Rachel Bryant Davies’ monograph takes us on a tour of some of the more dilapidated corners of the Victorian imagination in this study of creative responses to the ruins (or lack thereof) of Troy and Carthage. If there is one thing the Victorians can do, we learn, it is fill in the gaps, sometimes in the most irreverent or surprising of ways.
The book concentrates far more on Troy than it does Carthage, but throughout Bryant Davies encompasses a range of experiences of antiquity across the social scale. While the bulk of analysis falls on a range of popular entertainments, more highbrow debates around the location of the ancient city and its implications for the historical basis of the Bible are key elements of the discussion, allowing the reader substantial insight into the complexities involved in gauging a full picture, not only of the Victorian reception of Troy and Carthage, but the diffusion of antiquity more generally. Starting with an extensive introduction to the conceptual and historical framings that shape this study, chapter 1 makes plain some of the nuances involved. Bryant Davies highlights that the audiences of material which may appear ‘popular’, such as burlesques and ephemera, included the social elite and well-educated. She explains that the boundaries between both demographics and ‘different cultural spaces’ were blurred, and that these form ‘an overarching discourse about conceiving the past, present and future’ (10).
Undoubtedly, it is a tall order for both writer and reader to conceptualise an almost infinitely complex web of influences, allusions and citation. However, Bryant Davies’ choice of case studies gives a wealth of routes into this tantalising nexus. Chapter 2 is a timely investigation into debates around the necessity of excavating Homeric Troy. Anyone concerned by the plight of university archaeological departments or interested in how humanities research is communicated to the public will have something to gain here. Bryant Davies analyses the presentation in the contemporary middle-class press of taxpayer funding for these investigations, along with both Heinrich Schliemann’s pivotal discoveries and the Romantics’ more imaginative communing with the idea of Troy. Spanning more than a century’s worth of activity across several countries, this chapter is an impressively detailed introduction to the portrayal of ‘Troy’s duality, as both “gone” and yet culturally vital’ (123).
Chapter 3 presents Philip Astley’s circus, identified here as a quintessentially English institution, offering family-friendly productions (126), which presented to packed audiences several ‘mythological equestrian burlesques’ based on the Trojan War. These entertainments are a far cry from the scientific exertions described in the previous chapter, but both sections evoke vividly the mass press and its readerships. Bryant Davies’ discussion of the toy-theatre replicas and other souvenirs – among the book’s highlights in my opinion – connects with one of the most elusive aspects of classical reception: that of non-literary but no less intimate, emotional and creative engagements with the past, right at the hearth.
Chapter 4 returns to an increasingly popular line of enquiry: the classical burlesque. Profiting from Richard W. Schoch’s argument that burlesques ‘disperse meaning’ (Victorian Theatrical Burlesques (London 2003), xxviii, quoted on page 252), and in a persuasive discussion of anachronism, Bryant Davies argues that burlesques’ ‘humour is as much at the expense of neo-classicism as the classical canon itself’, suggesting that they problematise the British assumption of classical heritage (262). Chapter 5 outlines narrative and iconographic traditions depicting Scipio Africanus the Younger and Caius Marius in Carthage. The paradox of a city with no ruins becoming a visual emblem of a ruined future is deftly highlighted. Idid wonder how these classical engagements with the notion of translatio imperii (‘transfer of (imperial) rule’) implicated ordinary citizens in more than just a sense of self-validation but in material imperialist processes. For example, some undated European chocolate adverts (figs 5.19 and 5.20), featuring Roman soldiers among the ruins of Carthage and Troy, are compelling evidence in Bryant Davies’ argument that there was a mass proliferation of such images (332). However, the European chocolate trade’s bloody origins in enslavement and imperialism in Africa reminds us that this mass consumption reflects not only that lower-class Europeans were familiar with images of antiquity, but that they were beneficiaries of a vast system of extraction that developed in dialogue with ancient models of empire. When moving away from the model of individual ‘elite male’ creators in classical reception studies, as Bryant Davies rightly strives to do (44), the contours of privilege and exploitation don’t disappear: on the contrary, they become more involved.
The writer’s knowledge is compendious indeed, taking in British culture from the long nineteenth century and a multitude of aspects of the ancient world. Occasionally, a little more guidance in navigating such a spread of people and things would increase accessibility. However, careful study is rewarded with a rich trove of fascinating information about Victorian classical reception, as well as some valuable reframing of the topic as a whole.
