Christopher Stray has over four decades carved out an area of study which sits between the history of scholarship as traditionally understood (here described as ‘from within’) and accounts of classical (in particular Greek) influence on nineteenth-century British culture pioneered by Richard Jenkyns and Frank M. Turner. S.’s original training was in sociology, and his main interest is the social history of Classics at all levels. As well as numerous articles and edited volumes, he has published a previous general study Classics Transformed (1998). His writings have made classicists more aware of the history of their subject, contributing to the now routine acknowledgement that the later reception of a text or artefact is an intrinsic part of its meaning.

The present book (in the ‘Classical Presences’ series) consists of eighteen chapters, sixteen rewritten from earlier work and two appearing for the first time. Constanze Güthenke provides an introduction which considers at a more theoretical level issues of relativism and objectivity in reception studies and ‘a new mobility in Classics at large’.

Classics in Britain is divided into three parts, each in broadly chronological order. Part I consists of five chapters on ‘Scholarship and Institutions’. Ch. 1 looks at disputes where a particular perception of Classics (traditional textual scholarship) was defended against perceived threats: George Grote's radical reinterpretation of Greek history, or the introduction of archaeology. Ch. 2 compares the development of the Cambridge Classical Tripos and the Oxford Greats course, broadening out to consider contemporary perceptions of the two universities. The 1998 book was criticised for undue focus on Cambridge at Oxford's expense: redressing of the balance continues in ch. 3, based on S.’s 2008 Gaisford lecture (at Oxford) on Thomas Gaisford himself, the arch-pluralist (Dean of Christ Church, Regius Professor of Greek, lexicographer, delegate of the Clarendon Press, curator of the Bodleian, with a country living as well). Gaisford's main scholarly work was in editing two lexica from Late Antiquity, but his innovations in layout provided an important model for Liddell and Scott. The story of him ending a sermon by commending ‘the study of Greek literature, which not only elevates above the vulgar herd, but leads not infrequently to positions of considerable emolument’ is here judged apocryphal. We then move back to Cambridge, and to themes from ch. 1. ‘Porsoniasm’ occupies ch. 4: the cult of Richard Porson and his ideal of textual scholarship, whose Trinity College devotees included several future ‘Greek play bishops’ (editing Euripides being deemed a good qualification for running a diocese). Ch. 5 deals with curricular reform in late Victorian Cambridge, and the admission of women to examinations (but only much later to degrees).

Part II consists of seven chapters on ‘Scholarship and Publishing’. S. shows how much can be learned from publishers’ archives, hitherto little explored. Ch. 6 looks at the treatment of classical subjects in the early nineteenth-century Quarterly Review and its rivals, aimed at a cultivated general readership. A debate in their pages which S. could have mentioned was about William Mitford's then standard History of Greece, leading to its replacement by the works of Connop Thirlwall and more influentially George Grote. Ch. 7 contrasts two early and short-lived specialist periodicals, both emanating from Trinity: the Porsonian Museum Criticum and its successor the Philological Museum which promoted a broader German-inspired conception of Classics. Thirlwall was one of its editors: there is surprisingly no reference to his essay on Sophocles, to which we owe the idea of dramatic irony (conversely his quarrel with Christopher Wordsworth is recounted several times). Ch. 8 describes the origins of the Classical Review, considered alongside some of its immediate predecessors. Here (and recurrently in the book) we have a sense of familiar classical landmarks coming into being after false starts.

Next come two heroic individuals. Ch. 9 deals with William Smith and his still useful dictionaries of antiquities, biography and mythology, and classical geography: monuments of Victorian energy, even if necessarily team efforts. Ch. 10 is a portrait of Richard Jebb and his edition of Sophocles, perhaps the supreme example of symbiosis between author and commentator. Jebb was criticised by contemporaries (for vanity and other failings) but he comes over well here, striking in his care over page layout and his antipathy to Euripides. Ch. 11 explores the foundation of the Hellenic Society (1879) and the Classical Association (1903): again landmarks lining up. Ch. 12 is an overview of the wavering and waning authority of Latin across the last two centuries.

Part III consists of seven shorter chapters on ‘Schools and Schoolbooks’. S. has extensively researched the history of textbooks, and there is much curious detail here. Ch. 13 describes early use of lithography in a Dublin school modelled on a Benthamite panopticon prison. Ch. 14 is about John Taylor (no relation of the reviewer) and his advocacy of John Locke's ‘Classical System’, which has analogies with more recent ‘Great Books’ courses. Ch. 15 provides a glimpse of Winchester College in the 1890s through Wykehamists’ transcriptions of precocious banter with their eccentric teacher (a sort of Victorian History Boys). Ch. 16 is about the attempt by Edward Sonnenschein to impose uniformity in the use of grammatical terms across different languages: addressing a real issue, but doomed because too mechanical. Finally we move to the more familiar territory of Benjamin Hall Kennedy and his Latin Primer. It is well known that we owe to him the usual British order of cases (nominative, vocative, accusative …) and also that the still standard Revised Latin Primer was in fact written by his daughters. Ch. 17 shows how controversial (and unsatisfactory) was Kennedy's first edition, and ch. 18 gives some quaint reception history of the ‘gender rhymes’ provided as a mnemonic.

The Bibliography is impressively long but alphabetical order occasionally falters and at least twenty works referenced in the text do not feature (including several by S. himself, though he still clocks up sixty); there are also discrepancies of date and detail, and a few minor errors and typos in the book generally. The standard of production is less high than that of the 1998 volume.

A minor quarrel is with the cut-off date in the subtitle. No chapter focuses on events later than the 1930s. There are allusions to things up to about 1960 (terminal date of the earlier book), and incidental comparisons with present conditions. But the reader has little sense of developments in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In 1975 literary criticism of classical authors was in its infancy, and reception studies not yet conceived. Major authors (Homer, Herodotus, most of Aristophanes) lacked modern editions. Greek religion was a murky mystery. By the millennium there had been a revolution not only in the richness of resources available but also in their user-friendliness. That happy movement shows no sign of abating. We expect a new commentary on a text to provide sophisticated analysis and to tell students what they actually want to know. There has never been a better time to read Classics than now: o mihi praeteritos referat si Iuppiter annos.