Double post: Classics and the Mass Market I & II
The third post in the Realigning Reception blog series is a double bill by Claire Barnes and Caterina Domeneghini, who each offer a perspective on ‘Classics and the Mass Market’.
“Classics” and “mass market” are both extremely loaded, multivalent terms; both are capable of eliciting significant debate around their use and applicability, especially in light of contemporary discourse around the exclusionary narratives at work within the discipline. This two-part blog post seeks to interrogate some of these ideas around a comparatively specific place and time – Britain moving from the 19th to the 20th century – in order to explore specific historical instances of the vital conversations Classical Reception is facing (and, indeed, beginning to face up to). Tensions between the original and the copy, the acquisition and appropriation of antiquity, and the atavistic pursuit of ‘the classical’ as legitimisation of literary/cultural devices are all in full force during this period. Through our work on this place and time we are both keen to retain an awareness of the ongoing, changeable implications of and interplay between notions of ‘classics’ and of ‘mass appeal’. In short: what happens when classics and capitalism meet, and who stands to benefit from its consumption?
In the first post of this double bill, entitled ‘Authenticity for Sale: Classics and the heritage industry’, Claire Barnes will consider the development of classics as a commercial property during the mid- to late-19th century, and how this correlates with a contemporary impetus to select among ‘lifestyles’ as a means of self-identification. Using the Great Exhibition as a case study, she will look at how attitudes to both classics and commerce (and the interplay between the two) might be understood as illustrative of the desire for ‘authenticity’ omnipresent in the heritage industry.
Claire Barnes is a DPhil student at Oxford whose DPhil project charts philosophical and popular understandings of ‘authenticity’ and how these have been applied to classical tropes across this period – particularly those used to express a perceived ‘authentic’ connection with classical antiquity. Her thesis considers the use of ‘classic’ and ‘authentic’ as constructs signifying value, and how both emerge in the socio-political and intellectual climate of the late 19th and early 20th century – though it also examines the evolution and impact of thinking around authenticity and classics down to the present day.
Authenticity for sale: Classics and the heritage industry, by Claire Barnes
Notions of consumerism and “mass markets” in 19th century Britain bring with them a host of interconnected factors – often associated with the series of developments known as the Industrial Revolution. It’s a familiar story: increased industrialisation demands an influx of workers moving to cities, attitudes to labour and earning patterns adjust accordingly, and – alongside this increased, often brutal reliance on the workers – an emergent middle class with the income and willingness to match the increased production on offer. Resultingly, this type of consumer need no longer simply possess an object but select among objects, based on what a particular design, brand, or iteration of that product confers. These dramatic shifts in production and purchasing patterns lead to what Elizabeth Outka (2009) describes as an environment where the consumer does “not simply live a life, but select(s) among lifestyles”. The most tantalising product of all, the re-imagined self which exists beyond the constraints of one’s original circumstances, is forever there – just out of reach, beyond the next transformative purchase. The powerfully compelling capitalist illusion that the acquisition of a product will directly shape and actualise one’s truest self is identified by Outka as “the commodified authentic”. A paradox, but a highly seductive one.
Classics and the “commodified authentic”
This developing language of associations between what one purchases, what one fills a home with, and the volumes this speaks about social position, motivation, and outlook, maps nicely onto the cultural cachet that is never far away when looking at receptions (or indeed consumptions?) of classical antiquity. What might be conferred by positioning a classical artefact, or – more likely – an artefact which represents the ‘classics’, in the home? Books are an obvious signifier (see Part II of this double bill), as are reproductions of classical art.
This latter point, in particular, ties in with the 19th century’s appetite for archaeology and a notable shift in widespread understandings of the past. The materiality and tactility of the past becomes even more appealing alongside contemporary developments in archaeological work and widespread fascination with archaeological finds from antiquity gaining significant traction during this period. Again, we are seeing a confluence of factors which combine to make the classical past both more accessible and more marketable: the popular press (hand in hand with the advent of photography) was covering new archaeological finds, such as Schliemann’s digs in Turkey and, later in the century, Grenfell and Hunt’s at Oxyrhynchus. Take for instance the (in)famous 1873 photograph of Sophia Schliemann draped in jewels from the ‘treasure of Priam’: a woman of the time is “trying on” antiquity for herself, however problematically. Access to the jewels themselves was not widely available, but the photograph and its imaginative implications (including that of adopting, as it were, an ‘authenticating’ mantle of ancientness) was circulated through the press.
If we’re exploring a widespread, or indeed “mass” appeal, the impact of archaeological finds on the popular imagination might be understood as offering a democratising effect. The past is now something that exists just beneath one’s feet, rather than operating solely at a theoretical level within the rarefied space of an academic institution. There is a visceral, tangible appeal to a past in which an individual can reach down into the ground and ‘earth’ themselves. Yet, in the instances of Schliemann, Oxyrhynchus, etc., it is not from British earth that these histories are being exhumed. Colonialising influences, then, come into play – with a British mindset “trying on” antiquity like Priam’s jewels and opting to situate itself as part of an unquestioned inherited trajectory from the ancient Mediterranean. Having a reproduction classical object in one’s home, then, or a book or a print depicting the classical past, operates doubly as an advertisement of one’s cultural capital as well as a symbol of one’s positioning within a historical narrative – what Outka terms the “originary authentic”.
The “Great Exhibition” effect
Scholars looking at the nineteenth century often cite the Great Exhibition of 1851 as a turning point in both British attitudes to the past and appetite for the consumerism of the future. The 1851 exhibition’s full title – “The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations” – encapsulates two significant themes at work in this period: a festival of industrial might, and a festival of empire. Yet even in this display of contemporary innovation, a construction announcing – to paraphrase Trollope – “the way we live now”, it was not simply the world of the moment that attendees were invited to explore. The originary authenticity of antiquity was there too, situating and legitimising one empire among imperial precedent. The team behind the exhibition worked alongside amateur archaeologists in their scrupulous attempts to reconstruct a Pompeian house, with emphasis on the “scientific” nature of these archaeological findings helping to lend the experience a certain cachet for the hordes of curious Londoners passing through – many of them unable to participate in the vogue for archaeological tourism gaining popularity among the wealthier classes.
For all the claims of scientific accuracy, there’s also significant evidence of a desire to mould or direct mainstream attitudes towards the displays and their origins. Items suggestive of colonial might were given prominence, such as the koh-i-noor – the world’s largest known diamond at the time and ‘acquired’ from India as part of the Lahore Treaty in the previous year. There is a rather condescending sense of duty in moulding working class attitudes at play in the presentation of the classical areas of the exhibition – the choice of a Pompeiian house, for instance, emblematic of traditional family values stretching back to an imagined antiquity. The house is therefore interesting as a mise en abyme within the Crystal Palace built to hold the exhibition. Originally proposed as more of a novelty experience, a themed tearoom, the house became a destination in its own right. There is a wider trend in evidence here, with Paris’s Maison Pompeiiene (built as a private house by Jérôme Napoleon in 1856) and Bavaria’s highly idealised Pompejanum (1840 – built as a tourist attraction).
The longer-term educational implications of the exhibition were seized upon by John Ruskin, who used its comprehensive cast collections to set up cast museums and galleries with a view to ‘instructing’ the masses on the virtues of classical art. There is a fine line between accessibility and cultural imposition, here; something which any mention of “mass” marketing calls into question. Narratives around the exhibition regularly note its popularity and the societal cross-section it sought to attract. Entry to the exhibition ranged from 3 guineas to 1 shilling (around £5), with the shilling tickets proving especially popular (four and a half million sold). To quote Shelley Hales: “The Crystal Palace presented an antiquity geared for the era of mass production, inviting the possibility of a “total recreation” – and acquisition – of things past.”
Note: I have Rhiannon Easterbrook to thank here for drawing the link between Outka’s theory of originary authenticity and how this might be applied to the commercial implications of the Exhibition. Her work on Classics and commerce has since been published in ‘Shopping Like a Satyr, Styling like a Nymph: Towards a History of Classical Reception in Consumption’ (2021).
Latin in your living room
The Great Exhibition is an interesting case study for 19th century modes of replication and consumerism, offering both the promise of immersivity (through ancient replicas on view in the Crystal Palace) as well as reproduction artefacts available for purchase as souvenirs, competitively priced like the tickets. From other sources, too, representations of classical antiquity (themselves also mediated) were making their way into suburban drawing rooms: reproduction rights for prints of popular contemporary painters were sometimes worth more than their original works. Such was the case with Lawrence Alma-Tadema, whose highly-coloured, even immersive depictions of classical scenes remain extremely evocative of a particular 19th century understanding of antiquity. Alma-Tadema is known to have visited the Crystal Palace (and its Pompeian reconstruction) during an early visit to London, and at the height of his career in the late 19th century was keen to position himself as a ‘semi-antiquarian’. Paintings such as The Roses of Eliogabalus (1888) represent a desire for immersive intimacy with the ancient past.
By the mid to late 19th century a “heritage industry” was in full swing, offering an ‘originary authenticity’ through not only classical motifs but those closer to home – think about the arts and crafts movement, for example. In a set of William Morris curtains we are again presented with the paradoxical commerce of the consciously non-commercial. The consumer of what might now be termed ‘artisanal’ goods is seeking to buy an escape from the commodified through a nostalgic sense of bespoke craft, with consequent market explosion as many others clamour for the same.
Unsettling the elite
This move towards a “heritage industry” regarding the classics naturally brings with it a destablisation of classical antiquity as the preserve of the elite (its “constant patina of privilege”, to quote Goldhill). Broader debates around the democratisation of culture somehow diminishing its worth were rife in the period (much like the debates abounding in the previous century around public access to museums) and continued to rumble on, more theoretically, into the following century – e.g. Benjamin’s 1935 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, where said reproduction is argued to diminish the innate ‘aura’ of the work. Kate Nichols (2015) articulates this very clearly: “The idea that the past might become a recreational space has been greeted with hostility; critics align mass audiences with inauthenticity, and marginalize the deep engagements with the past that ‘heritage’ might constitute.” Fears that anyone might buy their way into the classical cognoscenti were (and perhaps remain) apparent in certain quarters – something which Christopher Stray identifies as inextricably linked with increased access to learning Latin in the ‘cheaper’ private schools of the middle classes (the public schools and universities responded by doubling down on the value of Greek). The turn of the 20th century was bringing with it significant tussles and paradoxes: What does it now mean to fill one’s home and discourse with artefacts signifying, even curating, a relationship with classical antiquity?
WORKS CITED
Ardis, Ann L., Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880-1922 (Cambridge 2002)
Church, Roy, ‘Advertising Consumer Goods in Nineteenth Century Britain: Reinterpretations’, The Economic History Review 52 (2000)
Crook, J. Mordaunt, The Rise of the Nouveaux-Riches: Style and Status in Victorian and Edwardian Architecture (London 1999)
Easterbrook, Rhiannon, ‘Shopping Like a Satyr, Styling like a Nymph: Towards a History of Classical Reception in Consumption’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 29 (2021)
Fraser, Hamish, The Coming of the Mass Market: 1850-1914 (Macmillan 1981)
Goldhill, Simon, Victorian Culture and Classical Identity: art, opera, fiction, and the proclamation of modernity (Princeton 2011)
Hales, S.J., ‘Recasting Antiquity: Pompeii and the Crystal Palace’, Arion 14 (2006)
Nichols, Kate, Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace (Oxford 2015)
Outka, Elizabeth, Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic (Oxford 2009)
Prettejohn, Elizabeth and Trippi, Peter eds., Lawrence Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity (London 2016)
Slaney, Helen, Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750-1820: Moved by Stone, (London 2020)
Stray, Christopher, Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities and Society in England 1830-1960 (Oxford 1998)
The image at the top of this post is from Unsplash.