Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, Schubert's popularity enjoyed a near-continuous progress extending well beyond local Viennese admiration. As secure as his reputation was by 1900, however, his significance did not go completely uncontested. The debate over the composer among a group of English writers during the last two decades of the century indicates that even so beloved an icon as Schubert did not acquire his stature without controversy. This polemic also illustrates the perils that could arise from the desire to accept too intimate an association between biography and creativity.

During the quarter century that followed his death, the composer himself remained an elusive quantity in England. In A History of Music (1830), William C. Stafford failed to mention Schubert when he listed more than a half dozen Viennese composers on the order of Gläser, Riotte, Hysel, Kessler, Wenzel, Müller, and Drechsler. Nor did it bode well for Schubert's British reception that, once discovered, he would be compared to the dynamic and cerebral Beethoven who, as early as 1826, was hailed by Richard Mackenzie Bacon for his “originality of invention, uncommon passages, a very energetic manner, imitative passages almost innumerable, and abstruse scientific modulation.” A dozen years later, Schubert was still absent from the second edition of George Hogarth's Musical History, Biography and Criticism. During the ensuing two decades, reference works like Samuel Maunder's Biographical Treasury and Charles Knight's English Cyclopaedia continued to give inaccurate dates for the composer.