This chapter traces the history of essay writing about art in Britain from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Developing out of eighteenth-century periodical essays, a more individualistic approach to art writing begins with Romantic essayists like William Hazlitt. For John Ruskin, the essay offered a means to connect his personal responses to the visual arts with a larger project of social and moral reform, while for his aestheticist successors, it enabled an exploration of the affective dimensions of those responses. For modernist writers like Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, or D.H. Lawrence, faced with the institutionalisation of art history, the art essay offered a testing ground for questioning assumptions about medium specificity or experimentation that animated their fiction. For contemporary writers from John Berger to W.G. Sebald, the proximity of the art essay to life writing has enabled the blurring of boundaries between essay, fiction, and autobiography.

This chapter discusses the poetics of familiarity embodied in the Romantic essay. It locates the origins of that poetics in Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ of 1800 and 1802 to Lyrical Ballads. Responding in turn to the famous preface, the three most notable ‘familiar’ essayists of the era, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, revise a manifesto for poetry into one for prose, a celebration of nature into a proclamation of the city. In their practice, the familiar essay becomes the exemplary form of urban expression in the Romantic era. The characteristic procedure of the essay is the slide from the familiar to the ideal and back again, by directly articulating the ideal bearing of the familiar subject, or by a range of other idealising (and essayistic) strategies.

Pater published three essays on Shakespeare, and probably considered a longer series, possibly to culminate in a book. His attention in the completed essays is directed towards plays that were relatively unpopular in his own day, and in the case of two of these he can be said to occupy an important position in the history of their reception. Modern critics of Richard II and Love’s Labour’s Lost still regularly, if cursorily, cite Pater as a milestone. But Pater’s contribution to Shakespearean criticism more generally is rarely remembered or appraised. This chapter attempts to estimate and characterise the influence Pater has had on subsequent criticism of Shakespeare, sometimes in unexpected places, and also to draw out some of the insights of which later criticism takes less notice. Each of Pater’s Shakespeare studies attempts to formulate relations between ethics and aesthetics, and many of their central terms – fineness, justice, grace, etc. – are used with both moral and aesthetic significance. By examining these essays in the context of other Shakespearean criticism and of Pater’s wider work, it is possible to arrive at some idea of what Shakespeare meant to him.

This essay explores some of the plethora of modes of censorship of British ‘imperial’ theatre through the long eighteenth century. Suppression ranged from the informal censorship of ‘Oriental’ performance practiced by Sir Richard Steele in managerial practice and periodical censure through cancellations of productions of Patriot drama attacking colonial slavery deemed offensive by Walpole’s Licenser. While productions set in distant lands increasingly offered an allegorical means of critiquing British imperial practices, in the decades of reaction following the French and Haiitian Revolutions, plays that explicitly denounced English participation in the slave trade, such as Oroonoko, were eventually expunged from the stage by nervous managers. Helping explain this managerial censorship. William Hazlitt’s amazed and anxious response to a rare performance of Oroonoko in 1815 reveals the terror inspired in White audiences by the belief that Black spectators might re-enact the slave revolts modelled on stage by heroic African protagonists. Censorship of imperial subjects thus ranged from the attempted control of dramatic subject matter through to the governmental or managerial erasure of texts and performances deemed subversive or revolutionary.

Centring on a reading of ‘The Recluse’, this chapter opens with a consideration of the representation of peace in ‘Home at Grasmere’ (1800–1806), a poem later known as ‘Part First, Book First’ of ‘The Recluse’. Through close readings of the 1808 ‘Recluse’ fragments that Wordsworth went on to adapt for The Excursion, the chapter investigates how remnants of the poet’s early interest in radical, pacificist thought speak against the poem’s declared allegiance with the values of Britain’s political and religious establishment. Noting how the poem’s composition is bisected by the composition of the pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra (1810) and the letter to the military theorist Sir Charles Pasley (1811), writings that explore the links between armed struggle, national independence, and the primacy of the Imagination, the chapter goes on to consider how The Excursion, through the character of the Solitary, grants expression to the revolutionary hope for perpetual peace, world citizenship, and delight in Fancy’s ‘mutable array’.

The critical essay emerged in the eighteenth century in writing that described natural and artistic objects, and in the process inspired readers to think about the nature of their experience. This chapter traces the critical essay’s evolution from Joseph Addison’s Pleasures of the Imagination through the work of nineteenth-century essayists like Thomas De Quincey and William Hazlitt, culminating in the academic literary criticism of New Critics such as I. A. Richards and Cleanth Brooks and more recent practitioners such as D. A. Miller and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

This chapter details how the essay form participated in changes in conduct, tact, and ways of living in nineteenth-century England, promoting an “ethics of unknowing” that was constantly subject to experimentation and revision. Particular attention is paid to essayists such as William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, who continued the Montaignean tradition in ways that responded to the urbanized modernity of the capitalist metropolis.

This chapter argues that the essay begins the eighteenth century as a bourgeois form and ends it as a radical one. Over the course of the century the form and style of periodical essayists such asRichard Steele, Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, and the Earl of Shaftesbury are taken up by writers with revolutionary politics, such as Jonathan Swift, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean-Paul Marat, and Karl Marx.

This essay explores the intersection of religion and literature in sermons and lectures during the British Romantic period. The essay traces the advance of elocutionary advice in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and demonstrates how interest in orality proliferated the printing of both sermons and lectures on religious themes. In addition to noted figures such as S. T. Coleridge, William Hazlitt, and Edward Irving, women’s voices emerged during the time, as women in dissenting religious circles set the stage for the first public lectures by women in Britain.

Built around two visits to Westminster Abbey, this short coda compares early eighteenth-century attitudes to theatrical transitions to William Hazlitt's and Charles Lamb's writing about actors. Both Lamb and Hazlitt emerge as hostile to what I have called the art of transition, as they each denigrate the performance of a character in favour of the study of that figure’s psychological constitution.

The Romantic Revolution in Taste entailed a radical revision of the category of art and a toppling of the traditional hierarchy of the senses. In the wake of the French Revolution, Parisian gastronomers emerged as necessary adjuncts to the phenomenon of the restaurant, guiding the public in the formerly exclusive practice of food connoisseurship and applying the aesthetic art of judgment to products of culinary artistry. This chapter examines the response of British literary writers and critics to the cultural upheaval the age of gastronomy represented. It surveys the different “schools” of thought that emerged at this time – in the language of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the Leg of Mutton School, the Cookery School, the Soda-Water School – in addition to the more well-known Cockney and Lake Schools – and considers the role of William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, John Keats, William Kitchiner, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy and Mary Shelley, and Lord Byron in the Romantic Revolution in taste.

This chapter examines the rhetoric, temporality, and interactivity of relationships between writers, readers, editors, and publishers of literary magazines and miscellanies, genres that were among the most important print media of the 1820s. Forms and styles of magazine writing became increasingly performative and improvisational as authors adapted to the demands of a periodical rhythm. Especially in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, this performative quality involves the construction of pseudonymous personae and theatricalized scenes that dramatize the process of producing the magazine and parody the notion of personal identity. Two lesser-known publications extend the impact and implications of this style of journalism: Knight’s Quarterly Magazine (1823–4), a Blackwood’s imitator edited by influential publisher Charles Knight, and John Galt’s The Bachelor’s Wife (1824), a miscellany that stages the processes of editing and reading within a gendered domestic setting.

This chapter traces the growth of Chaucer’s reputation from the early eighteenth century through the Romantic period. It begins with Dryden’s free modernisations that helped to popularise Chaucer’s works, examines the effects of John Urry’s 1721 edition, and looks closely at the groundbreaking linguistic and editorial work of Thomas Tyrrwhitt, who was the first to edit Chaucer’s verse from the manuscripts, and explained for the first time both the grammar and pronunciation of Chaucer’s Middle English, as well as an explanation of his metre. Tyrrwhitt’s edition generated new interest in Chaucer among the Romantic poets, especially evident in William Blake’s “Canterbury Pilgrims,” the modernisations of Chaucer written by William Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt and Elizabeth Barrett, and the dubious effort by the literary hacks R. H. Horne and Thomas Powell to publish a new set of Chaucer modernisations in 1841.

However well-regarded Chaucer’s works were during his lifetime, it was his immediate successors who fashioned him into the ‘father of English poetry’ they then bequeathed to the subsequent English literary tradition. In particular, the poets Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate not only represented Chaucer in this manner in their own, widely disseminated works, they were also instrumental in the broad dissemination of Chaucer’s works. Importantly, these activities were motivated not just by admiration but also by a politico-literary context in which Hoccleve and Lydgate, unlike Chaucer, were asked to produce works that spoke both for a prince and to a prince. Their invention of Chaucer’s literary authority cannot then be separated from their intervention into politics, and this conflation they also bequeathed to the English literary tradition, where it remained plainly visible in the works of their own successors, and where it persists, more obscurely, to the present.