Biographical Materials
Chesterton on Literature
- How to go about understanding the Victorian age
- Macaulay's “noble enduring quality in our literature” — his passion for history
- Defends Elizabeth Barrett Browning's greatness
- Thomas Hood — “the last great man who really employed the pun”
- Thomas Carlyle as Seer
- Carlyle's dangerous optmism
- The sentences of Ruskin, “an artist in prose”
- The two streams of inspiration that flow from Ruskin
- Carlyle's continuing influence
- Comparing Trollope's Realism to that of Dickens and Thackeray
- “It may seem strange to say that Thackeray did not know enough of the world”
- “being abruptly original in a corner”: MacDonald, Carroll, and Lear
- Dickens, Cobbett, and “the ordinary man”
- Swinburne's style “is a sort of fighting and profane parody of the Old Testament”
- Style and Idea in Robert Louis Stevenson
Political Themes and Contexts
- "The most important event in English history happened in France": The French Revolution and English Romanticism
- Macaulay begins the Victorian Age
- Three main trends of Victorian thought: Utilitarianism, the Oxford Movement, and the Romantic Protestantism of Carlyle and Ruskin
- Thomas Carlyle understood the politico-economical results of Classical Economics
- Ruskin, “the young lieutenant of Carlyle in his war on Utilitarian Radicalism”
- Chesterton's attack on the Reform Acts
- Macaulay's complex relation with Bentham and Utilitarianism
- Kipling's Imperialism Ends the Victorian Era
Religious Themes and Contexts
Poetry
Selected Works
Utopia of Usurers and other Essays. London: Hutchinson, 1936.
The Victorian Age in Literature. London: Butterworth: 1913. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1913.
The Wild Knight and Other Poems. London, 1900.
Last modified 14 June 2014