1. ‘Trafficking in the rich marketplace of the press’: Walter Pater and Print Culture

Abstract

A few years ago, Laurel Brake taught me a new word, blunt and unPaterian in its monosyllabic brevity: ‘puff’. I still remember the slight shock to my nervous system in a conference hall when Laurel categorically referred to one of Pater’s prose pieces as ‘obviously a puff!’. A Germanic word, in my own Germanic mind associated with a sudden breath, a swelling, an exclamation, ‘puff’ did not immediately spring to mind as a word to be associated with Pater, unless, of course, employed in its twentieth-century sense of ‘an effeminate man’ (OED 8d). The act of puffing, defined by Chris Kent as the giving of ‘excessive or unmerited praise to a performance or work of art or literature’,1 seemed out of character for Pater as we thought we knew him until Laurel exposed him and his anonymous reviews in the Guardian as ‘part of the puffing economy’, the...