“This Is the Modern Horse of Troy”
“This Is the Modern Horse of Troy”

The Trojan Horse as Nineteenth-Century Children’s Entertainment and Educational Analogy

Author(s): Rachel Bryant Davies
Subject(s): Pre-WW I & WW I (1900 -1919), Interwar Period (1920 - 1939), WW II and following years (1940 - 1949), Post-War period (1950 - 1989), Transformation Period (1990 - 2010)
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: 19th century classical reception; children’s periodicals; children’s toys; children’s literature and culture
Summary/Abstract: The preoccupation with playful pedagogy in nineteenth-century Britain, alongside the burgeoning publishing market, produced many products for children’s consumption in apparently transient formats such as board-games, theatrical souvenirs, and magazines. Classical myth, especially through cheap print, reached a wider social range than only those families with access to traditional, formal, classical education. Charting the Trojan Horse’s reincarnations across these media, this chapter examines how and why the Wooden Horse, usually symbolic of mythical destruction, became a quintessential toy: a hopeful symbol of the social and educational mobility promoted by children’s periodicals. The Trojan War myths were often retold in the guise of playful amusement. This chapter argues that, just as the mythical Horse smuggled Greek soldiers within Troy’s city walls, so entertaining accounts of the Horse secreted moral and ideological instruction, shaped by wider cultural discourses surrounding canonical epic literature and the accessibility of classical education.

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