Pyrrho’s (365/60-275/70 BC) name has carried great weight in the history of philosophy ever since it was attached to one of the two main branches of ancient scepticism. Traditionally, Pyrrho’s own philosophy has been interpreted as the early version of the more sophisticated philosophy recorded by Aenesidemus and preserved in the writings of Sextus Empiricus. This traditional view is not, however, unchallenged, and in recent years alternative interpretations have been offered that suggest a dogmatic Pyrrho, whose position would be incompatible with that of later Pyrrhonian sceptics, although having enough in common with it to serve as its distant historical source.

To what extent is the appropriation of Pyrrho by the later sceptics legitimate? It is important for an appraisal of Pyrrho’s place in the history of scepticism to ascertain which insights, if any, were common to Pyrrho and the later Pyrrhonists. But the contours of Pyrrho’s philosophy are blurred; the evidence is scant and subject to conflicting interpretations. Perhaps the situation was not a great deal better in the first century BC, when Aenesidemus introduced Pyrrhonism as radical scepticism, as opposed to the mitigated scepticism of the Academy, or in the late second century AD, when Sextus was at work. Their references to Pyrrho are cautious and hardly exegetical. Later accounts often emphasise his admirable state of mind, variously called indifference (adiaphoria), impassivity (apatheia), and tranquility (ataraxia). Sextus claims to call his scepticism “Pyrrhonian” “from the fact that Pyrrho appears to us to have attached himself to scepticism more vigorously and conspicuously than anyone before him” (PH 1.7).

This Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1830-1914 comprises a series of newly commissioned essays that offer fresh perspectives on a literary period bounded at one end by the Romantic movement and by Modernism at the other. Debates about periodization, as we know, can be both intense and contentious. The parameters of what has become known as the 'long' nineteenth century and the divisions within it are regularly contested. Studies of Romanticism have variously adopted the 1770s or 1789 as their starting point, tracing the origins of the movement in the poetry of the late eighteenth century or highlighting the French Revolution as the context for an equally revolutionary period in literature. The transition to the Victorian period is generally marked by the end of the 1820s, the decade that witnessed the deaths of the second generation of Romantic poets, with 1832, the year of the first Reform Bill, sometimes chosen as the end date, rather than 1830.

The Victorian period has similarly porous boundaries. The dates of Queen Victoria’s reign, 1837-1901, are sometimes adopted, as in the volume of The New Cambridge History of English Literature, which follows the divisions of the original CHEL (1907-27), although arguments about the artificiality of these dates are vigorous. The century (1800-1900) is sometimes used to circumscribe an area of study, as in the recent volume of the third edition of Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (1999), which followed the pattern established by the original CBEL in 1940. Opposition to this particular arrangement turns on the differences between Romantic and Victorian writing and the need to recognize their distinctiveness as well as the unsatisfactory nature of century divisions in literary study.

Romantic and Victorian writers made both nation and empire central to 'English literature', a phrase that can mean either writing by anyone using the English language or writing exclusively by English authors. The second meaning implies that literatures are nation-based: English literature is the expression or the possession of England. But what about writers from Scotland or Ireland? 'British literature' is equally problematic; thus, even before the Irish Republic gained independence in 1922, 'Irish literature' had its own national and often nationalist resonance. From the Act of Union of 1707, which joined England and Scotland in a single polity, 'Great Britain' or the 'United Kingdom' developed simultaneously as a modern nation-state and as an expanding empire. Because Britain consisted of England plus the 'internal colonies' of Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and also of an overseas empire including both India and territories of 'white settlement' in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, the interplay of nation and empire in literature is extraordinarily complex. Like Irish literature, formerly colonial literatures, often written in English, are now postcolonial - obviously no longer British.

Throughout the nineteenth century, literary works not overtly focused on themes of nation and empire nevertheless played a role in the imaginative forging of English and British identities. Domestic novels - Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), for example, or Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) - can be read as microcosmic versions of Whig history, the success stories of their protagonists implicitly mirroring the success stories of nation and empire. As French novelist Honoré de Balzac declared, ‘The novel is the private history of nations.’ Further, many writers explicitly celebrated or criticized Britain and its Empire, often doing both simultaneously.

Sextus Empiricus, the best known to us of the Pyrrhonian sceptics and the only one whose works have survived substantially intact, was, as his name indicates, a member of the Empirical school of medicine. Other evidence also points to a close and long-sustained relation between medical Empiricism and Pyrrhonian scepticism. Diogenes Laertius' list of Pyrrhonists includes at least three Empiricists apart from Sextus himself: Menodotus, Theodas, and Sextus' student, Saturninus (9.115-16). Some of the others may also have been Empiricists, and there are figures not included on DL’s list who seem to have been members of both schools.

In his Outline of Empiricism (Subfiguratio empirica), where he adopts the point of view of an Empiricist (Deichgräber [20[ 43, 20- 22), Galen maintains that the Empiricist is to medicine as the Pyrrhonist is to the whole of life (82, 28 et seq.), and he criticizes Menodotus harshly for failing to live up to the ideal represented by Pyrrho, whom he (Menodotus himself) had held up to his fellow Empiricists as a model (84, 13 et seq.). Sextus mentions empirical forms of the arts with approval: grammar (M 1.49-53, 61); astronomy, navigation, and farming (M 5.1-2). He wrote a work on Empirical medicine (M 1.61), which is not extant, and his surviving works contain many expressions of sympathy for the Empiricists and their ideas (PH 2.246, 254; M 5.104; M 8.191, 288, 291).

When I first wrote a paper about the difference between Academic and Pyrrhonist Sceptics a long time ago, I was less interested in the differences than in the commonalities. My point was to get away from the Humean distinction between moderate Academics and radical Pyrrhonists. I argued that both were radicals - not, as they came to be seen in early modern times, dogmatists who denied the possibility of knowledge more or less generally, but in the ancient sense of having no philosophical doctrines. They used the same method of arguing for and against any given thesis or belief, declaring the debate undecided, and suspending judgement. The “mitigated” sceptic, who believes that nothing can be known though one may have more or less well-founded opinions, was a figure invented by Carneades in order to refute the dogmatists' objection that suspension of judgement on all matters will make life impossible. Ironically, this figure later became the model of modern versions of scepticism.

Up to this point I still think I was right - at least as far as the early sceptical Academics Arcesilaus and Carneades were concerned. Arcesilaus argued that, given their conception of knowledge and wisdom, the Stoics themselves ought to suspend judgement on all matters. Carneades offered an alternative epistemology to counterbalance the impressive Stoic theory. But these philosophers did not maintain that they were right and the Stoics wrong, or that one should accept their own proposal. The only salient difference that seemed to me to be left between those Academics and their Pyrrhonist successors was the curious claim of the Pyrrhonists that their so-called “way of life” would lead to the goal that other Hellenistic schools were also endorsing – tranquility.

If the sceptic holds nothing to be true, his dogmatic opponent argues, he is not able to act. This is the core of the famous Apraxia challenge, arguably the best known anti-sceptical argument in antiquity. Several versions of this argument figure in ancient scepticism. At least for the most part, these arguments rely on core assumptions of Stoic epistemology and theory of action: that we have impressions (phantasiai), some of which are practical, i.e. prescribe an action as to be done, and that we either assent to our impressions or not. In assenting to an impression, we hold something to be true. For fools (i.e. almost everyone), this amounts to having an opinion. For the wise person, every instance of holding something to be true is a piece of knowledge. In the case of practical impressions, assent (sunkatathesis) is further identified with impulse (hormê). If there are no external impediments, impulse sets off action.

The sceptic’s explanation of his actions most importantly consists in his response to the Apraxia challenge, and more particularly, in his critical engagement with the Stoic claim that, in action, we assent and thus hold something to be true. Our interpretation of his response to the Apraxia challenge, however, relates to a broader framework of questions. First, how closely does the sceptic’s life resemble ordinary life? Are the sceptic’s actions, in the end, like everybody’s actions? Secondly, does the sceptic consider his way of life as an attempt at living well? Is suspension of judgement, perhaps, a safer road to happiness than adherence to a (potentially false) philosophical account of what is good and bad?

What we think of as the Victorian theatre emerged from the late Romantic period, and the aesthetic and political anxieties of the early decades of the nineteenth century were woven into the legislative, industrial and aesthetic characteristics of that theatre throughout the rest of the century. Many of the enduring debates about the theatre - about its audiences, texts and performance practices - were first broached in the late Romantic period, when the break between popular and high culture was institutionalized and embedded in ideologically loaded hierarchies of aesthetic value. These hierarchies are still with us today: whenever impassioned public debate erupts over the place of Shakespeare's plays in English-speaking national schools curricula, or the advisability of the (British) National Theatre staging Oklahoma in a state-subsidised theatre, or the paucity of new plays which are not musicals on Broadway, we are re-enacting Victorian debates about the competing roles and values of theatre as entertainment, or art or education. Abiding anti-theatrical concerns that theatre professionals value art over entertainment, evident in the assumptions and actions of state funding bodies (where these exist), and the suspicion that performance for the sake of pleasure (entertainment) is somehow both ethically and aesthetically 'wrong', are views inherited from the nineteenth century. And canonical literary histories of the Victorian period - the privileging of some narratives over others - have reinforced these ideological and aesthetic anxieties.

Among the stunning array of German-speaking writers and intellectuals around 1900 the poet Rainer Maria Rilke was perhaps the most cosmopolitan, only matched in his worldliness by his friend and compatriot, Stefan Zweig. Even though Rilke's actual knowledge of the world was mainly confined to continental Europe, except for his journey to North Africa in 1910-11, and firmly excluded the Anglo-Saxon sphere, of whose blunt materialism he remained suspicious until the end of his life, the poet's outlook was decidedly international and anti-chauvinistic, and he remained open-minded towards other cultures until the end of his life. His horizon as traveller and reader stretched from Bohemia to Russia, France to Scandinavia, Italy to Egypt, and from Spain to Switzerland and their respective literatures. He was a migrant and a belated troubadour, at times a vagrant revered, if not idolised, by aristocrats, industrialists, fellow artists and artisans alike, and eventually recognised by anyone able to appreciate German poetry as probably its most sublime master after - or even alongside - Goethe, Hölderlin and Heine.

There was something anachronistic about this poetic artist even though his art was quintessentially modernist in style and poetic approach without ever disregarding, or disowning, tradition. Bach, Beethoven and Nietzsche influenced him as much as Rodin, Cézanne, Klee and Picasso. He studied eclectically, if not erratically, and liked to read the Grimm brothers' German dictionary like a novel. His life was full of rich experiences that were without exception intimately connected with art. His creed was that life and art should serve each other.

Few live in a Golden Age. Fewer still ever know that they do. Even Cicero thought eloquence in short supply among his contemporaries, and complaints and regrets over oratory's diminishing quality mounted among his successors. The laments usually came embedded in a wider discourse of decline that tied oratory's downward trajectory to the indolence, greed and intellectual laxity of a grasping and complacent world: Romans were not inclined to fault their political system for the problem. Seneca the Elder, the first imperial author to address the question of decline, shrugs off a political explanation, and a century later the Greek author of the famous treatise On the Sublime flatly rejects what he calls 'that old cliché' that oratory flourishes with freedom and withers under tyranny. The cliché as he knew it derived from the Attic canon of orators, which implicitly identified great oratory with the death struggles of the independent polis, but the treatise reveals its Roman orientation by preferring a familiar Roman reason for oratory's plight, namely, undue love of wealth and pleasure. Romans of the first century AD may well have hesitated to follow the political thread of the argument to their emperor's door, but intimidation was not the only reason to hesitate. Those of a historical bent might conclude from the Republic's demise that not liberty but licence had nourished the eloquence of its oratorical Golden Age, and they might well prefer other measures of oratorical success.

Few aspects of Victorian life escaped the impact of industrialization. The experience of time and space was transformed in fundamental ways, but so too were the visual, aural, olfactory and tactile environments. To this extent the period saw an intensification of processes already well under way by 1837, as well as the effects of new forces. Industrialization had significantly developed in the previous century, but Victoria's reign was to see steam power reach its full potential. And towards the end of her reign a second phase of industrialization took place, this time based on electricity, the combustion engine, organic chemistry and new ideas about scientific management.

At its most basic, the industrial revolution was a revolution in the nature of manufacture, transport and communications, but shifts in these areas affected almost all aspects of experience. The nature of work was transformed, and the nature of class relations, but so was the link between work place and home, and the material culture of both; the industrialization of manufacture brought the prices of goods down, beginning the democratization of consumerism, while improvements in glass and lighting created a new consumer environment of arcades and department stores. When transport changed dramatically, the experience of landscape and cityscape altered; new methods of communication brought the regions closer together, creating standard national time in place of the many local times.

The facts of the past have a habit of confounding intellectual speculation. It is aswell never to forget that surprise may wait around a corner to mock the best endeavours, the most serious and learned efforts to analyse history. Why might the Prime Minister William Gladstone have demurred about recommending to Queen Victoria that Alfred Tennyson, her poet laureate, be offered a baronetcy? Perhaps, in 1883, Gladstone might have wondered if literature was really a dignified enough career - if 'career' it was - to deserve such an honour. Could writing poetry really qualify one to speak in the House of Lords? Perhaps he felt that Tennyson's political poems were no ample recommendation for actual involvement in politics. Perhaps the poet's famous religious uncertainty might be too controversial for the Bishops in the upper chamber. None is a poor suggestion. But Hallam Tennyson records in his Memoir (1897) of his father the real reason. 'The only difficulty in Gladstone's mind', Hallam remembered, 'was that my father might insist on wearing his wide-awake in the House of Lords.' It is a ludicrous turn, a confounding of serious explanations by the comical practicality of a hat. That hat was a difficulty, no doubt. But Hallam's account is awkward all the same, for it is not comfortable to find such trivialities in the heart of sober matters.

Examining 'war' in the Victorian era may seem at odds with classical Whig and Marxist interpretations of the nineteenth century with their focus upon political reform, urbanization, free trade, technological development, religious activism and intermittent class conflict. In dubbing the Victorian era as the 'Liberal Age', Colin Matthew reviewed an era dominated by domestic issues and one spared major military challenges such as the wars with revolutionary and Napoleonic France and the two world wars of the twentieth century. Yet the Victorians engaged in numerous wars. Byron Farwell aptly took the popular phrase, Queen Victoria's Little Wars as the title of his 1972 study, and it was these conflicts that precipitated intense debate about the impact of war on Victorian values and culture. Whereas some imperial, military and cultural scholars contend that imperial wars aroused strong feelings within Victorian Britain, even if these feelings like the wars themselves were often shortlived, Bernard Porter disputes that Victorians were 'imperially minded' before the onset of the 'new' imperialism towards the end of the century. Great Britain's 'cultural record', he claims, reflected 'the major concerns and priorities of most British men and women in the greater part of the nineteenth century', namely their interest in 'the problems attendant on Britain's progress, the unprecedented domestic changes she was undergoing in this period, for ill as well as for good'.