The second part of this book focusses on Pater’s engagement with a number of major English writers. Appreciations covers all post-medieval centuries, excluding only the ‘Augustan’ period about which Pater was rather less than enthusiastic (though he did design, and perhaps complete, an essay on Dr Johnson). Pater is not normally thought of as a leading Shakespearean, but unsurprisingly Shakespeare was central to his idea of English literature, and at one point he may possibly have planned a whole volume on him; he was also at least sympathetic to the idea of undertaking a commentary for schoolboy use on Romeo and Juliet, whose ‘flawless execution’ he commended (‘Measure for Measure’, App., 170). Typically he did not write about the most celebrated plays (his own favourites also included Hamlet), but instead chose for treatment ones less popular in his day: Love’s Labour’s Lost (perhaps because of its reflections on language and style), Measure for Measure (arguably the finest of his three essays, centrally concerned with the way a work of art can profitably engage with ethics), and Richard II (the main focus of ‘Shakespeare’s English Kings’, where Pater contributed to the idea of Richard as the ‘poet-king’ and added to the understanding of the deposition scene). Alex Wong examines all three essays in detail, and comments on the overall value and distinctive character of Pater’s view of Shakespeare.

The Introduction frames a collection that makes the case for Pater’s importance for the study of English literature, bringing to the fore key themes and preoccupations and thus underlining the unity and coherence of the book. Discussion starts in 1886 when the Pall Mall Gazette asked writers, intellectuals, and educators to comment on the proposal by J. Churton Collins to establish a School of English at the University of Oxford; Pater’s writings on literature are looked at in the light of institutional debates and developments in literary criticism at this time. The Introduction explores in detail Pater’s commitment to what, in the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance, he calls ‘aesthetic criticism’, derived in part from German philosophical aesthetics, and what he intends by his stress on ‘style’ and ‘form’. Finally it looks at Pater’s conception of education as dialogic process, stemming in particular from Plato and Montaigne, and the role his use of the essay plays in that process; the case is made that Pater has much to offer us when we think about desirable forms of English Studies for today that are neither nationalistic nor exceptionalist but cosmopolitan.

The first part of this book looks at Pater’s contribution to English studies and literary criticism within a number of broader contexts. Kenneth Daley provides initial orientation for the reader. He compares Pater’s Appreciations with the writings of other critics in the period, stressing how the volume asserts the centrality of the ‘romantic’ tradition in English literature, and contributes influentially to late nineteenth-century literary historiography and the tradition of the English critical essay. Appreciations may not have enjoyed the succès de scandale of The Renaissance, but it was widely disseminated and admired, with six editions and thirteen other reprintings up to 1927.