ABSTRACT
Historians of philosophy and of Victorian culture alike have found it hard to agree on a definition of Stoicism which captures the complexity of its cultural reception in nineteenth-century Britain. Should we restrict ourselves to philosophical ideas which identify themselves clearly with the various Greek and Roman Stoic writers, or should we rather concern ourselves with the examination of a wider cultural attitude towards pain, difficulty and the challenges of life? To put it differently, we can confine ourselves to the discussion of Stoicism, with a capital “S,” or broaden out to include “stoicism,” written in lower case. In the words of Gordon Hartford, the term “Stoic” should refer to the “intentional attaining of the goals of the Greek and later Roman philosophy of Stoicism” while with “stoic,” he writes, “we are in a laxer field of meaning, using here a word which has become proverbial in its reach to cover austere steadfastness, a type of uncomplaining endurance” (Hartford 1999: 53).
