Victorian Perspectives

Abstract

The main chapters of this book have focused on Hazlitt’s views concerning the relationship between language and literature, and his ideas have been discussed in the context both of his predecessors and of his contemporaries. But what of his successors? Did his advocacy of, say, the ‘familiar’ style and his rejection of the type of ‘verbal’ criticism practiced by John Gibson Lockhart, John Wilson, Francis Jeffrey, William Gifford, and others, exert a detectable influence over the next generation of writers and critics? As usual, the picture is complex. Certainly, the ideology adopted by Tory reviewers of the early nineteenth century enjoyed impressive longevity. Even as late as 1864, for instance, in a review of Browning’s Dramatis Personae (1863), William Stigand was able to remark that.