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| Walter Pater (drawing by Simeon Solomon, 1873 ) |
Kenneth Daley, ed., Appreciations, and Studies and Reviews,
1890-1894, vol. vi, in eds., Lesley Higgins and David
Latham, The Collected Works of Walter Pater,
10 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
For the past number of years, I have been editing the work of Walter Pater (1839–94), English essayist, art and literary critic, classicist, fiction writer, and a central figure in British aestheticism and the English literary tradition. I am part of an international team of twelve scholars preparing a new critical edition of Pater’s entire oeuvre, commissioned by Oxford University Press, and consisting of ten volumes, three of which have already been published. When complete, the Oxford Collected Works will serve students and scholars as the definitive edition of Pater for the next one-hundred years.
The editorial work is a collaborative process, involving meetings, correspondence, and shared work among the team of editors, the support of research assistants (advanced Ph.D. candidates at the University of Toronto and York University), and an advisory group of classicists and translators. The project is funded by a significant humanities research grant from the Canadian government.
I have long been involved in Pater studies, and am the author of a well-regarded monograph on Pater, as well as a number of articles and essays. For many years, I served as the Bibliographer for the Pater Newsletter and its successor, Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism. I have been involved in the Oxford editorial project from the beginning, and was an active participant in the initial proposal workshop held at the University of Exeter, UK, in the summer of 2011. I participated in the inaugural editorial meeting held at the Sorbonne University, Paris, in the summer of 2014, and all subsequent editorial meetings.
Pater published six books in his lifetime: his first and most famous, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873; in subsequent editions renamed, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry), which Oscar Wilde described as having “had such a strange influence over [his] life”; Marius the Epicurean (1885), an experimental novel in two volumes; Imaginary Portraits (1887), another experimental work featuring the hybrid genre Pater created, the imaginary portrait, merging fiction and myth with the critical essay, history and biography; Appreciations, With an Essay on Style (1889), Pater’s only book of literary criticism; Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures (1893), and a limited edition of An Imaginary Portrait: The Child in the House (1894).
Pater’s contributions to leading periodicals of the day—essays, reviews, revised lectures, short works of fiction—were substantial. After his death, friends Edmund Gosse and Charles Shadwell arranged for four additional volumes to appear: Miscellaneous Studies, Essays from ‘The Guardian’, Greek Studies, and chapters from the unfinished novel Gaston de Latour. The Collected Works preserves the integrity of Pater’s arrangements for his writings, augments several of those volumes, and brings together, for the first time, all of his literary journalism and academic studies, his extant correspondence, and transcriptions of his manuscripts.
My volume includes the 12 essays that make up the two editions of Pater’s book of literary criticism, Appreciations, With an Essay on Style (1889, 1890), and an additional 11 essays and reviews that Pater published in the final four years of his life. It is a large volume; when published it will likely be well over 500 pages.
Pater is a difficult and elusive writer, his work full of unacknowledged allusions and quotations (and misquotations!). His stylistic tendencies run toward disjunction, postponement, and qualification. He is not easy to pin down. The editorial work is demanding and time-consuming, at turns tedious and exhilarating; at heart, it is a sustained attempt to inhabit a complex consciousness, and to recreate the relevant social, cultural, and intellectual milieu of late-Victorian England, as represented in a plethora of nineteenth-century primary materials – contemporary letters, diaries, manuscripts, lectures, periodical articles, newspapers, histories, literary editions, literary criticism, reviews, and other forms of scholarly and creative work – as well as in the subsequent scholarship of the 20th- and 21st-centuries.
There are three primary
components to my edition:
1) Explanatory Notes: scholarly annotations which mediate Pater’s text, providing identification and/or translation of quotations and allusions, identification of Pater’s sources, and the historical or cultural background necessary for understanding the term or passage. These notes contextualize Pater’s critical point of view in relation to his contemporaries; cite other passages in Pater’s work that concern the same author, text, or theme; and cite relevant scholarship of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Each of the purple-highlighted superscript numbers indicates an explanatory note. All explanatory notes can be found here . Please feel free to follow along using both links in separate tabs.
2) Textual Variant Typescripts: In addition to preparing explanatory notes, I
am responsible for collating all various editions, published in Pater’s
lifetime, of the essays included in my volume, as well as any extant
manuscripts. All of the pieces included in Appreciations
had previously been published at least one time before in a periodical or
other venue, and Appreciations itself
was published twice in Pater’s lifetime, with some significant differences
between the 1889 and 1890 volume. Following the copy-text rationale established
for the Collected Works, I use the 1890 edition of Appreciations,
the final version that Pater saw through the press, as the text against which
all other versions are compared.
Pater was a consummate wordsmith, and relentlessly revised and reshuffled his work as it reappeared in various forms. My collation of Pater’s “Coleridge,” for instance, includes over 600 variants! In providing a detailed collation of the differences between versions, readers are able to better understand Pater’s composition and revising processes.
In addition, the collations provide evidence of Pater’s continual negotiations of the societal, legal, and cultural pressures he faced as a queer writer and provocative literary sensibility, sympathetic to French realism and naturalism, for instance, or closer to home, the ‘fleshly poetry’ of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and A.C. Swinburne, objects of censorship and moral condemnation in late-Victorian England.
3) Critical and Textual Introductions
I am preparing a
critical introduction (14,000 to 15,000 words) addressing the genesis of Appreciations
and the late essays, their early reception among Victorian critics, significant intellectual and artistic
contexts, and afterlife of the texts.
I am also preparing a textual introduction providing a detailed account of composition and publication history, discussion of revisions and other emendations, and description of the five extant manuscripts collated in my volume.