ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book offers a new view of Victorian literary history by presenting representative instances of the overlooked but exhilaratingly multiple relationship between the Victorians and the Hanoverian age. It presents a wide range of material that reveals the multiple engagements between Victorian critics and Pope's poetry – encounters occluded by the pronouncements of Matthew Arnold's 'The Study of Poetry'. The book shows the eighteenth-century world – embodied in the figure of Samuel Johnson – as an enabling source of quotation, example, and identification. Dismantling the view of Johnson in the nineteenth century as largely the preserve of critics and pedants, Turner excavates Johnson's multivalence to nineteenth-century readers from a range of social and educational backgrounds. The chapter discusses the eighteenth century as site inscribed with the particular anxieties of late Victorian culture, especially concerns about masculinity, Aestheticism, and the relationship between literature.
