This chapter looks at how Victorians constructed a genealogical relation to antiquity and the Bible, forming both as a cultural, intellectual and spiritual origin for modernity. It shows how philology was the discipline which linked theology and classics as disciplines, and how historiography and archaeology were mobilized to understand the present as the outcome of the past. In particular, it looks at how William Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, Brooke Foss Westcott, Charles Kingsley, and Henry Montagu Butle, used translation, Homeric studies, historical fiction and cultural history to forge a contentious and contested relation between the biblical and classical pasts and modernity.

Thispiece offers a introduction and overview of thekey themes established in the collection of essays in Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity: The Shock of the Old. It opens by alluding to the Victorian pride in progress, in technology, in travel – in the newness of modernity. It proceeds to point out, however, that it was a critical engagement with the past that most challenged how Victorians understood the world and their place in it. In other words, this Victorian anxiety about progress was fed by the shock of the old. The piece then introduces thecore thesis of the volume as a whole, which is thatVictorian encounters with the past – though quintessentially modern – can only be properly understood through the nineteenth century’s passionate exploration of the interaction between religion and historicity, between the theological and the classical, between the Bible and classical antiquity.

Enlightenment thinkers rarely used the word “consumption,” but they spoke incessantly of “luxury,” a multivalent term that became the principal idiom through which writers discussed the moral, social, and political implications of consumption. Controversy over luxury was a proxy for the first modern debate on consumption. The discussion of luxury shifted decisively at the turn of the eighteenth century, when two writers – François Fénelon and Bernard Mandeville – laid the foundations for a vigorous Enlightenment debate. Drawing on ancient and medieval critiques, Fénelon argued that luxury corrupted morals, scrambled the social order, and destroyed states. Mandeville countered by advancing a bold apology for luxury. Far from weakening states, he argued, luxury generated prosperous and powerful nations. Gender would play a key role in the debate that ensued. Whereas critics of luxury like Jean-Jacques Rousseau warned that excessive consumption effeminized men, rendering them unfit for public service, defenders of luxury like David Hume claimed that material well-being was the sign of a civilized society in which men and women frequently interacted. In the second half of the eighteenth century, certain thinkers sought to resolve the debate. Political economists argued that if consumption was directed toward productive ends, wealthy and powerful nations would avoid corruption and endure. Meanwhile, luxury producers incorporated critiques of luxury by designing natural and healthy products. Criticism of luxury did little to slow the pace of consumption.