners and the Pelican Club minutes as much as for his tutorials that undergraduates regarded Sidgwick as “Adviser-general to the whole community”—a community that rested on the notion that women had no more corporeality than Lady Guinevere or Petrarch's Laura.Footnote 79
The Question of Coeducation
Yet these ideas about pedagogy and college community, which depended upon the intimate social relations possible among elite men, might seem to conflict with a different side of reform: Sidgwick's support for the expansion of the national franchise, and thus his commitment to a wider vision of liberal education that would help to inculcate the virtues of citizenship in a wider group of people. The new population of married public-school masters to which Sidgwick belonged was a small aspect of the greater demographic change in Oxford in the later nineteenth century. Undergraduates increasingly came from a wider range of secondary schools, and even from around the Empire. University Extension, founded in 1878, provided Oxford-administered lectures and examinations to nonmatriculated students in Oxford, including women, to institutions such as university settlement houses, and to other people around the country. Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville, the first women's colleges, were founded in 1878 and 1879 respectively, though not yet recognized by the university.
These changes posed problems for the classics-centric curriculum: one of the chief internal political questions of the time was whether it would be possible for the university to accommodate students who were not capable of passing Responsions, a required introductory examination in classical languages and scripture. Sidgwick campaigned for a degree course in English literature, and, after the turn of the century, for a controversial proposal not to require any competency in classical languages from candidates for degrees in modern subjects.Footnote 80 Those who sought to keep the curriculum and the student population unchanged came out in force against this proposal. Compulsory Greek was not abolished until 1920, in the same wave of postwar reforms that saw women admitted to the BA; compulsory Latin endured until the 1960s. That Sidgwick's progressive wing faced such opposition indicates how unusual it was for a classics teacher who delighted in Greek and Latin to believe that a person could be educated without knowing them.
Sidgwick sought to adapt classics into a subject that could be taught to students without years of linguistic training. He argued that translation into and out of classical languages could be used to teach good English prose style, a rationale that could be made compelling to administrators, donors, and politicians. He saw no reason not to teach classical texts in translation to those who might not have time or opportunity to master the languages—a radical stance at the time.Footnote 81 He told his colleagues that they should be asking, “Who are the right people to teach classics to?” and “How should classics be taught to them?”—questions linked directly to debates about the widening franchise and “the right people” to be engaged citizens in the British polis.Footnote 82 Sidgwick delighted in playing Greek word games with the cleverest of his Oxford students, but he also preached a broader gospel about the relevance of classics to non-elites at a time when the usefulness of a classical education and its relevance outside Oxford and Cambridge were increasingly called into question.
University Extension first raised the possibility that Oxford might need to design whole courses of study suited to people from different educational backgrounds.Footnote 83 Sidgwick participated in the program, lecturing in Oxford and around the country on English literature and on classical texts in translation.Footnote 84 At the same time, the increasing number of married dons led to a rise in the number of women living in Oxford who wanted and were able to pursue higher education. In 1878, a group of prominent dons and their female relatives formed a committee to organize lectures that, unlike university lectures, women could attend.Footnote 85 Over the next fifty years, the Association for the Education of Women (AEW) became a fully fledged parallel university: women lived in one of what were eventually four halls or as home students, and the AEW arranged their lectures and tutorials, including in new courses such as English literature and modern languages to which University Extension had opened the door but which were not yet recognized as subjects in which traditional undergraduates could be examined. The AEW also became a vocal lobbying organization, fighting for women to be granted BA degrees when pursuing courses of study and examination that were identical to those of male students.Footnote 86
Sidgwick joined the AEW when he arrived in Oxford in 1879, and did much of its administrative work until 1914, long after retiring from his university job.Footnote 87 The organization's records are extensive, a large proportion in Sidgwick's handwriting: this, too, was a realm in which he turned the practices of his masculine collegiate culture to new ends. He lectured and gave tutorials on Greek language and English literature, including several “popular lectures” geared to draw revenue in ticket sales, and he labored over the minutes and the accounts.Footnote 88 He used his connections at Cambridge—especially his brother and sister-in-law, Henry and Eleanor, who had founded Newnham College, Cambridge for women in 1871—to coordinate common strategies for the campaign for women's degrees.Footnote 89 His diaries are crowded with references to teaching women students and marking their essays and exams; with the succession of small victories that saw women admitted to University degree courses; with meetings of the AEW and related causes (such as women's suffrage); and with social invitations to the women's colleges. There is a reference to women's education on nearly every page of Sidgwick's diaries from 1880 on; it is the most common category of annotation, and the entries—often punctuated with block capitals, exclamation points, and underlines—convey energy and enthusiasm.Footnote 90
The inflexibility of the Oxford examination system and the federated college structure stalled curricular innovation, but women students’ lack of university membership allowed the AEW greater latitude when developing alternatives to Greats, the preferred course for at least half of male undergraduates well into the twentieth century. Given the cultural status of Greats and its association with a certain masculine ideal of brilliance, women's entry to the course progressed slowly.Footnote 91 In the interim they studied modern history or natural sciences, or sat unofficial examinations in English literature and modern languages.Footnote 92 The new courses in modern literature were well suited to women, many of whom hoped to teach in the kind of girls’ schools they themselves had attended, where French and German took precedence over Latin and Greek.Footnote 93 But women's inability to compete with men in classics limited the extent to which they could be treated as equal members of the university—many could not even complete the BA-equivalent course in English because they were unable to pass the Responsions exam.Footnote 94 Frustrated, the AEW ultimately decided to focus its political campaigning on formal equality, pushing for women's admission to the same classics examinations sat by men and emphasizing students’ achievement therein.
Some AEW members worried that encouraging less well-prepared women students to study classics was setting them up for failure; or that pushing them through exams at standard undergraduate speed subjected them to dangerous strain.Footnote 95 In this, they echoed Eleanor and Henry Sidgwick, who had hesitated to enter Newnham students in university examinations.Footnote 96 Arthur disagreed: his own daughters, he pointed out, had all completed Moderations, a further required, challenging Latin and Greek language exam, without taking extra terms to prepare.Footnote 97 But he did worry that assimilating women students to Greats was a step backward, denying them the freedom to pursue the courses of study most relevant or interesting to them.Footnote 98 Even if women students could pass Responsions and Moderations, perfection of classical language skills might not have been the best use of every woman's time or the path that most enabled her to develop herself intellectually and personally. Over the course of the decades Sidgwick spent working with and for women students, the ideals of liberal education that he had initially developed through his investment in classical learning, and in communities whose intimacy was founded on a certain vision of masculine friendship, came to mean something rather different.
In 1920, Oxford abolished its requirement that all matriculated students demonstrate competency in Greek; not coincidentally, that same year women won the right to matriculate and thus to take the BA. But this had little effect on the culture within the men's colleges, and a separate-but-equal system prevailed until coeducation of the colleges began in the 1970s. In the early twentieth century, elaborate and expensive parietal provisions kept men's and women's social lives separate, intellectual community flourishing in the women's colleges on its own terms. Sidgwick wrote one essay, in 1903, about the “salutary and civilising influence” social interaction with members of the opposite sex might have on secondary-school pupils, regarding “the herding together of masses of boys or girls apart” as “unnatural.”Footnote 99 Working with women students and for women's education in Oxford—to say nothing of having daughters—must have changed his outlook on the subject since his days as a public-school master. But few, including Sidgwick himself, would have made similar statements about elite higher education. Activists who highlighted the freedom separation gave to design courses of study better suited to women also perceived there to be something exceptional about the female homosocial community that women's colleges offered. Members of women's colleges were often as emphatic about defending this as were men who sought to preserve the all-male environments of their colleges.Footnote 100 Support for single-sex education was not solely, or even largely, a reactionary position.
One progressive woman educator who was a lifelong champion of women's single-sex higher education was Sidgwick's own daughter, Rose. In his diary, Sidgwick reserved particular praise for Rose, who among all his children achieved success according to the terms which her father was most able to recognize.Footnote 101 After a successful undergraduate career, she worked as a librarian and tutor at Somerville, before becoming one of the first British women to be hired into an academic position also open to men, as a lecturer in history at Birmingham University.Footnote 102 With her longtime romantic partner, the future principal of Somerville, Margery Fry, she presided over the first women's hostel at Birmingham, helping to shape a similar kind of clever and high-spirited community to the one her father had created at his college. In 1918, she joined a British Educational Mission to the United States, intended to cement cultural and diplomatic ties between the two countries after the War. She was a popular public speaker at East Coast women's colleges, and her diary records her marvel at the resources dedicated to women's education in the US.Footnote 103 Like the other woman member of the Mission, Bedford College English professor Caroline Spurgeon, and other contemporaries, Rose believed that women university graduates had something particular to offer the new, international postwar world, separate and complementary to the men's work of the League of Nations.Footnote 104
Just after Christmas 1918, Rose died in New York City, a casualty of that year's influenza pandemic. At her funeral in the Columbia University Chapel, attended by numerous British and American dignitaries, her coffin was draped in a Union Jack. Dean of Barnard College Virginia Gildersleeve, one of the organizers of the mission, later recalled, “I felt that she had died as truly in the service of her country as had the thousands of her young countrymen who had fallen on the fields of Flanders and of France.”Footnote 105 Her work was not so different from that of the elite young men who went to war in 1914–18 in the belief that they were defending liberalism and opposing tyranny. It suggested an increasingly prominent place for highly educated professional women in the public life of the nation and empire, which did not need to rest on appeals to a classical tradition.
Arthur and Charlotte's other children also pursued paths indicative of the new era. Born between 1877 and 1882, all five children had at least some university education, though none studied only Greek and Latin. Frank became a publisher, married, and had six children. Hugh had a prizewinning undergraduate career and became a civil servant before joining up, dying of battle wounds in 1917.Footnote 106 Ethel was a governess and a respected novelist. Margaret remained at home, caring for her parents as they aged, but sought fulfillment as an active participant in the suffrage movement. All three daughters had attended an excellent girls’ day school and studied modern history through the AEW. Their father taught them enough Greek and Latin to pass Responsions and Moderations. None of them married, though Rose's relationship with Margery Fry is indicative of alternative forms of emotional commitment available to professional women of the era.Footnote 107 All five children traveled widely, and inhabited mixed-gender professional and social circles. The opportunities available to Rose, Ethel, and Margaret in particular were ones that their mother could never have envisioned.
Arthur Sidgwick never learned of Hugh's and Rose's early deaths: he had suffered from a neurodegenerative illness, “remote from all knowledge” since about 1914.Footnote 108 He was not able to see in the climax to Rose's career the fruits of his decades of labor in university politics. But this work had, whether intentionally or not, made it possible for her to study history at Oxford—and to enter a new world of self-consciously internationalist political and cultural initiatives, many of them undertaken by women, where knowledge of Greek was no longer a prerequisite to participation in diplomacy and governance. By the 1920s, Greek had become a subject of academic research, which could increasingly be conducted by women as well as men.Footnote 109 The group for whom it could function as a shared language was a small cadre of experts, not a social class. To be sure, there were still Apostles. Some talented individuals still hid sensitive topics in a language few could read.Footnote 110 But the notion that knowledge of Greek could be taken for granted among public-school-educated men—and only them—died with Sidgwick's generation, and with the institutional reforms that he and his colleagues introduced.
This, then, was Oxford at the turn of the twentieth century: teetering on the brink of coeducation and, like the society and polity of which it was a part, wider inclusion of women; but seeing much at stake in changing the status quo.Footnote 111 This hesitation could manifest itself in vicious, even violent, misogyny—though this was hardly the whole story, as Sidgwick's public defense of women's intellectual capacities shows.Footnote 112 Still, the narrow spatial confines of a university city like Oxford, where men's colleges, women's colleges, and the family homes of dons who participated in both were all a short walk from each other, led this controversy to become especially charged. Though Sidgwick may have moved from an entirely homosocial world to one shaped by family and a political commitment to wider opportunities for women, his life, and those of men like him, cannot be understood in such straightforwardly linear terms. Every day he walked from his family home in North Oxford to his college in the city center, in which even the mention of fellows’ families was considered poor taste. He had daily to make decisions about whether and how his pursuit of intellectual community within the university would include or exclude women, the confined space in which this occurred throwing the contradictions in his practice into sharp relief. For even as Oxford was coming to include a population of intellectually able women, they could not and did not encroach upon the efforts of Sidgwick and his colleagues to introduce new generations of young men to the pleasures of college life, perpetuating within the cloistered environments of schools and colleges the old culture of classical masculinity. Though this culture would no longer be defined specifically by knowledge of Greek, it remained a powerful presence in elite institutions throughout Britain, retaining strong links to the heyday of Greek prose composition.
Conclusion
In this essay I have sought to illuminate the debates over classics and the inclusion of women that raged within Oxford in the late nineteenth century, and to argue for their significance by showing how they shaped lives lived within institutions that perpetuated classical learning. Arthur Sidgwick is one don with a diary, whose knowledge of Greek was exceptionally fine. His dedication to an expansive and idealistic vision of education in and out of the classroom, and the record of his dedication in published and private writing, may make him an unusually sympathetic figure. But he lived in institutions populated by many colleagues about whom, sources permitting, one could tell similar stories.
These stories would tell us that institutions are made up of individuals whose personal and political commitments evolve throughout their lives, often on unpredictable and idiosyncratic lines. One member of an institution might change another's mind in a chance meeting about an unrelated matter; another might hold different views in his private life from those he espouses at work, never seeing the contradiction. Others might never state their beliefs and values in so many words, leaving them to be guessed at by the historian. Drilling down into the workings of as prominent and powerful an institution as late-nineteenth-century Oxford exposes these contingencies and complexities, challenging any generalizations about the norms and values of the institution as wholly reformist or regressive. Like other languages or discourses on which the historian could focus, Greek did not telegraph a single coherent political and cultural stance on behalf of the men in elite educational institutions who used it. But, taken together, Greek's various connotations can offer a sense of the contours of the world these men inhabited, the ways that world changed in their lifetimes, and the aspects of their culture which endured, as institutions like Oxford and Rugby continued to have an outsize influence on Britain's national political culture.Footnote 113
As Sidgwick himself would have argued, change over time within educational institutions—which, after all, primarily concern themselves with transmission of knowledge between old and young—is especially contingent upon personal relationships, and the unintended consequences they can engender.Footnote 114 Through the generations of students who passed through Sidgwick's classrooms, his college rooms, his family home, and his student societies, Sidgwick's influence stretched farther and more diffusely outside the confines of his own lifetime: unhistoric acts that history nevertheless allows us to recover.
