Walter Bagehot

Abstract

Walter Bagehot’s literary criticism fits within a fairly limited time frame: from November 1847 and an anonymous review of Philip James Bailey’s Festus to the period of greatest activity, a decade extending from the mid 1850s to the mid 1860s, and the final two reviews of George Grote’s History of Greece (June 1871) and Nassau William Senior’s Journals (August 1871) . His career as editor of the Economist co-editor of the Spectator and author of The English Constitution (1867, in book form), Physics and Politics (1872), and a large number of essays on political figures such as Disraeli, Lord Palmerston, Bright and Gladstone, obviously distracted him from analyses of the relationship between a writer and his work. He died relatively young, at the age of fifty-one. For all his limitations in temperament and insight (no essay of his twenty-eight critiques — several impressively extended, none easily dismissible — may be rated as definitive), Bagehot may be the most modern and likable of all Victorian literary critics, and his essays the most pleasurable reading of any discussed in this volume. I do not underestimate his wit or his ability to stimulate a reader to return to the original writings under consideration; but it seems to me that, at this late date, one need not subscribe uncritically to Woodrow Wilson’s idolatry (contained in two articles published in the Atlantic Monthly — November 1895 and October 1898 — and in a large number of other allusions) or to C. H. Sisson’s searing indictment, in The Case of Walter Bagehot (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), that Bagehot’s understanding of the greatest artists’ enthusiasm for reality ‘combines a silly notion of enthusiasm with an ordinary busy-body’s notion of reality’ (p. 42).