At the hands of recent scholars the Victorians have come to look rather like us. They revelled in the ‘annihilation’ of distance and time by railways, ocean-going steamers and the safety bicycle. They marvelled at the ‘thunderless lightnings’ of the telegraph, at photography and at mechanised printing. They relished exotic travel, both in person and in prospect: even the less well-off could afford a Holmes Stereoscope to ‘see’ far-flung locations in 3D. They were avid consumers of exhibitions, tourism and celebrity culture. This exciting interdisciplinary volume touches on all of this, but it paints a world that in other respects seems radically unfamiliar. Trust in experts ran high, and in the European academy debates about Athens and Jerusalem dominated the most prestigious fields of the day: biblical scholarship, philosophy and history. The quintessential discipline of the age, the French scholar and ex-Catholic Ernest Renan proclaimed, was philology, whose fearless pursuit stood to undermine misguided myths in the present: ‘the modern spirit, that is, rationalism, criticism, liberalism, was founded on the same day as philology’ (p. 20). Yet while it has become a truism to say that historicism helped to erode received religious certainties, the contributors to this book insist that Christianity remained nevertheless a privileged site for debate over questions of nationhood, morality and social cohesion in an age of imperfect democracy. Shot through such debates was the tension between what Thomas Arnold famously referred to as Hebraism and Hellenism: contrasting inheritances, to be sure, but also a shorthand for divergent instincts on pressing questions: morality versus aesthetics, the sectional versus the universal, duty versus knowledge, faith versus intellect. Simon Goldhill and Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft’s edited book seeks to get to the heart of that tension.

The ‘Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Culture’ project, based at CRASSH in Cambridge, was funded by the European Research Council and ran from 2012 to 2017. This book began life as one of the final events of that project, and its gestation has ensured an impressive level of intellectual integration. Its twelve main chapters are book-ended by an introduction and an epilogue, both substantial. The former presents the Victorians as self-conscious moderns whose obsession with the question of ‘How to see oneself in time’ (pp. 1–2) impelled them to think as hard about the past as they did about the present. The latter reflects via Paul Connerton, Walter Benjamin and Benedict Anderson on how technology shaped ‘temporalities’ and ways of seeing the past.

The chapters in between are divided into six themed pairs. In the first (‘Antiquity’s modernity’), Goldhill looks at how Victorian luminaries fitted together their philhellenism and their faith amid scholarly trends that threatened to destabilise both. Suzanne Marchand explains how Herodotus was quarried by conservative thinkers for details of the ancient world that could be used to buttress the historicity of Scripture, later sidelining him when biblical archaeology came to look like a better bet. In part ii (‘Making the Past Visible’), Kate Nichols’s chapter demonstrates the centrality of biblical painting in the 1887 Manchester Jubilee Exhibition and provides the book with its cover image, Edwin Long’s Diana or Christ? (1881), which depicts a dramatic moment of choice for a first-century female. Carrie Vout’s chapter, likewise, emphasises the wide popularity of biblical themes, but argues that the vocabulary of sculpture was fundamentally classical, a cross-pollination that secular-minded scholars have overlooked. Part iii (‘Materiality and Spectacle’) looks further afield. Robert Priest explores the Passion Play at Oberammergau, which prompted fierce debate for German philhellenists who saw it as a rural ‘Dionysia’ but argued about what that signified. Alex Bremner examines the building of the American Episcopal Church in Rome, whose projectors envisaged St Paul as a proto-Protestant son of liberty opposed to papal authoritarianism. In part iv (‘Travelling the World’), Dorothy Figueira and Brian Murray showcase the horrified fascination of Protestant visitors to St Peter’s, including Dickens, Newman and the Black American abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass. Michael Ledger-Lomas tracks the round-the-world tour of the young British royals Prince Albert Victor and his brother George. Their trip culminated with Scripture-themed sightseeing in Palestine and Syria: a pointed exercise in a region where rival sovereigns vied to sponsor churches and archaeological sites. Part v (‘Manuscripts, Morality and Metaphysics’) tackles two contrasting thinkers. Jocelyn Betts deftly elucidates the Liberal Anglican theologian F. D. Maurice’s efforts to weave revealed truth and human development into a coherent history of philosophy. Alison Knight and Scott Mandelbrote explore M. R. James’s fascination with ‘any document that has claimed to be a Book of the Bible, and is not’ (p. 286), a passion that reflected his patristic interests but also his love of a good story. In part vi (‘Intellectual Superstars’), Laura McCormick Kilbride revisits Matthew Arnold’s version of Isaiah, suggesting provocatively that Arnold regarded literature not as supplanting religion but as something divine in itself, albeit freed from the constricting corsetry of simplistic supernaturalism. ‘Whatever finds me, bears witness for itself, that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit’, Coleridge influentially declared (p. 355). Brian Young offers a brilliant intertwined account of the careers of the friends Connop Thirlwall and George Grote, one an Anglican bishop and the other an unbeliever, united in their fascination with ‘the religions of antiquity’ and buried in the same grave in Westminster Abbey.

While the introduction and the subtitle push the idea of ‘shock’, it has to be said that the book tends instead to evoke a world of confident curiosity. Well-worn texts and tools remained serviceable, while new insights into old questions were hailed grandiloquently. ‘If half a dozen works of contemporary literature survive to the thirtieth century,’ declaimed one reader, ‘I believe that Maurice’s Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy will be one of them’ (p. 261). The past was also marketable, although this is more an account of purveyors than it is of consumers: we do not hear much from ‘ordinary people’ themselves. Twenty-first century readers will not need to be reminded that civilisation and race loomed large in the nineteenth-century worldview, but they may well be surprised at the salience of the distant past in scholarly discussions about them, the soft-pedalling of empire per se, and the relative absence of angst regarding such questions. Above all, they will be struck by the presence of religion as a live question in a rich variety of contexts. Intellectual historians used to assume that elite ‘Hellenes’ who championed Arnoldian sweetness and light were too polite to say that they had stopped believing in God, and that they were somehow representative of the Victorians as a whole. This book shows convincingly how misleading that picture was.