BOOK REVIEW: Stefan Collini.ENGLISH PASTS: ESSAYS IN HISTORY AND CULTURE. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Abstract

In his many books and articles—especially in his study of L. T. Hobhouse (1979) and his Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850-1930 (1991)—Stefan Collini has established himself as one of the foremost intellectual historians of Victorian and post-Victorian Britain. He has also entertained the readers of Dissent, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and other periodicals with eloquent essays that enhance our understanding of a world of social and political thought that increasingly is not our own. Here, in English Pasts, he has assembled a collection of those writings from the 1980s and 1990s. He has edited some and expanded others, [End Page 153] rendering the whole more than the sum of its parts. Indeed, taken together these essays offer as much trenchant commentary on the nature of contemporary scholarship as they do on the great Victorian and post-Victorian thinkers whom Collini has made his own.