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 p.i

Testing New Opinions and

Courting New Impressions

Reflecting Walter Pater’s diverse engagements with literature, the

visual arts, history, and philosophy, this collection of essays explores
new interdisciplinary perspectives engaging readers and scholars alike
to revisit methodologies, intertextualities, metaphysical positions, and
stylistic features in the works of the Victorian essayist. A revised
contextual portrait of Pater in Victorian culture questions
representations of the detached aesthete. Current editorial and
biographical projects show Pater as fully responsive to the emergence
of modern consumer culture and the changes in readership in Britain
and the United States. New critical views of rarely studied texts
enhance the image of Pater as a cosmopolitan aesthete dialoguing with
contemporary culture. Conceptual analysis of his texts brings new
light to the aesthetic paradox embodied by Pater, between artistic
detachment and immersion in the Heraclitean flux of life. Finally,
aestheticism is redefined as proposing new artistic and linguistic
synthesis by merging art forms and embracing interart poetics.

Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada is Associate Professor at Rouen

University. Her research and teaching interests include British
literature, art criticism, and painting of the 1860s–1890s.
Martine Lambert-Charbonnier is Associate Professor at the University
of Sorbonne-Paris 4. Her field of research focuses on late-nineteenth-
century literature and aesthetics in England, and especially on Walter
Pater.

Charlotte Ribeyrol is Associate Professor in nineteenth-century English

literature at the University Paris-Sorbonne. She is also a Member of
the Institut Universitaire de France and a Marie Curie Fellow at
Trinity College, Oxford (2016–2018).
 p.ii

Among the Victorians and Modernists

Edited by Dennis Denisoff

This series publishes monographs and essay collections on literature,

art, and culture in the context of the diverse aesthetic, political, social,
technological, and scientific innovations that arose among the
Victorians and Modernists. Viable topics include, but are not limited
to, artistic and cultural debates and movements; influential figures and
communities; and agitations and developments regarding subjects such
as animals, commodification, decadence, degeneracy, democracy,
desire, ecology, gender, nationalism, the paranormal, performance,
public art, sex, socialism, spiritualities, transnationalism, and the
urban. Studies that address continuities between the Victorians and
Modernists are welcome. Work on recent responses to the periods
such as Neo-Victorian novels, graphic novels, and film will also be
considered.

1 Arthur O’Shaughnessy, A Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British

Museum
By Jordan Kistler

2 Dialectics of Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction

By Leila May

3 Louise Jopling
By Patricia de Montfort
 p.iii

Testing New Opinions and

Courting New Impressions
New Perspectives on Walter Pater

Edited by Anne-Florence Gillard-

Estrada, Martine Lambert-Charbonnier,
and Charlotte Ribeyrol
 p.iv

First published 2018

by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2018 Taylor & Francis

The right of the editors Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada, Martine Lambert-

Charbonnier, and Charlotte Ribeyrol to be identified as the authors of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered

trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested.

ISBN: 978-1-138-08157-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-10352-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon LT Std

by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
 p.v

Contents

List of Figures
List of Tables
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments

Introduction
BÉNÉDICTE COSTE, ANNE-FLORENCE GILLARD-ESTRADA, MARTINE
LAMBERT-CHARBONNIER, AND CHARLOTTE RIBEYROL

PART I
Pater’s Modern Involvement: New Editorial and Biographical
Approaches

1 Walter Pater and the New Media: The “Child” in the House
LAUREL BRAKE

2 Privileging the Later Pater: The Choice of Copy-Text for the

Collected Works
LESLEY HIGGINS AND DAVID LATHAM

3 Habitus and the Multifaceted Self: Are There Different Paters?

MARTINE LAMBERT-CHARBONNIER
PART II
Intertextualities: The Aesthete and Contemporary Culture

4 Trace, Race and Grace: The Influence of Ernest Renan’s

Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse on Pater’s Gaston de Latour
ADAM LEE

p.vi

5 The Loveliness of Things and the Sorrow of the World: Art and
Ethics in Pater and George Eliot
THOMAS ALBRECHT

6 A Great Chain of Curiosity: Pater’s “Sir Thomas Browne” and its

Nineteenth-Century British Context
DAICHI ISHIKAWA

PART III
Modern Interactions: Aestheticism, Desire, and Artistic Detachment

7 “What an interesting period . . . is this we are in!”: Walter Pater

and the Synchronization of the “Æsthetic Life”
JOSEPH BRISTOW

8 Walter Pater’s Dialectical History of (Same-Sex) Desire: Queer

Conclusions
MICHAEL F. DAVIS

9 “Unimpassioned Passion”: Inner Excess and Exterior Restraint in

Pater’s Rhetoric of Affect
NICHOLAS MANNING

PART IV
Interart Poetics: The Art of the Portrait
10 “What came of him?”: Change and Continuity in Pater’s Portraits
LENE ØSTERMARK-JOHANSEN

11 Walter Pater’s Lives of Philosophers: Inversions of the Aesthetic

Life in “Coleridge’s Writings” and “Sebastian van Storck”
KIT ANDREWS

12 Reading the Mona Lisa

PASCAL AQUIEN

Index
 p.vii

Figures

10.1 Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1815–1891), Le liseur blanc

(The White Reader) (1857), oil on panel, 21.7 cm × 15.7 cm.
Paris, Musée d’Orsay
10.2 Jean-Baptiste Pater (1695–1736), Portrait de Marie-Marguerite
Pater, oil on canvas, 79.2 cm × 62.9 cm. Valenciennes, Musée
des Beaux-Arts
10.3 Philip de Koninck, Panoramic River Landscape (1664), oil on
canvas, 95 cm × 121 cm. Museum Boijmans van Beuningen,
Rotterdam
10.4 Wilhelm von Gloeden, Bacchus (1890s) photograph
10.5 Dresden figurine (mid eighteenth century), porcelain, 25 cm,
private collection
12.1 Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa (1503–1506), oil, 77 cm × 53
cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre
 p.viii

Tables

1.1 Monthly magazines. New generations 1859–1890. 1 shilling;

6d
1.2 New (fourth) generation of reviews 1865–1898
1.3 Patterns of publication 1: serials to which Walter Pater
contributed
1.4 Patterns of publication 2: numbers of contributions per serial
title
1.5 Patterns of publication 3: Pater’s serial publications by genre
1.6 Patterns of publication 4: contributions to periodicals, by
decades of entry
1.7 Patterns of publication 5: Pater’s use of anonymity and
signature
1.8 Patterns of publication 6: Pater in American “eclectics,” 1876–
1892
1.9 Patterns of publication 7: aggregations of Pater’s journalism,
excluding collected editions
1.10 Pater’s Uncollected Essays (Mosher, 1903): contents by
category
1.11 Walter H. Pater and Macmillan and Co.
 p.ix

Contributors

Thomas Albrecht teaches literature and literary criticism as an

Associate Professor in the Department of English at Tulane
University in New Orleans. He is the author of The Medusa Effect:
Representation and Epistemology in Victorian Aesthetics (State
University of New York Press, 2009) and the editor of Selected
Writings by Sarah Kofman (Stanford University Press, 2007). He is
currently completing a book manuscript on ethics in the writings of
George Eliot.

Kit Andrews is Professor of English at Western Oregon University. He

has published articles on Walter Pater, Michael Field, Watteau, and
T.H. Green in journals such as ELT and The Journal of the History
of Ideas. His article on Carlyle’s reception of Fichte recently
appeared in Literature Compass. He is currently researching
Benjamin Jowett’s critique of the Victorian reception of Hegel by
Oxford Idealist philosophers.

Pascal Aquien is Professor of English Literature (Poetry) at Paris-

Sorbonne University. His major publications include W.H. Auden:
de l’Éden perdu au jardin des mots (L’Harmattan, 1996); The
Picture of Dorian Gray. Pour une poétique du roman (Éditions du
Temps, 2004); Oscar Wilde. Les mots et les songes (Aden, 2006);
Tombeau pour Swinburne. Chapter: “Lesbia Brandon, ou l’art et la
 lanière” (Aden, 2010); numerous editions and translations of Oscar
Wilde’s comedies and major works (Flammarion and Le Livre de
Poche). He has contributed to the edition of Oscar Wilde’s works
(Œuvres, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1996) and edited Thomas De
Quincey’s works (Œuvres, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard,
2011). He is author of numerous articles on English poetry (19th
and 20th centuries). His research interests include stylistic analysis
of poetry and literary corpus.

Laurel Brake is Professor Emerita of Literature and Print Culture at

Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests are media
history, gender, digital humanities, and Walter and Clara Pater. She
is the author of Subjugated Knowledges (NYU Press, 1994), Walter
Pater (Northcote House, 1994), Print in Transition (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2001), and a number of co-edited collections on Pater
and on the press over the past three decades. Recent print and
digital work includes ncse (Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition;
ncse, a free online digital edition of six nineteenth-century journals:
www.ncse.ac.uk); and DNCJ (Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century
Journalism), co-edited with Marysa Demoor (in print and online),
and articles on ephemera, supplements, journalism networks,
Swinburne and journalism, Pater and American reprints, Pater and
the Guardian, ‘The Lives of Men’ on Pater biography and Thomas
Wright, and ‘Better Together. The Paters and ink Work’ in Life
Writing, about the advantages of writing a sibling biography. With
Jim Mussell, Roger Luckhurst, and Ed King she co-edited W.T.
Stead, Newspaper Revolutionary in 2012, and in 2015, she co-
edited The News of the World and the British Press 1843–2011,
with Mark Turner and Chandrika Paul. She is an editor of a volume
of journalism in the new Oxford Collected Works of Walter Pater,
and serves on the advisory boards of Media History, Victorian
Periodical Review, Esprit (a network of scholars in Europe writing
on European periodicals) and NINES. She is currently working on
 Ink Work, a biography of Walter Pater, Clara Pater and print
culture.

p.x

Joseph Bristow is Distinguished Professor of English, University of

California, Los Angeles. His recent books include a study (co-
authored with Rebecca N. Mitchell), Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton:
Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery (Yale
University Press, 2015), a collection (co-edited with Josephine
McDonagh), Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016), and an edited volume of essays, Oscar Wilde and
the Cultures of Childhood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). He is
currently completing Oscar Wilde on Trial: The Criminal
Proceedings, from Arrest to Imprisonment—5 April 1895–25 May
1895.

Bénédicte Coste teaches Victorian studies at the University of

Burgundy and concentrates on Walter Pater and Aestheticism. Her
latest monograph, “Cette époque de doute”: penser la croyance avec
Walter Pater, will be published in 2017. She is currently engaged in
a monograph on notable Aesthetic controversies. Her translation of
The Renaissance into French was published by Classiques Garnier
in 2016.

Michael F. Davis is Associate Professor of English at Le Moyne

College in Syracuse, New York. He has published essays on Rainer
Maria Rilke, Walter Pater, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. He is
currently completing books on Pater and Woolf and co-editing, with
Petra Dierkes-Thrun, a collection of essays on Oscar Wilde.

p.xi

Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada is Associate Professor at Rouen

University. Her research and teaching interests include British
literature, aesthetics, art criticism, and painting of the 1860s–1890s.
 She has co-edited Écrire l’art / Writing Art: Formes et enjeux du
discours sur les arts visuels en Grande-Bretagne et aux Etats-Unis,
with A.-P. Bruneau-Rumsey and S. Wells-Lassagne (Paris: Mare et
Martin, 2015) and has published a number of articles on Walter
Pater, Oscar Wilde, and British painting. She is currently writing a
book on the subject of “Greece” and the body in British paintings of
Antiquity (1860–1900) that draws on close readings of the images
through the theoretical approaches of French art historians such as
Georges Didi-Huberman as well as on the reception of these works
in Victorian art criticism and periodicals. She is also co-editing a
book with Anne Besnault-Levita entitled Beyond the Victorian /
Modernist divide: Remapping the Turn-of-the-Century Break in
Literature, Culture and the Visual Arts (forthcoming, Routledge).

Lesley Higgins specializes in Victorian and Modernist literature,

poetry, and editing at York University. In 2002, she published The
Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics (Palgrave)
and co-edited Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire (ELT Press).
Together with Elicia Clements, she co-edited Victorian Aesthetic
Conditions: Pater Across the Arts (Palgrave, 2010). In textual
editing mode, she is the co-general editor of the Collected Works of
Gerard Manley Hopkins (OUP), and for that series the editor of
Hopkins’s Oxford Essays and Notes (2006), the Dublin Notebook
(2014), and Diaries (2015). Together with David Latham, she is the
co-general editor of the Collected Works of Walter Pater (10
volumes, forthcoming from OUP).

Daichi Ishikawa is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at

Queen Mary University of London, where he is working on a
dissertation that explores the cosmopolitan notions of curiosity in
British Aestheticism with particular emphasis on the writings of
Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, and Lafcadio Hearn.

Martine Lambert-Charbonnier is Associate Professor at Paris-

Sorbonne University. Her field of research focuses on late
 nineteenth-century literature and aesthetics in England, and
especially on Walter Pater. Her doctoral dissertation on Walter
Pater’s “imaginary portraits” was published in 2004 (Walter Pater et
les “Portraits Imaginaires.” Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). Recent
publications include a chapter and an article on Walter Pater’s
famous passage on Mona Lisa (“La Joconde et les ‘espaces
subjectifs’ de l’écrit sur l’art chez Walter Pater.” Ecrire l’art / Writing
Art: Formes et enjeux du discours sur les arts visuels en Grande-
Bretagne et aux Etats-Unis, ed. A.-P. Bruneau-Rumsey, A.-F. Gillard-
Estrada, S. Wells-Lassagne. Paris: Mare et Martin, 2015; and “‘A
reality that almost amounts to illusion’: Walter Pater et le voile de la
Joconde”, Sillages critiques 14, 2012), a contribution to a collective
work on spiritualist naturalism in Europe (Le naturalisme
spiritualiste en Europe. Développement et rayonnement. ed. M.-C.
Cadars and M. Cedergren. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2012), an
online article on Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater published by
Oscholars, “Du plaisir à l’idéal: regards croisés entre Oscar Wilde et
Walter Pater”, Rue des Beaux Arts 33 (July–August 2011).

p.xii

David Latham teaches English at York University, edits the Journal of

Pre-Raphaelite Studies, and, with Lesley Higgins, is the co-general
editor of The Collected Works of Walter Pater in ten scheduled
volumes for Oxford University Press. His nine books are on
Victorian and Canadian literature, and include Haunted Texts:
Studies in Pre-Raphaelitism (University of Toronto Press, 2003),
Writing on the Image: Reading William Morris (University of
Toronto Press, 2007), and The First Prologue and Omitted Tales of
The Earthly Paradise: A Critical Edition (William Morris, 2013).

Adam Lee has a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford and is currently
editing Plato and Platonism for The Collected Works of Walter
Pater (forthcoming from OUP). He lives in Toronto and teaches at
Sheridan College.
Nicholas Manning is Associate Professor in American Literature at
Université Paris-Sorbonne. A graduate of the École Normale
Supérieure (Ulm), he is the author of Rhétorique de la sincérité. La
poésie moderne en quête d’un langage vrai (Honoré Champion,
2013), and Signs of Eternity: H.D.’s Trilogy (with Clément Oudart,
Fahrenheit, 2013). Founding editor of The Continental Review, his
research is devoted to the rhetoric of emotion in modern literature.
p.xiii

Lene Østermark-Johansen teaches English art and literature at the

University of Copenhagen. She is the author of Sweetness and
Strength: The Reception of Michelangelo in Late Victorian England
(Ashgate, 1998) and of Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture
(Routledge, 2011). Among her edited volumes are Nose Book:
Representations of the Nose in Literature and the Arts (Middlesex
University Press, 2000) (with Victoria de Rijke and Helen Thomas)
and Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance
(Routledge, 2005) (with John Law). She has a long-standing interest
in word–image relations and in the nineteenth-century reception of
the Italian Renaissance, and has published essays and articles on
Oscar Wilde, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Vernon Lee, Arthur
Symons, and most extensively on Walter Pater. Her annotated
edition of Pater’s Imaginary Portraits (Modern Humanities Research
Association, 2014), the first one ever, was received with great critical
acclaim, and she is currently expanding it to be included as volume
3 in The Collected Works of Walter Pater (forthcoming in 10
volumes from Oxford University Press). She is also working on a
monograph about Walter Pater and portraiture.

Charlotte Ribeyrol is Associate Professor in English literature at the

University Paris-Sorbonne and a Member of the Institut
Universitaire de France. A former student of the École Normale
Supérieure (Fontenay-Lyon), her main field of research is the
influence of Ancient Greece on Victorian painting and literature. She
is the author of « Étrangeté, passion, couleur », L’hellénisme de
Swinburne, Pater et Symonds (1865–1880), (Grenoble: ELLUG,
2013) as well as the editor of several collections of essays, including
The Colours of the Past in Victorian England (Oxford: Peterlang,
2016); “Antique Bodies in Nineteenth Century British Literature
and Culture” (with C. Bertonèche), Miranda (n°11, 2015); “Late
Victorian Paganism” (with C. Murray), Cahiers Victoriens et
Edouardiens (2015); and Inventer la peinture grecque antique (with
S. Alexandre and N. Philippe) (Lyon: ENS-Éditions, 2012). She is
currently preparing a monograph on the colours of William Burges’s
Great Bookcase at Trinity College, Oxford, where she holds a two-
year Marie Curie Fellowship (2016–2018).
 p.xiv

Acknowledgments

We are thankful to our colleagues from the Paris-Sorbonne University

Frédéric Regard and Pascal Aquien who supported our project.
We are also grateful to Bénédicte Coste who provided expertise to
define the outline of the volume and who took part in the drafting of
the introduction.
We would like to express our sincere thanks and appreciation to
Dennis Denisoff who encouraged and assisted us in the publication
process for this volume.
 p.1

Introduction
Bénédicte Coste, Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada,
Martine Lambert-Charbonnier, and Charlotte
Ribeyrol

What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and

courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy.

This quotation, taken from the “Conclusion” to Walter Pater’s essays

on the Renaissance, follows the purple passage which lays the
foundations of modern aestheticism:

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in
life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all,
habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of
the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts
under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to
knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or
any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or
work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend.
(Pater 1980, 189)

If this often-quoted exhortation to his enthusiastic readers has

received much critical attention over the past decades, Pater’s
invitation to challenge “facile orthodoxy” by “testing new opinions”
and “courting new impressions” is frequently overlooked, although
this subversive statement just as powerfully unveils the modernity of
the author’s novel and almost experimental engagement with past and
contemporary ideas. “Curiously” is certainly the key, polysemous
adverb in this sentence which not only echoes Pater’s sensual
celebration of “strange colours, and curious odours” in the preceding
lines, but also the heterodoxy of Charles Baudelaire, whose Curiosités
esthétiques were published posthumously in 1868. To be curious is
indeed not only to have a desire for knowledge but also for “new
impressions and new pleasures,” as Pater later explained in
Appreciations (1910a, 246).

p.2

Equally emphasized by Pater, opinions and impressions are central

to our understanding of the author’s aesthetic reflections. On the one
hand, Pater called for a constant dialogue with past and present
opinions, encouraging in his reader a turn of mind that would not
remain fixed on any precise philosophical standpoint. As one of his
students later put it, “he treated all systems with great respect, simply
putting their leading tenets before you[.] This cultured toleration had
the effect of an exquisite irony, reminiscent of Socrates” (Manson).
This dialogical posture is not only a defining characteristic of Pater’s
modern mind, which highlights relativism, it also provides
contemporary scholars of nineteenth-century culture with a method to
address major intellectual issues such as the relation between faith and
science or art and desire, which are still ongoing concerns in the
twenty-first century. Yet such opinions are just one aspect of Pater’s
literary work, which also relies on impressions to lend “colour” to his
ideas. As opinions provide a constantly evolving structure to his
thoughts, impressions are material for his own personal and aesthetic
expression and inspire him with powerful rhetoric to act on others’
emotions.
This complex articulation of “new opinions” and “new
impressions,” experimented by Pater, will be the focus of this volume
whose contributors emphasize the modernity of this key author who,
rather than shunning contemporary debates, was indeed curious about
“the gaudy, perplex light of modern life” (Pater 1980, 182). Studies in
Pater have undergone deep changes over the last two decades (Brake
and Small 1991; Brake and Williams 2002), and if further hypotheses
and ideas are still being aired and exchanged, some consensus seems to
prevail about essential issues relating to his own complex biography
and art of life writing, the imaginary portrait as a genre, and his
intricate relationship to the intellectual and philosophical debates of
his time. Such “opinions” concerning Pater the essayist, the singular
biographer, as well as the talented prose writer and first-class
rhetorician, have recently been refreshed by new methodologies in the
fields of humanities thanks to the influx of disciplines such as
sociology, media history, and intermedial studies. These multifaceted
critical trends and orientations equally underlie this collection which
envisages Pater as a prominent thinker of the late nineteenth century,
straddling disciplines in what is now increasingly acknowledged as the
highly politicized and international context of British aestheticism.
New approaches to Pater particularly reveal his modernity as a
periodical essayist and a painstaking journalist, constantly refining his
writings and seeking to shape his ideas in the best media form,
whether in periodicals or in essay collections. The forthcoming new
edition of his complete works by Oxford University Press, which will
also include some of his manuscripts, and to which several authors in
this volume have contributed, is very likely to generate new interest in
textual criticism, challenging the very notion of the authoritative text:
should editors choose the text of the first publication or print the last
version?1 Should Pater be seen essentially as a ubiquitous Victorian
journalist or as a canonized writer, Mallarmé’s “parfait prosateur”?
(Mallarmé 1897, 373). These issues need to be discussed in the context
of British and transatlantic media as well as of European literary
spheres over some four decades, which were subjected to profound
changes due to the massification and democratization of readers, the
diversification of periodicals, and the corporate concentration of
publishing.
p.3
 Breaking away with the image of the detached aesthete in his ivory
tower, this new understanding of Walter Pater as a multifaceted writer
immersed in his own time prompts new biographical approaches,
which draw both on the influx of sociology as well as on the wealth of
material recently unearthed – letters,2 personal testimonies, journals.
These methodologies complicate the task of the would-be biographer
by stressing the discursive nature of all material and by obscuring the
distinction between fiction and reality in all texts, be they letters or
literary writings.
But Pater’s modernity also appears in his skillful dialogues with
contemporary writers and peers through allusions, references, and
citations. Far from being reiterative, unoriginal, or plagiaristic, his
rhetorical strategy constitutes a great part of the pleasure we
experience when reading Pater, with our memories of other texts being
so often solicited by an unusual turn of phrase or a typographical
interplay of English and foreign words, italics and inverted commas
signaling some discreet or more openly acknowledged borrowing. In
particular, Pater addresses the failure of his age to harmonize
rationality and emotions, as the mind is deprived of sensory response
and must repress desire and sensuality, especially when dealing with
same-sex attraction.
Moreover, the refusal of Pater to engage in a single “system” or
“facile orthodoxy” does not preclude a thorough exploration of his
readings of philosophers. Pater’s relation to philosophy was a complex
one, as no text ever written or published by Pater explicitly presents
his own philosophy, although he lived the life of a philosopher
according to W. Shuter (Shuter 1988, 411–412). His rejection of
metaphysical and strictly empirical philosophy matches his rejection of
purely speculative philosophy severed from experience, Pater
vindicating instead the value of art to solve the tensions between the
quest for absolute perfection and the fleetingness of perceptions.
Finally Pater created the “genre” of the imaginary portrait, writing
literary and fictional portraits meant to present or to portray the life
of an individual worthy of a historical, intellectual or artistic focus.
Working definitions of both the literary portrait and the “imaginary
portrait” have been reshaped by recent contextual studies analyzing
how both genres fit into the complex Victorian artistic and literary
scene. Since the modern age did not provide Pater with adequate
conditions for a harmonious life, he explored the balance between the
mind and the senses in his imaginary portraits, promoting art as
fulfillment and interart poetics as a new language “of the emotions
and the body.” Thus Pater’s portraits reflect a complex dialogue
between the arts, between literature and painting, literature and
sculpture, literature and the art of the goldsmith, weaving new
correspondences into narratives rich in word painting.

p.4

The topics discussed in the following collection of essays further

explore these new critical methods to re-assess Pater’s multifaceted
talent as a Victorian periodical essayist, a biographer, a philosopher,
and an art critic. Each contributor challenges preconceived ideas of the
aesthete’s solipsism as they question Pater’s active participation in the
publishing industry and emphasize his intertextual dialogue with his
contemporaries even beyond British borders, shedding new light, in
particular, on his reading of French authors. All the essays rely on a
thorough knowledge of former and current studies to revise certain
assumptions, to suggest new approaches or lines of research, or to
introduce newly available material. This collection will therefore be of
interest both to the general reader and to the Pater scholar, providing
them with both “new opinions” and “new impressions” of his
writings.
The first new impressions the reader is presented with in this
volume address the aesthete’s solipsism. Reassessing the paradox of
artistic detachment frequently associated with Pater in past criticism,
the four essays in the first section of the volume unveil Pater’s active
involvement with “the modern world, with its conflicting claims, its
entangled interests” (Pater 1980, 182) thanks to a thorough
investigation into Pater’s journalism, his publishing choices, and
scholarly approaches to his biography.
As Laurel Brake shows, Pater published most of his texts in
periodicals and he was an influential Victorian essayist in a changing
print landscape where new periodicals engaged in signature, and
competed for variously educated and socially positioned readers.
Brake argues that Pater thoroughly explored this landscape and
became ubiquitous in London periodicals as well as in provincial and
American publications through syndication. Such ubiquity also
constituted a powerful means of transmission of his “new opinions”
and ideas to the first generation of Modernists. The issue of journalism
is a key aspect of Pater’s reception, as he moved from print articles to
full-length books, sometimes planning his volume in the process of
publishing separate articles. The various patterns of publication not
only challenge the vision of Pater as an aesthete living in his ivory
tower, they also reflect an “identity crisis” – the inner divide between
the status of a journalist and that of a man of letters, even when new
journalism was blurring the borders.
Pater’s strategic choices of publication are themselves indebted to
the question of the successive versions of his texts. In the perspective
of the forthcoming edition of his complete works, Lesley Higgins and
David Latham reopen a discussion that has been enriched by research
into genetic criticism. The rule so far has been to publish the last
version the author had revised and approved of, and Higgins and
Latham support this view, providing new arguments on the basis of
Pater’s writing process. While most scholars in genetic criticism
rightfully stress the importance of successive versions of writings to
assess properly writers’ achievements (Ferrer 2011), Higgins and
Latham underline that Pater revised his texts endlessly, always trying
to print the latest version of his appreciations. While such meticulous
habits are well documented, Higgins and Latham further demonstrate
that Pater did not back away from the core of his opinions in later
versions. His alertness to the evolution of the permissible and the
expressible in public expression vindicates the argument that the last
version of his text may be taken as authoritative.

p.5

The analysis of Pater’s publishing choices and habits also gives new
insights into his life and his character, suggesting new methods to
write his biography.3 The inflection of biographical studies under the
influence of sociology is discussed by Martine Lambert-Charbonnier
in her essay on Pater’s biography. She takes her cue from Bourdieu’s
notion of habitus (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), and Idalina Conde
(Conde 2011, 14) to analyze the multiple approaches to Pater’s life
and to advocate a new synthesis of biographical methods. If Pater’s
intellectual and cultural context has already been taken into account
in previous biographical approaches (Donoghue 1995), Lambert-
Charbonnier suggests that one should include Pater’s portraits and life
narratives and, more generally, his texts on life. Such an approach does
not only blur the difference between the real and the fictional since
both are discursive material, it also partly dissipates one of the most
vexing ideas about Pater’s portraits, that is, their value as
autobiographical material. Indeed, whether literary or imaginary, they
all possess autobiographical overtones which are often too subtle to
pin down and define accurately.
Further to the investigation into Pater’s reactivity on the publishing
stage, the second part of the volume draws on comparative
approaches to shed light on Pater’s intertextual practices, in particular
on his readings of contemporary essays and fiction. Pater’s interest in
contemporary French and English literature informs his reflection on
humanism, religion, and the profane, which are essential notions in his
works.
Adam Lee’s focus on Renan’s Souvenirs d’enfance and Pater’s
Gaston de Latour envisages the vexing issues of the sacred and the
profane in nineteenth-century England (Chapter 4). It sheds light on
the still perplexing question of Pater’s attitude to faith and morality
and provides a new reading of Gaston de Latour, a novel with a
complex textual history, which still needs to be further explored.
Intertextual resonances not only clarify essential notions such as
inheritance, race, and grace in the survival of faith through modernity;
they also reveal the power of art – of architecture, literature, and
painting – to materialize the unseen and to shape the aesthetic temper.
As “true style” reflects the elevation of a moral conscience, it becomes
perceptible for souls enlightened by the action of grace. Thus the
aesthetic temper has, for Pater, something of a priestly character
illuminated by the promise of a grace that may, or may not, come.

p.6

How to convey beauty to others becomes an essential function of

aesthetic criticism, which may also be viewed through the lens of
Pater’s humanist sympathy. In Chapter 5 Thomas Albrecht discloses
unexpected resonances in Eliot’s and Pater’s literary and critical work,
exploring anew Pater’s humanism through the distinction between
utilitarianism and “impassioned contemplation.” The intellectual links
between Eliot and Pater appear stronger than previously
acknowledged for their advocacy of compassion as a critical criterion
to define true art. Intertextual echoes, especially between Eliot’s “The
Natural History of German Life” and Pater’s “Style” and “Measure for
Measure,” show a remarkable convergence between realism and
aestheticism – two schools that are so often opposed – in the common
quest for a sublime form of morality through the appeal to emotions
and human care. This contradicts the notion of art for art’s sake as
essentially self-referential, since through aesthetic effect art will also
strive for the enlargement of sympathy.
Therefore elevation of soul may not be incompatible with the desire
for beauty of a curious mind eager to take part in the renaissance of
culture. In his analysis of “Sir Thomas Browne,” Daichi Ishikawa
demonstrates in Chapter 6 that Pater and Symonds engaged in a
literary “dialogue” on curiosity, which illustrates the debates between
the contesting claims of science and religion in the last quarter of the
nineteenth century. In their periodical exchanges on the seventeenth-
century man of science who tried to situate modern experimental
science versus faith, they praise curiosity not only for instilling a
temper open to sciences and the arts, but also for inspiring new
aesthetics of desire, thus breaking away from the Augustinian
tradition. Their dialogue is also part of a larger discussion that
remains underexplored to this day, echoing the many articles on
science and religion published in the very periodicals (the Fortnightly,
the Contemporary, and the Nineteenth Century Review) to which
Pater and Symonds contributed.
Though Pater’s keen philosophical turn of mind is acknowledged by
all scholars, it is not very easy to assess his own precise line of
thinking, since he refused to commit exclusively to one single
philosophical system. The third part of the volume revises Pater’s
aestheticism through a careful study of the dilemma of metaphysical
abstraction and the experience of the senses.
Joseph Bristow’s examination of a rarely studied manuscript of
“The Aesthetic Life” addresses Pater’s criticism of metaphysics and
empiricism in a particularly innovative way, drawing on close textual
analysis (Chapter 7). Pater only published a limited amount of his
extensive drafts and “squares of paper,” described by Edmund Gosse
in 1894 (Gosse 1903, 263). Exploring “The Aesthetic Life,” a text
possibly written in 1893 by an older Pater busily engaged in several
different projects, Joseph Bristow builds upon Pater’s readings on
Hume and Kant to discuss the aesthete’s move from sensory
observation to an enlarged consciousness of life. Pater’s manuscript
sheds light on the very sensitive issue of the relation between ethics
and aesthetics, and provides an invaluable insight into the status of art
in modern England, as the artist contributes to the well-being of
society by disclosing and expressing the beauty hidden even in the
unsightly scenes of modern, industrial London.
p.7
 While “The Aesthetic Life” conveys the vision of an older Pater,
Michael F. Davis’s analysis of the essay “Poems by William Morris,”
which was later revised as the “Conclusion” to The Renaissance,
conveys Pater’s focus on the value of experience and the senses in the
desiring subject (Chapter 8). Davis shows how Pater’s reflection on
desire – and in particular on same-sex desire – is structured upon
Hegelian dialectics of thesis, antithesis, and conclusion. Yet while both
the macro-argument of the essay and the micro-argument are Hegelian
in structure, Pater’s conclusion is not Hegelian in content. Pater rejects
the Hegelian drive toward the sublimation of the body and recovers
not the Greek ideal of the body at one with itself, but rather the
medieval Christian idea of the body at odds with itself to form the
modern concept of the desiring subject. Besides, Pater turns from
Hegel’s law of historical change to the law of natural change, itself
fueled by Darwin, to suggest the wavering of the modern mind caught
in an ephemeral flux.
Pater’s rehabilitation of sensuous response encapsulates his original
view on art and literature, turning the individual’s perceptions into the
only reliable reference for aesthetic criticism. Focusing on Pater’s
attempt to create for the aesthetic mind a continuous state of
receptivity that transcends bodily emotions, Nicholas Manning
explores in Chapter 9 the concept of “passion,” which Pater privileged
over pathos and emotion, because its temporal limitation allowed him
to circumscribe intensity within a definite time span. The praise of
passion in its sexual as well as religious sense would have been
offensive for the Victorians, but Manning effectively shows to what
extent Pater induces them to adhere to his aesthetic goals, countering
the rhetoric of excess by advocating restraint and containment.
Though the body’s finite temporality might doom the individual to
scattered and fragmentary representation, Pater weaves a perennial,
continuous image of the self through the interchange between art and
literature, which also contributes to the immersion of the character in
history.
 Pater often chose to convey his ideas in the form of imaginary
portraits, which gave historical and aesthetic substance to
metaphysical debates. Art becomes the sensible, or rather the sensual,
embodiment of the idea in Hegelian terms, thus giving corporeal
presence to history and historicity, and enabling Pater to historicize his
subjects fully. The last part of the volume focuses on the interart
poetics deployed through the creation of a narrative universe proper
to each of the “personalities” (as Wilde would have written) explored
by Pater in his art of the portrait.

p.8

The title of Lene Østermark-Johansen’s chapter, “What came of

him?,” taken from Pater’s letter to Grove (Pater 1970, 29–30), is
directly related to visual reception and invites the reader to consider
affinities between narratives and painted portraits – something that
many critics of his time, including Symons and Price, were inclined to
do. Østermark-Johansen studies formal features – in particular the
importance of foreground and background, the portrayal of characters
as individuals or as types, the power of colors – as so many elements
enhancing meaning and contributing to the ideal of correspondences
between art and literature. She highlights Pater’s art of literary
portraiture, showing how he suggests the character’s emotive intensity
by images (often pictorial) of interiority, which themselves are
appropriate to the historical setting of the narrative. Imaginary
portraits are also part of a critical discourse on the arts, and
Østermark-Johansen assesses Pater’s contribution to the British
reception of seventeenth-century Dutch realism, pitting his position
against Ruskin’s critical view of Dutch crudity.
From the literary to the imaginary portrait, portraiture is a most
appropriate form for Pater to explore aesthetic issues, especially the
dialectics of fleetingness and the absolute in art. Writing about the
lives of philosophers as a way to assess their ideas is a tradition that
goes back to the Greeks, and was revived by Pater’s portrayal of Plato
in Plato and Platonism (Pater 1910b, 140). In Chapter 11 Kit
Andrews’s joint reading of “Coleridge’s Writings” and “Sebastian van
Storck” shows how through portraiture Pater can convey in visual
terms the dilemma of intellectual abstraction and the living
experience, since Coleridge and the Spinozist Sebastian provide two
examples of damaged lives resulting from their worship of the
absolute. Significantly, Sebastian denies art its power to transcend the
dilemma, translating the dialectics of fleetingness and fixity into the
opposition of life and art – which fin-de-siècle writers were keen to
probe and accentuate. Andrews nevertheless argues that Pater’s
position is not so clear-cut and that he sympathizes with some
followers of abstraction, finding in their lives a beauty worthy of the
“diaphaneitè” he advocated as early as 1864.4

Finally, Pater’s portrait of La Gioconda5 in “Leonardo da Vinci,” a

purple patch indebted to Gautier’s and Clément’s ekphrases,6
exemplifies the function of art to freeze successive moments of
intensity within the frame of Leonardo’s famous painting. By engaging
in a stylistic analysis of the portrait of the “Lady Lisa,” Pascal Aquien
demonstrates Pater’s perfect sense of composure and stylistics, and
emphasizes the transitional character of the portrait (Chapter 12). The
“Lady Lisa” indeed belongs to the genre of the imaginary portrait as it
is more than one of many stunning ekphrases of a celebrated portrait
for the Aesthetes. Through rhetorical means perfectly suited to the
topic and to the textual economy of “Leonardo da Vinci,” Pater
literally produces an entrancing mental image curiously deprived of a
referent, superimposing his words both to Leonardo’s masterpiece and
to the discourses surrounding it. Such an image is that of the eternal
woman embodying (male) subjective desire, but it also points to
modern poetry, as Yeats was one of the first to acknowledge when he
published the portrait in his own The Oxford Book of Modern Verse
1892–1935 (1936), carefully excerpting Pater’s flamboyant
paragraphs.

p.9
 The impressions gathered in this volume do not convey a radically
different image of Pater, but they enhance his multifaceted talent as a
philosopher, a periodical essayist, and a masterful writer fretting over
stylistic perfection “amid the manifold claims of . . . modern
intellectual life” (Pater 1980, 182) in which he actively participated.
The difficulty we still encounter when trying to pigeonhole Pater’s
work in our current disciplinary categories is also a useful reminder of
the complexity of Victorian classifications. Due to his emphasis on the
importance of identity and self – a reconstructed, mediated, layered
self – Pater was indeed a philosopher who debated metaphysical issues
with an unusual twist from prevalent models. But he was also an
essayist in a hugely competitive market who engaged in subtle quarrels
with his contemporaries, and who devised the contents of his
publications in keeping with the current interests, readerships, and
intellectual issues of his time. Finally, he was a masterful prose writer,
who wove each of his words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages into a
verbal tapestry. With meticulous care he created the genre of the
imaginary portrait with which his name remains associated and whose
brilliant poetics and rhetoric deserve further scrutiny, especially in a
revised contextualized history of the transition between Victorian
Aestheticism and early Modernism.7 In that perspective, the imaginary
portrait turns out be more than a mere exercise in verbal fireworks: it
initiates the sustained reflection on the relationship between language
and the sister arts which was to be later reformulated, recycled, and
recirculated by the Modernists. If “curiously testing new opinions and
courting new impressions” was Pater’s approach to the challenges of
modernity it is also, therefore, an invitation to readers to revisit issues,
accept new methodologies, and open up to new fields of research.

Notes
1 For this reason the contributors to this volume were free to use any edition of
Pater’s works.
2 See, for instance, the testimonies from Michael Field in Vadillo (27–85); also see
Coste (4–20) and Tucker (49–63).
3 Laurel Brake’s forthcoming biography will place a large emphasis on his career
in journalism.
4 In his essay “Diaphaneitè,” based on a lecture Pater delivered at the Old
Mortality Society in Oxford in July 1864. It was published in the volume
Miscellaneous Studies in 1895.
5 This essay was published in 1869. It was probably Pater’s first imaginary
portrait.
6 See Gautier (1864) and Clément (603–643).
7 See. for example, Coste (2017); Gal (2015); Thurston (2012); Teukolsky (2009);
Feldman (2009); Daly (2000); Corbett and Perry (2000).

p.10

Bibliography
Baudelaire, Charles. 1868. Curiosités esthétiques. Paris : Michel Lévy
Frères.
Bourdieu, Pierre, Loïc J.D. Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive
Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Brake, Laurel, Lesley Higgins, Ian Small, eds. 1991. Pater in the 1990s.
Greensboro: University of North Carolina.
Brake, Laurel, Carolyn Williams, eds. 2002. Walter Pater:
Transparencies of Desire. Greensboro: ELT Press.
Clément, Charles. 1860. “Léonard de Vinci.” Revue des Deux-Mondes,
32 (1 April 1860): 603–643.
Conde, Idalina. 2011. Individuals, Biographies and Cultural Spaces:
New Figurations. Lisbon, Portugal: CIES E-Working Paper.
Corbett, David Peter, Lara Perry. 2000. English Art 1860–1914:
Modern Artists and Identity. Manchester: Manchester University
Press/Rutgers University Press.
Coste, Bénédicte. 2012. “Two Unpublished Letters from Walter Pater
to Paul Bourget.” The Pater Newsletter 61/62 (Spring/Fall): 4–20.
Coste, Bénédicte, Catherine Delyfer, Christine Reynier, eds. 2017.
Reconnecting Aestheticism and Modernism. Continuities, Revisions,
Speculations. New York: Routledge.
Daly, Nicholas. 2000. Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle:
Popular Fiction and British Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Donoghue, Denis. 1995. Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls. New
York: Knopf.
Feldman, Jessica. 2009. Victorian Modernism, Pragmatism and the
Varieties of Aesthetic Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Ferrer, Daniel. 2011. Logiques du brouillon. Modèles pour une
critique génétique. Coll. “Poétique.” Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Gal, Michalle. 2015. Aestheticism: Deep Formalism and the
Emergence of Modernist Aesthetics. Bern: Peter Lang.
Gautier, Théophile, Arsène Houssaye, Paul de Saint-Victor. 1864. Les
Dieux et les demi-dieux de la peinture. Paris: Morizot.
Gosse, Edmund. 1903. “Walter Pater: A Portrait” [1894]. Critical Kit-
Kats. New York: Dodd, Mead.
Mallarmé, Stéphane. 1897. Divagations. Paris: Fasquelle.
Manson, Edward. 1906. “Recollections of Walter Pater.” The Oxford
Magazine (7 November), 60–61.
Mullin, Katherine. 2013. “Pernicious Literature: Vigilance in the Age
of Zola (1886–89).” In Prudes on the Prowl, eds. David Bradshaw
and Rachel Potters, 30–51. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

p.11

Østermark-Johansen, Lene, ed. 2014. Walter Pater : Imaginary

Portraits. London: Modern Humanities Research Association.
Pater, Walter. 1910a. Appreciations. London: Macmillan.
——. 1895. Miscellaneous Studies. London: Macmillan.
——. 1869. “Notes on Leonardo da Vinci.” The Fortnightly Review, 6
(November): 494–508.
——. 1910b. Plato and Platonism. London: Macmillan.
——. 1886. “Sir Thomas Browne.” Macmillan’s Magazine, LIV (May):
5–18.
——. 1891–1893. “The Aesthetic Life.” bMS Eng 1150 (7). Houghton
Library, Harvard University.
——. 1970. The Letters of Walter Pater, ed. Lawrence Evans. Oxford:
OUP.
——. 1980. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry [1877], ed.
Donald Hill. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Seiler, Robert, ed. 1999. The Book Beautiful: Walter Pater and the
House of Macmillan. London: Athlone Press.
Shuter, William. 1988. “Pater as Don.” Prose Studies, 11: 411–412.
Symonds, John Addington. 1864. “Sir Thomas Browne,” Saturday
Review, 25 June: 794–795.
——. ed. 1886. Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, Urn Burial,
Christian Morals, and Other Essays. London: Walter Scott, vii–xxi.
Teukolsky, Rachel. 2009. The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and
Modernist Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thurston, Luke. 2012. Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to
Modernism: The Haunting Interval. New York: Routledge.
Tucker, Paul. 2013. “An Unpublished Letter of Walter Pater.” The Pater
Newsletter, 64, Fall: 49–63.
Vadillo, Ana Parejo. 2014. “Walter Pater and Michael Field: The
Correspondence, with Other Unpublished Manuscript Materials.”
The Pater Newsletter, 65 (Spring): 27–85.
Yeats, W.B. 1936. The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 p.13

Part I
Pater’s Modern Involvement
New Editorial and Biographical
Approaches
 p.15

1 Walter Pater and the New Media

The “Child” in the House

Laurel Brake

In that half-spiritualized house he could watch the better, over again, the
gradual expansion of the soul which had come to be there – of which
indeed, through the law which makes the material objects about them so
large an element in children’s lives, it had actually become a part; inward
and outward being woven through and through each other into one
inextricable texture.
(Pater, “Child in the House,” 1878, 173)

How insignificant, at the moment, seem the influences of the sensible

things which are tossed and fall and lie about us, so, or so, in the
environment of early childhood. How indelibly, as we afterwards discover,
they affect us; with what capricious attractions and associations they
figure themselves on the white paper, the smooth wax, of our ingenuous
souls. . . . The realities and passions, the rumours of the greater world
without, steal in upon us, each by its own little passage-way.
(177)

Introduction
Walter Pater’s writing career and the trajectory, locations, and
character of his publications relate to the media of his day. Apart from
Marius the Epicurean, nearly all of Pater’s writing appears in the
press, only a third of which he collected in his lifetime into books.
Pater’s periodical writing coincides with the emergence of the new
media of his generation in the 1860s. The date of his first submission
to the press in 1864–1865 coincides with the advent of the “new
media” of the 1860s – new monthly magazines in 1859–1860 and
reviews in 1865, and with few exceptions, his subsequent work
appears in them, until his last submission in 1894. In this sense Pater
is a “child” in the “house” of publishing, an equivalent of “born
digital” in our own period of print in transition.
Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey Pingree are helpful here in “What’s
New about New Media” (2003), where they argue “All media was
once ‘new media’” (xi). In demonstrating their case, they focus on
transitional moments of media change:
p.16

a moment before the material means and the conceptual modes of new media
have become fixed, when such media are not yet accepted as natural, when their
own meanings are in flux. At such a moment, we might say that new media briefly
acknowledge and question the mythic character and the ritualized conventions of
existing media, while they are themselves defined within a perceptual and semiotic
economy that they then help to transform.
(xii)

The new media in the nineteenth century consist of the revised forms
of the newspaper, magazine, and review genres that follow the repeal
of the newspaper taxes 1855–1861, in which Walter Pater’s writing
appeared for nearly thirty years. For that reason, his journalism
cannot be explained as an “apprenticeship,” or “pre-literary,” as his
adherence to the press spanned the entirety of his career, as it did for
many of his generation.1 He is moreover one of many “university
men” who wrote regularly for the press in this period.
I will argue that the pattern of Pater’s publications exhibits a
catholicity – akin to what Gitelman and Pingree call “an identity
crisis” – characteristic of the “uncertain status” of new media in
relation to “established known media and their functions” (xii).
Gitelman and Pingree detect a high incidence of intertextuality
between the old media and the new, which we see in Pater’s career. On
the one hand, Pater’s publishing record shows him alert to the
possibilities of the new media, and an active agent in exploring them.
As may be seen in the publishing patterns below, he publishes across
the press, from daily newspapers to quarterlies; he adopts anonymity
and signature; his press work is consistently marked by orientation to
the specific journals in which it appears, but professional: he does
bread-and-butter reviewing, sometimes anonymously; he puffs the
work of friends, and in turn solicits their puffs of his own work; he
also reviews books of interest to him, and publishes short fiction (a
genre coming into its own in Britain at this time) and a novel in
magazine instalments; he intervenes in contemporary critical debates,
placing his criticism in high-culture magazines, reviews, and
newspapers; he publishes his lectures; and he draws heavily on his
journalism to compose books.
On the other hand, there is a fault line between this pattern of
Pater’s in the new media and the old media, the “identity crisis” if you
will, between the press and books, journalism and literature. It is there
in the small fraction of his press work he reprints in his books – less
than a third. This pattern of cautious selection is echoed by C.L.
Shadwell, the primary editor of the posthumous editions of Pater’s
works, who publishes less than half of the articles that remained
uncollected. Two representations of Pater’s identity are etched in the
publishing practices of the day, that of an author/artist of a “choice”
number of finely honed books above the affray, and that of a working
“man of letters,” who was a frequent contributor to the new media, a
university lecturer, a novelist and author of books that reflect this
richesse.

p.17

How did Pater navigate the shoals of this new form of journalism,
and move between lectures, periodical articles, book publication, and
celebrity? The patterns of his contributions to the press – titles and
genres he favored, and when – are represented in the tables that
follow. I also note serials to which he was invited to contribute but did
not, to explore the limits of his participation in the new media – for
example, in his lack of contributions to the avant-garde and the
popular press.2 Much of Pater’s journalism also routinely circulated in
the American press in its “eclectics” or reprint magazines. This
presence of his writing in the American press during his lifetime
provides a new perspective on the posthumous reprints of Pater’s
work in the U.S. by Thomas Mosher – in the Bibelot, and in his fine
editions.3 His work was already familiar to American readers of the
press, as well as the American editions of his books published in the
U.S. by Macmillan. In Pater’s last decade, post Marius the Epicurean,
the character of his criticism and fiction, for example, “Style,” the
Imaginary Portraits, and “Apollo in Picardy,” and where he publishes –
in the New Review (1889), Harper’s (a “decadence” issue), and the
Bookman (1891), register an acknowledgment of the fading force of
the twenty-years-old new media and genres, and an anticipation of
and participation in the new.

Pater’s Patterns of Publication

The new media that claimed most of Pater’s press work (Tables 1.1
and 1.2) multiplied the number and prominence of the layer of
upmarket titles for educated readers; these titles gave new impetus to
signature and celebrity, and weakened anonymity; they provided an
enlarged sector for visible, attributable, cultural, literary, political, and
scientific debate, which was less attached to political parties than
earlier generations of serials. They enhanced what might be called “the
dignity of literature,” allowing university men to publish and debate
respectably in these new organs. More generally, they offered an
enlarged market for prose of all types – critical, analytical/political,
expository, and fiction in article-length instalments; and not least, they
provided authors with more opportunity to earn an income from
writing, strengthening authorship itself. The new media of the 1860s
offered greater security to freelance authors such as Pater, by
facilitating the coupling of serial and book publication. In its
multiplication of serial titles and readers, it made this pattern –
enjoyed principally to date by authors of very successful fiction, such
as Dickens – more generally accessible, whereby an author could be
paid for a lecture, periodical publication, and book sales. This may be
seen in 1864–1865 in the example of Matthew’s Arnold’s publication
of “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” that appeared in
three media forms in rapid succession: as a lecture on October 23,
1864, as a periodical article on November 1, 1864, and in a book of
collected pieces in February 1865.4

p.18

Table 1.1 Monthly magazines. New generations 1859–1890. 1

shilling; 6d
 This is the “house” that Pater and his writing inhabited; its culture
is discernible across his career and his diverse publications, in which
anonymity, signature, critical prose, magazine fiction, the dignity of
literature, celebrity, and the need for income from his writing all
figure. These characteristics, especially signature, were limited to the
new periodical press rather than the press as a whole, but traces are
discernible in early new journalism newspapers such as the daily Pall
Mall Gazette. However, anonymity did survive: three of five of Pater’s
pieces in the Pall Mall Gazette were anonymous, as were his nine
contributions to the weekly newspaper, the Guardian. He even
published two anonymous review articles in Macmillan’s Magazine in
the 1880s, one of the original flagships of signature in the 1860s.
 p.19

Table 1.2 New (fourth) generation of reviews 1865–1898

To summarize, the contents of the new generation of monthlies

(magazines and reviews) and some weekly newspapers represented a
fresh market for authors for lighter, shorter, brighter pieces distinct
from those solicited for the quarterly reviews or older monthlies, and
untied to political editors and parties, like the Edinburgh, the
Quarterly, Blackwood’s, and Fraser’s. They multiplied significantly the
periodical market for fiction, giving a fillip to magazine fiction,
beyond, for example, Blackwood’s Magazine and All the Year Round,
and to criticism. At the cheaper price of a shilling, or 2/0 or 2/6 for
reviews, the consumer base and readership for both journals and
books were widened and augmented, as well as the author base. The
new generation of magazines, reviews, and weeklies tightened the
bond between literature and journalism, providing a larger platform
for “criticism.” It also furthered the release of the serial novel from the
standalone form of part-issue, housing it in the protective and high-
circulation envelope of a branded periodical, imitating and
consolidating the practice of Dickens and Blackwood in their
magazines. Pater’s writing for the press bears the marks of these
changed conditions of writing in the new media.
Nor was Pater’s presence in the new media confined to his
contributions to serial titles. Searches of the corpus of the tiny
percentage of digitized British newspapers and periodicals to which we
now have access indicate that Pater was all over the U.K. press, as the
subject of book reviews, literary gossip, and announcements, from tiny
papers in Scotland, to titles in Ireland and Yorkshire, to the
metropolitan press.5 In Robert Seiler’s pioneering Critical Heritage
volume in 1980, we had an indication of coverage of Pater in the
press, but the power of publicity, networks, syndicates, and cutting
and pasting in an age of celebrity emerges more clearly in this later
digital manifestation of the general “circulation” of “Pater” and his
writing. Unlike Seiler’s collection, not much of this merits quotation;
but together, this profile – in numbers, frequency, and reach – embeds
Pater in the contemporary press to a greater degree than we have
understood to date.

p.20

What are the implications of the new platform for authorship for
Pater, who comes of age as a writer just as the new fiction-rich,
cheaper monthly magazines and the new reviews appear? Investigation
of a number of perspectives on Pater’s patterns of publishing suggests
some of them.
Pater contributed to fifteen different serial titles (Table 1.3) – dailies,
weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies; newspapers, magazines, and reviews;
large, “national” and well-known titles such as the Pall Mall Gazette,
the Daily Chronicle, the Westminster and Fortnightly Reviews, and
Macmillan’s Magazine; obscure titles such as the Oxford Review; and
to the American as well as the British press, Scribner’s, and Harper’s.
Those titles that solicited work but were refused included the
Illustrated London News, Good Words, and the Century Guild Hobby
Horse; and he never lived to write the Yellow Book piece he promised.
They indicate both the range and high number of publications
available to him in this period of new media growth, and also his
selection from diverse types of titles.

Table 1.3 Patterns of publication 1: serials to which Walter Pater

contributed
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 PLATE XXXIII.
PAIR OF COTTAGES.
SEE PAGE 38.

An example of a pair of cottages treated in the Dutch style.

D E S C R I P T I O N O F P L AT E S
X X X I V. A N D X X X V.
PLATE XXXIV.
PAIR OF COTTAGES.

FRONT ELEVATION
GROUND PLAN
BEDROOM PLAN
PLATE XXXIV.
PAIR OF COTTAGES.
SEE PAGE 40.

The accommodation of the pair of cottages shown in this plate is as

follows:—
Ground Floor.
Parlour, 11 ft. 4 ins. × 13 ft. 6 ins., and bay. Living room, 11 ft. 6 ins. × 14 ft. 5
ins. (French Windows). Kitchen, 10 ft. 8 ins. × 12 ft. 3 ins. Larder. Porch, Hall,
and Clock Space under stairs. Tools, w.c., and Coals (Enclosed yard).
Bedroom Floor.
First Bedroom, 11 ft. 4 ins. × 13 ft. 6 ins. Second Bedroom, 11 ft. 6 ins. × 14 ft. 5
ins. Third Bedroom, 8 ft. 6 ins. × 10 ft. 8 ins. Bath Room (hot and cold water).
Height of rooms: Ground floor, 8 ft. 9 ins.; first floor, 8 ft. 6 ins.
Total cost, including all extras, £375 per cottage.
Laying out of gardens, £12 10s. each.
Cubical contents, 34,285 ft., at 5¼d. per foot cube = £375 per
cottage. (Built in 1903.)
Materials.—Whitewashed common bricks are here used.
Whitewash is cheap and may be used very effectively, especially
where there are trees in the background. The roofs and dormers are
hipped, and covered with Welsh green slates and blue half-round
ridges; the chimney pots are buff-colour.
Sills.—The sills, as in many of the other houses, are formed of
calf-nosed bricks set on edge in cement, with two courses of tiles
beneath, which form a drip under the sill, and with a backing of slate in
cement. By bringing the window-frame forward to reduce the size of
the top of the sill, damp and the driving in of rain are prevented. This
makes an inexpensive sill, and adds to the homely appearance of the
cottage.
Interior Wall Decoration.—The interior wall decoration is
Duresco throughout. Plain ingrain paper, of which there is a number of
very cheap kinds now on the market, might be used with a frieze. A
good effect is obtained by bringing down the white from the ceiling as
far as the picture rail, which gives light to the room and improves its
proportions.
The exterior woodwork is painted a Verona green.
Fireplaces.—Fireplaces suitable for this or any of the six-roomed
cottages are as follows:—
Front Room: interior grate, slabbed surrounds, tiled hearth, and white wood
chimney piece. Living Room: iron tiled mantel-sham. Kitchen: 3 ft. range with
white tiled coves and York stone shelf and trusses. Front Bedroom: 30 in.
mantel-sham and tiled hearth. Back Bedrooms: 24 in. mantel-sham and tiled
hearth.
 The total cost of the whole should not amount to more than £12.
The scullery is lengthened by a projection in the nature of a bay.
The outbuildings, which are carried to right and left of the pair, give
privacy to the garden near to the houses.

PLATE XXXV.
PAIR OF COTTAGES.

This plate illustrates one of several different treatments of the last

plan.

PLATE XXXV.
PAIR OF COTTAGES.
SEE PAGE 41.
PLATES XXXVI., XXXVII., AND XXXVIII.
SINGLE COTTAGE.

FRONT ELEVATION
SIDE ELEVATION
GROUND PLAN
BEDROOM PLAN
PLATE XXXVI.
SINGLE COTTAGE.
SEE PAGE 42.

Plate xxxvi. gives the plan of a single cottage occupying a corner

site. It contains:—
Ground Floor.
 Drawing Room, 12 ft. 6 ins. × 13 ft. 6 ins., and bay. Dining Room, 13 ft. × 13 ft.,
and bay (French casements). Kitchen, 10 ft. × 11 ft. Scullery, 8 ft. × 10 ft. Larder.
Porch and Hall, with Cloak Space under stairs. Coals, Tools, and w.c.
Bedroom Floor.
First Bedroom, 13 ft. 6 ins. × 15 ft. 9 ins. Second Bedroom, 11 ft. 6 ins. × 13 ft.
Third Bedroom, 10 ft. × 13 ft. Dressing Room. Cupboards. Bathroom, with w.c.
and Lavatory (hot and cold water).
As will be seen, there is very little space wasted in the planning of
the rooms.
The whole of the exterior is rough-cast. The front bedroom is
enlarged and projects over the ground floor, giving a pleasant shade
to the lower portion of the elevation, while the roof is continued over
one side and carried down to form the porch. The gable is of half-
timber framing.
The roof is covered with Hartshill hand-made tiles, which, while
richly toning and colouring, have admirably stood the test of several
years’ hard weather, and have proved much more durable than the
pressed tile used for some of the other cottages at Bournville.
The plan of the cottage might be simplified by gabling back and
front, the roof thus covering the whole building, and having no valleys.
The bedroom accommodation could be then increased by the addition
of attics.
Two views of the actual example appear in Plates xxxvii. and
xxxviii.
 PLATE XXXVII.
SINGLE COTTAGE.
SEE PAGE 42.
 PLATE XXXVIII.
SINGLE COTTAGE.
SEE PAGE 42.
D E S C R I P T I O N S O F P L AT E S
XXXIX.-XLII.
PLATES XXXIX., XL., XLI., AND XLII.
SINGLE COTTAGE.

FRONT ELEVATION
BACK ELEVATION
GROUND PLAN
BEDROOM PLAN
PLATE XXXIX.
SINGLE COTTAGE.
SEE PAGE 44.

Another single cottage has accommodation as follows:—

Ground Floor.
Living Room, including roomy alcove, 13 ft. 5 ins. × 15 ft. 6 ins. Kitchen, 10 ft. ×
13 ft. 5 ins. Scullery, Larder, Tools, w.c., Coals, and Enclosed Yard.
Bedroom Floor.
First Bedroom, 13 ft. 5 ins. × 15 ft. 6 ins. Second Bedroom, 10 ft. × 13 ft. 5 ins.
Third Bedroom, 9 ft. 6 ins. × 9 ft. 6 ins. Bathroom (hot and cold water) and w.c.
Spacious Attic (shown by dotted lines) and Boxrooms.
Total cost, in 1903, £540.
Cubical contents, 19,938 ft., at 6½d. per ft. cube, £540.
By hanging a curtain, the alcove shown in the plan may be made
private for writing or studying, if required. It may also be used for
meals; and if a door communicates with the hall, the table may be laid
by the maid unseen by the visitor, and the curtains afterwards drawn
apart. Thus one of the disadvantages urged against the larger-sized
houses with one large living room may be overcome.
Materials.—The cottage is built of whitewashed common bricks,
with tarred plinth, the roof being covered with Peake’s dark brindled
hand-made roofing tiles. It is without decoration, apart from what is
afforded by the semicircular hood over the front door, the wrought-iron
brackets supporting the gutters, and at the back a semicircular arch to
give importance to the living room. There are shutters to all the ground
floor windows, which are made to bolt from within.
The view shown in Plate xl. is of the back.
 PLATE XL.
SINGLE COTTAGE BACK.
SEE PAGE 44.

Plates xli. and xlii. show the staircase and dining room
respectively.
 PLATE XLI.
STAIRCASE OF SINGLE COTTAGE.
SEE PAGE 44.
 PLATE XLII.
DINING ROOM—SINGLE COTTAGE.
SEE PAGE 44.
D E S C R I P T I O N S O F P L AT E S
X L I I I . A N D X L I V.
PLATES XLIII. AND XLIV.
SINGLE COTTAGE.

FRONT ELEVATION
BACK ELEVATION
GROUND PLAN
BEDROOM PLAN
PLATE XLIII.
SINGLE COTTAGE.
SEE PAGE 46.

Plates xliii. and xliv. show the plan and view respectively of
another type of single cottage, with the following accommodation:—
Ground Floor.
 Dining Room, 13 ft. × 19 ft., and small alcove. Drawing Room, 13 ft. × 16 ft. 6
ins., and bay. Kitchen, 9 ft. 6 ins. × 15 ft.
Scullery, 8 ft. 6 ins. × 9 ft. 4 ins. Larder, Coals, Ashes, w.c., and Enclosed
Yard.

Bedroom Floor.
First Bedroom, 13 ft. × 13 ft. 4 ins. Second Bedroom, 12 ft. × 13 ft., and large
bay. Third Bedroom, 9 ft. 6 ins. × 12 ft. Fourth Bedroom, 8 ft. 6 ins. × 13 ft. 4
ins. Bathroom, with Lavatory and w.c. Large Attic, extending over almost the
whole of the four rooms.

Total cost, in 1904, £640. Cubical contents, 25,077 ft. at 6⅛d. per
ft. cube = £640.

PLATE XLIV.
SINGLE COTTAGE.
SEE PAGE 46.

By the arrangement of the stairs it will be noticed that additional

space is secured to the dining room, forming a pleasant arched
alcove.
Materials.—The materials used are brindled bricks, Peake’s
hand-made roofing tiles, hips and ridges covered with half-round
ridge-tiles, 6 in. half-round spouts with ornamental stays, projecting
hood of timber, covered with lead and supported by two wrought-iron
stays, red tall-boy chimney pots, doors painted Suffield green,
window sashes and frames ivory white, and eaves, gutters and
down-spouts lead colour.
PLATES XLV., XLVI., AND XLVII.
PAIR OF THREE-STOREY COTTAGES.

BEDROOM PLAN
GROUND PLAN
PLATE XLV.
PAIR OF COTTAGES.
SEE PAGE 47.