Judas and the Widow

Abstract

Walter Pater’s death in July 1894 took place towards the end of a century in which biography had great commercial success, and became one of the dominant literary modes. Accompanying its success was a protracted public debate about the nature of biography that revived on the publication of J.A. Froude’s Thomas Carlyle (1882–4). Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) and Queen Victoria (1921) ended this phase of the debate resoundingly. Throughout the period two monuments of biography were built: the Dictionary of National Biography between 1885 and 1904, edited by Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, and Macmillan’s English Men of Letters series, edited by John Morley, between 1878 and 1892. In the midst of this activity and fracas, in 1906 and 1907, two lives of Pater were published, by A.C. Benson (EML, Macmillan) and Thomas Wright (Everett & Co.) respectively. These are interactive texts.1 Although Benson’s appeared first, it seems to have been occasioned by Wright’s project, and when Wright’s two-volume life appeared, it began with a critique of Benson’s volume. As the relative status of the two publishers suggests, Benson (1862–1925) was the better connected of the two, and indeed part of the Establishment culture: son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, his school was Eton, his university Cambridge, he became an Eton Master (1885–1903), took residence as a Fellow at Magdalene (1904–15), eventually serving as its Master.KeywordsBritish LibraryDaily MailArchive 55022Investigative MethodSexual PoliticsThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.