With its series of ‘Oxford Histories’ and ‘Oxford Handbooks’, Oxford University Press is producing invaluable volumes that offer new scholarly insights into periods, authors and literary tropes which reinvigorate our appreciation of the reciprocity of cultural relationships. The current volume is a case in point, and it moves generously across a range of social, political, theatrical and literary spaces in order to demonstrate the richness of the Classical sources infusing thinking and creativity between 1790 and 1880.

We are used now to seeing figures from the ancient world cropping up in a variety of arenas: Cicero, to take just one instance, is the hero of Robert Harris's Imperium trilogy, which is being staged by the RSC, as well as being one of the central characters of Steven Saylor's and John Maddox Roberts's detective series. This volume shows conclusively that such genre-crossing fertility is far from being a modern invention, and whilst it is not a reference work, it is nonetheless possible to plumb its highly detailed index to track the gestation of Romantic and Victorian concepts of Classical authors and characters. Medea was the highly popular subject of a range of dramas in the United States – where it was linked to debates over slavery (p. 19), Europe and Britain, where, as F. Macintosh describes, in 1856 the world-famous Italian tragedienne Adelaide Ristori was performing ‘in Italian, as was the case with her Shakespearean roles, in a French version of Euripides tragedy by Ernest Legouvé’ (p. 312), at the same time as audiences were also enjoying Robert Brough's burlesque, Medea; or, the Best of Mothers with a Brute of a Husband. Burlesque could radicalise its source, renewing it and shedding a new critical light on it for modern audiences, as Brough did with this play, but it also evidences the extent of the audience's knowledge of its source text, without which the jokes and situational comedy simply would not work. Like Shakespeare, who was also frequently the subject of burlesques, Classical literature at this time was made newly available in a variety of protean forms to a variety of audiences.

The volume is divided into two sections, ‘Contexts and Genres’ and ‘Authors’, which offer a wide-ranging examination of a period when Classical authors, along with both Greece and Italy, became gradually more readily available to a broader audience. Developments in travel, in publishing technologies, and in the spread of literacy and education brought Classical literature and art within the reach of a broader demographic than those educated at public schools, Oxford and Cambridge. It is of the nature of much of the great literature of this period that it carries within itself the responsibility to be more democratic, self-consciously opening up its realm of Classical references to new audiences: George Eliot, for instance, as S. Fiske puts it, became ‘a mediator between the discipline of classical study and the more casual consumption of antiquity amongst a broader readership’ (p. 579). As with Eliot's other intertextual references, the world around the reader opens up into the possibility of broader significance through allusions to the Classical world.

There are, however, interesting fault lines that open up with this volume and that enable, if not a reconfiguring of, then a shifting perspective on, the literary landscape of 1790–1880. Arguably the writer with the most popular cross-class appeal in the nineteenth century was Charles Dickens, but he makes scarcely an appearance here, suggesting that the spread of the Classics in the nineteenth century had some blind spots. Indeed, as E. Richardson notes in his illuminating chapter, ‘Political Writing and Class’, many novelists, including Dickens, represent the acquisition of a Classical education as an awkward excrescence on a working-class character, such as Uriah Heep. The Classics do not find a natural home in Dickens's work, which is more overtly concerned with other markers of class, education and attainment. This is an important marker of some of the differences between Dickens and Thomas Hardy. Hardy's Jude Fawley finds his long-cherished Classical ambitions denied by Christminster (Hardy's fictional Oxford) in Jude the Obscure, a gesture impossible to conceive as a measure of class distinction and exclusion in Dickens. In Hardy's writings, readers find themselves inevitably coming face to face with questions of human impotence in the form of the gods that underpin Greek tragedy, and with Hardy's active, and often critical, take on Classical influences, including Virgil's Georgics, as R. Pite's chapter on Hardy shows.

This is not simply a matter of the authors’ education: neither man went to public school, and as this volume clearly points out, some of the writers who were most notably influenced by Classical literature were either auto-didacts or received their Classical education through non-standard means. As the case of Elizabeth Barrett Browning shows, the Classics could be re-animated and reconfigured if accessed, and indeed re-written, outside the realms of masculine privilege.

This volume attests brilliantly to the richness and inspiration of the Classical tradition for writers and readers of the period 1790–1880. But it also reveals something very fundamental about the outlook of that period. The majority of readers at this time were being exposed to Classical literature either through its mediation by contemporary writers or through translation. To read, or watch, something in translation is willingly to open up the reading self to the experience of difference, the knowledge of otherness, and to absorb that otherness into the contemporary experience. It betokens a period opening up to other worlds, where the Classical impulse could be one of democratisation and broadening horizons, rather than the consolidation of centuries of privilege. This generous volume demonstrates the vitality of a period open to difference, difficulty, intellectual challenge, and the insights of other times and other countries.