"Who are we to judge?": Issues of Identity and Cultural Authority in Late Victorian Metacritical Debate

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, the authority of literary critics was threatened by both internal factors—what Leslie Stephen called a "crisis in aesthetic criticism"—and by external factors, such as the cultural democratisation and emancipation of the general reading public. This article discusses a selection of metacritical essays by a group of relatively marginal men and women of letters, whose essays, despite lacking the status of Arnold's or Saintsbury's, nonetheless shed light on the ideology and practice of Victorian criticism and reveal how critics struggled with their identity due to the lack of professionalization.