A distinctive feature of Pater’s oeuvre is that, like many French critics of his generation, he wrote both literary and art criticism; in this respect his work parallels that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poet and painter. The chapter argues that, if Jerome McGann is right to describe Pater’s essay on Rossetti as ‘the best single study of Rossetti’s poetry we have’, that is because Pater provides the most persuasive interpretation of this double aspect of Rossetti’s work. The essay is densely intertextual with other writings of Pater’s in ways that can be surprising: verbal cross-references link Rossetti not only to his own chosen precursors (Dante as well as Blake and Michelangelo) but also to Gautier and Baudelaire, and, more importantly, to Plato. Thus it plays a more significant role in Pater’s overall critical project than previous scholars have recognised, not least explaining to us a historical fact that may seem difficult to understand: the extraordinary influence of Rossetti on both painters and poets of his own and succeeding generations, an influence out of all proportion, some may think, to his actual achievement in either art form.

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.

A. Contents as listed on contents pages (authors’ names of anonymously or pseudonymously published contributions given in square brackets)

Printed on all four covers: ‘When whoso merely hath a little thought’ [sonnet, William Michael Rossetti]

No. 1, January 1850 [all contributions anonymous in this issue, except the etching]

Etching by William Holman Hunt, to accompany ‘My Beautiful Lady’ and ‘Of my Lady in Death’

My Beautiful Lady [poem, Thomas Woolner]

Of my Lady in Death [poem, Thomas Woolner]

The Love of Beauty [sonnet, Ford Madox Brown]

The Subject in Art (No. 1.) [essay, John L. Tupper (No. II in issue no. 3)]

The Seasons [poem, Coventry Patmore]

Dream Land [poem, Christina Rossetti]

Songs of One Household (My Sister's Sleep) [poem, Dante Gabriel Rossetti]

Hand and Soul [story, Dante Gabriel Rossetti]

The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich [review, William Michael Rossetti]

Her First Season [sonnet, William Michael Rossetti]

A Sketch from Nature [poem, John L. Tupper]

An End [poem, Christina Rossetti]

No. 2, February 1850

Etching by James Collinson, to accompany ‘The Child Jesus’

The Child Jesus: by James Collinson [poem]

A Pause of Thought: by Ellen Alleyn [poem, Christina Rossetti]

The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art: by John Seward [essay, F. G. Stephens]

Song: by Ellen Alleyn [poem, Christina Rossetti]

Morning Sleep: by Wm. B. Scott [poem]

Sonnet: by Calder Campbell

Stars and Moon [poem, Coventry Patmore]

On the Mechanism of a Historical Picture: by F. Madox Brown [essay]

A Testimony: by Ellen Alleyn [poem, Christina Rossetti]

O When and Where: by Thomas Woolner [poem]

Fancies at Leisure: by Wm. M. Rossetti [poem]

The Light Beyond: by Walter H. Deverell [three sonnets]

The Blessed Damozel: by Dante G. Rossetti [poem]

Reviews: ‘The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems:’ by Wm. M. Rossetti

‘I cannot compliment them on common sense in choice of a nom de guerre’, wrote John Ruskin in a letter to the editor of The Times published on 13 May 1851, the first time he commented on the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The reservation came in the context of a stirring defence of the controversial group, and in one way Ruskin was right: the word ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ has caused problems for the group's reputation ever since. Arguably the allusion to the art of a pre-modern age has prevented the artists and writers who adopted the label from being given their due as the first of the modernist avant-gardes. Moreover, the word can be criticized for over-complexity. It refers to the art of an age not precisely before Raphael himself, but rather before his followers and imitators, the ‘Raphaelites’. To be ‘Pre-Raphaelite’, then, is not just to look back to an archaic past; it is also defiantly to reject the idea of following in the footsteps of a master or school. The word thus carries a modernist implication difficult to disentangle from its archaizing one, something that has caused critical problems throughout the century and a half from the formation of the PRB to the present day.

Yet in another sense Ruskin was spectacularly wrong. The word ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ is perhaps the most successful label ever devised for an English artistic movement, still more widely familiar than such labels as ‘Vorticism’, or even ‘the YBAs’; it makes an effective brand name across the spectrum from scholarly journal articles through museum exhibitions to greetings cards. So familiar, indeed, is the label that we may forget to notice how strange it is. It is not easy to pronounce, and there is a flavour of jargon about it; it sounds like a term of scholarly art history rather than the slogan for a group of young rebels. In that respect, however, it was brilliantly calculated to capture the attention of an age that was just beginning to organize its discussions of art and literature historically.