Literary Studies

Walter Bagehot's Literary Studies emerges as both a major critical collection and an intimate intellectual portrait of one of Victorian England's most original minds. In his memoir, Richard Holt Hutton argues that Bagehot was never merely a practical economist or political commentator: his judgment sprang from a rare mixture of imagination, humor, skepticism, and speculative power. The narrative traces Bagehot from his Somerset and banking-family background through his student friendship with Hutton at University College, London, where lively debate, wide reading, and the ferment of Free Trade politics sharpened both men's minds. It also reveals Bagehot's sharp wit, social detachment, and sometimes sardonic manner, balanced by real kindness, high spirits, and a love of pleasure and vivid life. The essays themselves range widely across literary, political, and religious thought, from Shelley, Shakespeare, Milton, and Cowper to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Bagehot's fascination with Catholicism, his reflections on belief and intellectual vanity, and his insistence on the comic, everyday texture of English literature all show a critic alert to the tensions between grandeur and humanity, reason and feeling, seriousness and wit. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.