ABSTRACT
Classics have long functioned to exclude working-class people from educational privileges. Classics was uniquely instrumental in the intellectual and cultural reproduction of class hierarchies in Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian society, which was itself partly a product of the rigid segregation of social classes in the educational system, as Matthew Arnold saw. Henry Knighton, Joseph Gerrald implies, was complaining about popular literacy as well as popular access to the word of God. Gerrald accurately presents both Knighton and Burke as enemies of social inclusion. The distinction between lucre and social capital is further explored in the memoir of Charles Frederick Briggs, an American citizen, published in 1855. Translation into the mother tongue is in turn implicated in a threat to the established political order and the consequent need for the subordination of the social swine. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
