After Studies: the Cancelled Book

Abstract

It had long been argued by scholars that the period of the 1870s, after the appearance of Studies in the History of the Renaissance in 1873, was one of retrenchment for Walter Pater, a decent reaction to the decorous unease (the British equivalent to roars of disapproval) which greeted the book from the pulpit, the university, and some sections of the press. It is this theory and period that I attempt to rethink in this chapter. The retrospective retrenchment theory was based heavily on the record of Pater’s publications — book publication — with a dozen years separating the first book (Studies, 1873) from the second (Marius the Epicurean, 1885), and on the removal of the ‘Conclusion’ of Studies from the second edition of 1877, accompanied by a change of title to The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Moreover, bibliographical and biographical work in the last thirty years, by Lawrence Evans and Billie Inman, has seemed to substantiate the retrenchment construction, with the revelation of a cancelled book in 1878 in Evans’ edition of Pater’s letters, and a compromising involvement of Pater with an undergraduate in 1874 in a revelatory piece of research by Billie Inman (Inman: 1991).