This chapter focuses on how Pater looked at the natural world and art. It discusses how he practiced and thought about the very act of looking. For him, this was both an acutely personal act, and something demanding recognition that the object being looked at has its own specificity – material, historical, and contextual. This chapter asks what qualities he retained as visual touchstones across the broad historical timespan, from the Greeks to the present day, that he addressed; and through the variety of different modes in which he captured the objects of sight – essays, reviews, fiction, and imaginary ‘portraits’ of figures from the past. It shows that all are unified by Pater’s habits of looking, including how he saw colour, and by the process of translation into verbal language, with attention to works including ‘Emerald Uthwart’ and Marius the Epicurean.

This chapter considers Pater’s public persona. It addresses how his position as a university academic, public lecturer and intellectual, and subject of (mis)representation in parodies such as The New Republic by W. H. Mallock, shaped his life and reputation. It places the evolution of Pater’s public life in the context of late-Victorian culture and society, including attention to Oxford’s secularisation and curriculum changes, journalistic practices, and career setbacks. In doing so, this chapter shows Pater’s ambition as an intellectual and how this shaped his career and writing.

This chapter focuses on Pater’s two novels: Marius the Epicurean (1885) and Gaston de Latour (1888, 1896), illustrating how they stand at the heart of his work as aesthetic writer and of new currents in nineteenth-century fiction. It shows that, together, these novels aimed to provide a personal overview of European history in epochs of transition: the transition from paganism to Christianity in the case of Marius, and the Reformation for the unfinished Gaston. The chapter positions these novels in the context of their contemporary debates around the future of the novel, including attention to Henry James’s ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884) and Emile Zola’s naturalism. The discussion then focuses on Marius as a historical novel, which interweaves history with fiction and intellectual commentary, a decadent novel engaged in the core themes of contemporary French decadence, and a cosmopolitan novel engaged in acts of translation from Latin to English.

This chapter focuses on Pater’s unstable and evolving view of Christianity. It discusses the significance of his failed attempts to be ordained into the Church of England, his rejection of religious and moral dogmatism, disavowal of spiritual after life, and paganism. Although these aspects have led critics to disregard Pater’s investment in the Church, this chapter illustrates the sensuous appeal of religious practice and how Pater valued religion for its truth-content, even if he was at different stages in his life very uncertain about what that might mean. Putting his attitude to religion in a wide-ranging context, including the works of William James, John Ruskin, and John Henry Newman, it explores the appearance of ritual, religious symbolism, and belief in works including ‘Emerald Uthwart’, ‘Pascal’, and Marius the Epicurean.

This chapter discusses Pater’s relationship with the aesthetic movement and its central principle of ‘art for art’s sake’, suggesting that he provided a philosophical basis for some key assumptions of the movement, spontaneously practised but not theorised before him. It illustrates how Pater’s first articulation of ‘art for art’s sake’ responds to the burgeoning aesthetic movement illustrated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting, the art furniture industry led by William Morris from the 1860s, and Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetry, and in sharp response to the purism of John Ruskin. It goes on to trace the history of aestheticism back to philosophers including Immanuel Kant and the poet John Keats, and illustrates Pater’s understanding of this history via close reading of his essays including ‘Coleridge’ (1866) and ‘The School of Giorgione’ (1877), with attention to the controversies around the movement, and Pater’s involvement.

This chapter surveys Pater’s ‘widely diffused’ contributions to early twentieth-century modernist poetry, prose, and aesthetic discourse. It provides insights into Pater’s influence on modernist writers including W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot, addressing the unevenness of his reception among Anglo-American modernists and the source of the ambivalence that often defined this. Its first section concentrates on how Pater’s literary impressionism anticipated modernist interiority and so can be seen reflected in works including Joyce’s Ulysses, and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Orlando. Its second section turns to the rejection of Pater by T. S. Eliot – and how Pater nevertheless haunts his works.

This chapter addresses Pater’s vexed relationship with the decadent movement. It asks whether Pater is a decadent writer and considers the extent to which he illustrates, is appropriated into, and resists decadence. It is organised in three sections: (1) setting out the origins and definitions of decadence, with examples from mid-nineteenth century France; (2) explaining how Pater’s Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) picked up on key features of French decadence and the ways in which the similarities were exploited by Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons; (3) addressing how decadence figures in Pater’s later works as an ethical problem, with reference to Marius the Epicurean (1885).

This chapter focuses on Pater’s short fiction, which took the form, to use Pater’s phrase, of ‘imaginary portraiture’. It positions these works in the context of Pater’s evolving imaginative writing, the publishing industry, and their influence on writers including Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons. It illustrates how this concept of the imaginary portrait appears in works and titles of other contemporary authors published, like Pater, by Macmillan. It then explores the basis of Pater’s portrait stories, each of which focuses on an individual figure, usually a young male, destined for a tragic early death and set in Europe. In doing so, it provides examples from a range of works including ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ and ‘The Child in the House’.

This chapter focuses on Pater’s most famous work, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, to provide an expansive context in which to understand its significance in intellectual, literary and art history. It begins by locating it: explaining the concept behind Pater’s collection of eleven essays in terms of publication history and the periodical press, and exploring the ways in which these essays combine silent citation with originality. Its sections concentrate on: (1) how and why Pater redefines the ‘renaissance’ from the ways in which it was conceived in the nineteenth century; (2) Pater’s definition of subjective aesthetic criticism, which reverses Matthew Arnold’s critical position, with particular attention to the Preface and Conclusion; (3) the centrality of desire and passion in text; (4) Pater’s subject-positioning between the ‘Old Masters’, modernity and his reader.

This introductory chapter briefly charts Pater’s difficulties and importance as a literary theorist and philosophical thinker, with directions for thinking critically about his works and life. It is organised in three sections: (1) Pater in Context outlines how Pater’s relationship with, and writing about, the late-Victorian period is singular with the period refracted through his aestheticism; (2) Pater, ‘himself’ explains the difficulties of looking for Pater in his writings; (3) Pater Today looks at his late-twentieth century critical history and Pater studies today.

This chapter asks what it was that marked the young Pater’s philosophy out as so radical and potentially dangerous in the 1870s. It addresses how his singular attitude to referencing, originality, and artistry in philosophy put him at odds with his contemporaries at Oxford. In its sections, it addresses (1) Pater’s reading of philosophy, and the importance of this reading to his intellectual development; (2) the ways in which Pater’s treatment of philosophy is part of his wider commitment to interdisciplinarity, and how his engagements with philosophers and their ideas shape diverse and perhaps unexpected aspects of his writings; and (3) the philosophical significance of Pater’s own aestheticism.