The major fault-line in Victorian engagement with the Bible and antiquity lay between believers and unbelievers, across a wide array of perspectives. Something of this is traced here, from the rationalistic legacy of Bentham to Pusey’s consciously reactionary repudiation of his own early immersion in German scholarship.Consequently, literature about the Bible and antiquity could be polemical, but solvents could be found, not least ones that were associational and personal. Most importantly, friendship could provide such a bond: this chapter traces that which began at Charterhouse School between George Grote and Connop Thirlwall and which ended only with their deaths. Grote is now much better remembered than Thirlwall, but both wrote important histories of ancient Greece that would be translated into German, a great tribute given their own indebtedness to German scholarship. In a review of Curtius’s history of ancient Greece, Arnold criticised both Grote and Thirlwall for failing to reach the new standards set by more recent German scholarship. Within a year of the death of Thirlwall, Anglo-German classical scholarship was being written in an altogether new key.

J. S. Mill in the 1830s and early 1840s, Barrell argues, thought extensively about the practical problems of historical enquiry. His progressive theory of historiography, sketched in the article on Jules Michelet, rejected presentism and the resort to ‘everyday experience’. This rejection was bolstered by his reception of German Historismus, Romanticism, and ‘Continental’ philosophy, all of which set out to de-familiarise and imaginatively reconstruct the past. The best modern historians, J. S. Mill argued, were more attentive than their eighteenth-century predecessors to the past’s animating uniqueness, and it is significant that Hume, Gibbon, and other eighteenth-century luminaries barely featured in his account. At the same time, his defence of general principles provided continuities with Scottish philosophical history and the utilitarian tradition in which he was raised. Thomas Carlyle’s account of the French Revolution, while innocent of presentism, was ultimately conjectural and uncritical, whereas Grote’s History of Greece combined criticism with philosophical insight, placing it somewhere between the second and third stages of historical enquiry.