Walter Pater: an Imaginative Sense of Fact

Book excerpt: First Published in 1981. Pater is certainly the least widely read and understood of any of the Victorian critics and creative writers, though there are signs of a coming revival of interest in him. Each of the discussions included in this issue devoted to Pater touches, in some significant way, on his "imaginative sense of fact," on his struggle with the objective ‘givens’ of experience (ideas or individuals), and on his efforts to co-opt or turn that Other into a reordered reflection of his own image.