A period of significant demographic, social, and political transformation produced essays marked by a deep seriousness of tone and a sense of weighty purpose that departed sharply from the playful quality of the periodical tradition and the lighter touch of the Romantic familiar essay. Essayists in criticism of this period (Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, William Morris, Oscar Wilde) were deeply engaged in defining ideas of culture that could encompass an increasingly diverse and fragmented society. This chapter reflects on the publication contexts that shaped some of the best-known examples of the Victorian critical essay; examines Victorian critics’ emphasis on specific capacities in perception as a ground for pedagogical exposition with the aim of achieving social coherency; and highlights the deep historicism and awareness of mediation that informs the Victorian essayist’s approach to cultural criticism.

Chapter 6 explores the gradual development of English literary history to trace how the autonomous and performative being of the literary came to be enframed within the nation, and how literary texts were seen as unmistakable expressions of national spirit. Some of these ideas were first expressed as part of the literary sovereign paradigm, and were reinforced through the successive stages of its travel across geographies. After the initial impetus from the colonial administrators, the idea of the literary and the nation as conjoined entities in history received a further elaboration in two publications from 1808 – Friedrich Schlegel’s On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians and Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation. Both Schlegel and Fichte identified unbroken literary tradition as the most organic expression of a nation, and both advocated for a “literature” in vernaculars as the most legitimate ground for a national history. However, the bulk of this chapter traces the new discipline of literary history in England, from Thomas Warton’s The History of English Poetry (1774–81) to Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867) and beyond.

Appreciations represents a significant contribution to nineteenth-century literary historiography and to the delineation of the English essay tradition. Pater’s book asserts the centrality of Romanticism and develops a historical schema for the essay in conscious opposition to the prevailing narrative, prominently articulated by Arnold, of eighteenth-century prose as the apogee of the achievement in that mode, an English Attic prose style derived from French neoclassicism. Pater sets a modern tradition of prose derived from Montaigne and inaugurated by English writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This alternative genealogy epitomises the romantic impulse of English literature. Pater’s treatment of the literary tradition and the development of English prose constitutes a pointed response to the late-Victorian recuperation of Augustan and neoclassical literature undertaken by critics such as Leslie Stephen, George Saintsbury, and W. J. Courthope, associated with the rise of English Studies and the campaign for the institutionalisation of English at Oxford and Cambridge.

This chapter pitches Arnold’s theory of how we should read against his reading practice. It uncovers how secular the practice of literary criticism really is. Arnold’s legacy, the idea of reading as moral formation, will remain confused as long as we neglect practice in favour of theory. Beginning with an overview of Arnold’s approach to reading the Bible in Literature and Dogma (1873), I explore how Arnold’s biblical hermeneutics works in practice, arguing that his preparation of a version of Isaiah for schoolchildren replaces established typological practice with a new method which he calls ‘employing parallels’. It is the genre and apparatus of the Bible ‘version’ which registers and enables his radical position. In Arnold’s method, the intellectus spiritualis is replaced by a secular method of imaginative engagement which has far-reaching consequences for how the reader finds themselves positioned: as a result, a secular intellectus culturae or cultural ‘tact’ comes to replace the traditional method of reading scripture. Throughout I am concerned with reading as a practice which is constitutive of concepts including faith and doubt.

The major fault-line in Victorian engagement with the Bible and antiquity lay between believers and unbelievers, across a wide array of perspectives. Something of this is traced here, from the rationalistic legacy of Bentham to Pusey’s consciously reactionary repudiation of his own early immersion in German scholarship.Consequently, literature about the Bible and antiquity could be polemical, but solvents could be found, not least ones that were associational and personal. Most importantly, friendship could provide such a bond: this chapter traces that which began at Charterhouse School between George Grote and Connop Thirlwall and which ended only with their deaths. Grote is now much better remembered than Thirlwall, but both wrote important histories of ancient Greece that would be translated into German, a great tribute given their own indebtedness to German scholarship. In a review of Curtius’s history of ancient Greece, Arnold criticised both Grote and Thirlwall for failing to reach the new standards set by more recent German scholarship. Within a year of the death of Thirlwall, Anglo-German classical scholarship was being written in an altogether new key.

Britain developed a public education system in 1870 but eliminated alternative schools for poor children on the basis of their poor quality. In 1855, Denmark prioritized expanding access over quality standards, by supporting private evangelical schools serving rural populations. Cultural frames informed these struggles over education. For British authors, education would build character and social stability, and the left endorsed workers’ rights to schooling; yet even sympathetic Victorian social reform novelists worried about the culture of poverty and missed the social investment benefits of workforce training. Their depictions of quality problems helped to close schools and reduce access. Alternatively, Danish authors supported education as a means of producing useful citizens and did not worry about a culture of poverty. Danish authors depicted a government in benign terms and affirmed the importance of local government self-determination. British and Danish authors participated in movements to expand schooling to underserved populations. British writers Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, and Elizabeth Gaskell wrote heart-wrenching stories that stirred charitable impulses toward the poor; Matthew Arnold directly shaped the 1870 legislation. Danish authors such as NFS Grundtvig and Bernhard Severin Ingemann inspired the free school and folk high school movement that greatly expanded education among rural peasants.

‘I have always sought to stand by myself’ Arnold announced in 1865.1 The remark is the more intriguing for its appearance in the first series of Essays in Criticism, a collection which, with its consideration of cultural tradition and the intricate relationality of writers, both affirms and denies autonomy. A poet-critic deeply interested in the legacy of the past and the influence of previous generations of writers, Arnold was very conscious of the particular challenges of pursuing a literary voice of one’s own in an age when the place and purpose of the arts was being questioned (not least by him), and with the Romantics still in living memory. The irony of Arnold’s wish ‘to stand by myself’ is that its registering of distinctness carries Byronic airs. With one eye on his present fame and one on posterity Byron had declared ‘I stood and stand alone’, sounding more sure of it than Arnold.2 Whether it was his powerful individualism and desire to go his own way, his defence of personal liberties and resistance to authority, or his estranged and egoistic heroes, Byron was the embodiment of self-determination for contemporaries and subsequent generations. Arnold admired Byron’s independent streak, and, ironically, found in it means of self-recognition as well as self-evaluation with which to carve out his own career. He sets up Byron as an example of what he wanted to be, as well as – more negatively – what he was prone to being, what he could not quite manage to live up to, or wanted to avoid becoming. Regard for Byron also enabled him to evaluate the legacy of different strands of English Romanticism and put his finger on what he felt was lacking in Victorian life and culture.

Nineteenth-century British and French intellectuals set the terms by which Europe evaluated Irish and American cultures before World War I. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America proposed that democratic literatures would be deformed by social levelling and market forces and unable to rival aristocratic literatures for distinction. Rare exceptions might occur at brief tipping points when democratic and aristocratic cultures mutually contested and energized each other, but the emergence of a new mass culture less sophisticated than classical or aristocratic literatures seemed inevitable. In Studies in Celtic Literature, Matthew Arnold proposed that though the Celtic peoples of the United Kingdom were too unruly to govern their own affairs, their literatures possessed qualities of lyrical imagination that might usefully correct the worst elements of a materialist modern English culture. Nineteenth-century literary renaissances in Ireland and the United States were founded upon and reacted against these discourses. William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound emerged as especially important figures, daringly reworking received literary discourses to set the terms for a brilliant new modernism that sometimes became stridently anti-democratic in its bid to challenge the degradation of taste that nineteenth-century liberal writers like Tocqueville and Arnold had forecast.

Chapter One, “Shakespearean Sermons and other Pious Texts,” examines Shakespeare’s treatment in the Victorian pulpit, especially his place in what were then called “Shakespearean sermons.” This subgenre effectively begins at the celebratory religious services for Shakespeare’s tercentenary in 1864 and continues into the first decades of the twentieth century. Initially, Shakespearean sermons sought chiefly to evidence Shakespeare’s familiarity with scriptures. But progressively the genre developed strong claims that Shakespeare’s texts served as a “Lay Bible” that served better for sermons – and perhaps for souls – than the original Bible. By the fin de siècle, some preachers could prophetically boast that believers would soon celebrate Shakespeare’s inspiration across the Christian churches. Claims like this one derive from a well-developed Victorian hermeneutics that sees Shakespeare’s wisdom as both universal and given to sacred exegesis.

Examining the Pareto Circle of thinkers who gathered at Harvard as many disciplines were beginning to articulate themselves and their methods, we look at the interdisciplinary birth of business studies and at the case study method. We argue that this history should be remembered, taught, and utliized in new interdisciplinary pursuits by management education and management studies more generally.

A brief entry in Jerome’s Chronicle – the only Life of Lucretius surviving from antiquity – claims that he wrote De rerum natura ‘in the intervals of insanity’ before committing suicide. Jerome’s brief Life and its early modern accretions became a virtual blueprint for reading Lucretius’ poem in biofictional terms. De rerum natura was seen as a document of a mind divided against itself: the Life interacted with contradictions in the text to read Lucretius’ poem as a dramatized version of a modern subject facing the competing pressures of religion and its scientific other. This chapter looks at how Victorian readers engaged in biofictional receptions of De rerum natura as a means to thinking through psychological modernity. Lucretius’ popularity – as is now widely acknowledged – was crucial to the scientific culture of the period. But his Life and his poem were associated with another sort of inquiry: the psychological investigation of the human mind. Focusing on Matthew Arnold and Alfred Lord Tennyson, the chapter examines how these writers, in exploring the make-up of the human psyche at the crisis of modernity, used biofictional reading of Lucretius’ to work through contemporary cultural anxieties. The Roman poet was co-opted as an ersatz Victorian, and, in the process, modern subjectivity itself could be discovered.