Literary Studies

Walter Bagehot's Literary Studies brings together sharp, witty essays on major writers and the habits of mind that shape genius, from Gibbon and Butler to Sterne, Thackeray, Dickens, Macaulay, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning. He is as interested in the making of authors as in their finished works, blending literary criticism with social history, biography, and brisk psychological insight. The opening portrait of Edward Gibbon traces his family's rise through the South Sea Bubble, then follows the historian's frail childhood, irregular schooling, and formative dependence on his aunt. From there Bagehot meditates on childhood reading, arguing that young minds absorb history and ideas as living wholes before they can analyze them, even as disciplined study provides the structure serious thought requires. Oxford appears as a hollow institution of idle tutors and empty formalities, and Gibbon's lonely years there lead, in a striking act of youthful seriousness and confusion, to his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Bagehot then broadens the discussion into a larger argument about education and the shaping of unusual genius. Elsewhere he turns to Dickens, praising his fearless comic power while judging his later work with stern honesty, and to Macaulay, whose history of 1689–1697 made a neglected age vivid and famous. Throughout, Bagehot's criticism is lively, exacting, and deeply human. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.