This is the first book to give a general account of the transformation of classics in English schools from an avocation among Victorian gentlemen to an object of serious study among professional scholars, from an elite social marker to a marginalized academic subject.

"This excellent book is of more immediate interest to American classicists than the comparatively narrow scope of its subtitle would suggest. Classicists should be grateful, for this exemplary exercise in intellectual, social snobbery, entrenched authority and perverse conservatism that only a scholar trained in the disciplines of sociology (this is not in Stray's case an oxymoron) and history could achieve."

"Classicists should be grateful, for this exemplary exercise in intellectual, social, and educational history is also a candid survey of social snobbery, entrenched authority, and perverse conservatism that only a scholar trained in the disciplines of sociology... and history could achieve...this book shows us what can and did happen when entrenched authority is blind, supine, or self-satisfied, yet it also encourages us to see that we need never give up the intellectual and humane values of the discipline to which we have devoted out lives."

Christopher Stray, Honorary Research Fellow, Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Wales, Swansea