Literary Criticism, Volume 4: Edited by S. T. Joshi

Leslie Stephen's analyses of the novelists and poets of the mid-nineteenth century are some of his most illuminating works of literary criticism. He studies the philosophy embedded in the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth; he writes engagingly about the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott as well as the novels of Benjamin Disraeli, William Makepeace Thackeray (whose nephew by marriage he was), and George Eliot; and he dissects the richly textured prose of Walter Savage Landor and Thomas De Quincey. The critical work of the early writers of the Edinburgh Review (1802f.) and of William Hazlitt is examined in detail. In all, Stephen provides a discerning view of some of the leading writers of the Victorian age.