This study had its origins in my work as an editor of Pater's late texts. In the process of annotating these texts I undertook to reread Pater's early writings, looking for parallels to the language and themes I had found in his late work. It soon became apparent that I was engaged in more than an editorial exercise. I found it impossible to read these early texts in the same way I had before. The later texts had decisively intervened. In ways I could not yet specify they had imposed a reading of these early texts that rendered my own initial reading less and less adequate. Moreover, this rereading by the older Pater of his early writings was often less conventional and more interesting than the readings offered by many of his critics. Pater's writings demanded, it seemed, a twofold reading. They asked to be read in the order in which they were written, with due attention paid to the changes in his thought and interests and with due acknowledgment made of the ways in which the older Pater attempted to distance himself from his earliest work. But they also asked to be reread, as it were, in the inverse order, the later work serving paradoxically as the necessary introduction to the earlier. It is such a double reading that I have attempted to provide in the following study.

I begin with what I call an initial reading of the shape of Pater's oeuvre. To such a reading what principally seems to shape that oeuvre is the later Pater's effort to differentiate himself from the earlier Pater.