Remember that religious study was the driving force behind much of the education that went on for a long time. If you view some version of the bible as literal divine word, learning the language it's written in makes sense.
The Catholic church only allowed mass to be delivered in a language other than Latin in the 1960s. If you wanted to simply understand what was said, you had to learn it.
The Anglican church (to which virtually all of the Victorian elite belonged) had phased out Latin since the 17th century. Likewise Victorian scientists, eg Darwin, wrote in English. (If they needed to correspond with their peers abroad, they might use Latin, but many would learn French, German, Russian...)
Its use in the Catholic church probably helped Latin survive as long as it did, but by the 19th century it was already an impractical relic whose prestige in English schools came partly from the fact that it had no actual application.
you're wrong the church originally did the Mass in Rome in Greek and it allows it in several other languages in other regions from the beginning. When the Mass was changed to latin in Rome it was the speaking language of the people. Learning latin was about important for most of the western history because pretty much every important book was written or translated to Latin
> If you wanted to simply understand what was said, you had to learn it.
What an absolutely bonkers concept. I mean, how dare they. I am shocked, I tell you! Shocked! Outrageous. I mean, the Catalonians treated me the same way when I visited Catalonia. I finally just gave up and went home.
The Eastern Orthodox (and other pre-schism apostolic) churches vigorously promote the liberal use of the vernacular in many cases. Even those which had a rather ossified "sacred liturgical" language sort of moved with the times.
With the story about the Roman Catholic Church, it is important to note that the Council of Trent was pivotal here. Trent essentially decreed to suppress/abolish many, many localized liturgies, and replace them all with the Roman-style liturgy. The Latin Church was quite diversified up until that point in the 16th century. Trent looked forward to a truly global and universal church that needed a central point of unity and cohesion. A singular liturgy was ideal to ensure that abuses were minimized and everyone was "playing according to Hoyle" because, as you may recall, two huge continents had just opened up for evangelization beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
So in the days before French became the lingua franca of the U.N. and the world, Latin was truly the proto-lingua-franca. Latin could transmit ideas amongst many people and be well-understood. Latin crossed borders, in ways that German or Euskara or Finnish could not. That is an extremely valuable aspect of a language, and that is why we value English, and Mandarin in much the same way in the 21st century.
The Church did not, however, prevent you from reading Sacred Scripture in the vernacular. The Douay-Rheims was a contemporary of the KJV and many English versions have been produced since then. Many, many vernacular Catholic Bibles. So essentially, if you knew your Scripture, you'd probably figure out the Mass anyway by following along. And as they say, "actions speak louder than words" and also, "a picture is worth 1,000 words" so the act of attending Mass was never quite wasted, as you'd hope to portray.
p.s. The "literal divine Word of God" is Jesus Christ. The Bible, for its part, came later than Jesus, and itself is a product of Sacred Tradition.
The Catholic church only allowed mass to be delivered in a language other than Latin in the 1960s. If you wanted to simply understand what was said, you had to learn it.