This book discusses the importance of the Romantic essay to the development of realism in the Victorian era. It explores how specific texts by key Victorian authors—Dickens, Ruskin, Eliot, Pater, Hardy, and Stevenson—depart from the principles and practice of their forebears in prose: William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Lamb. Reviving, in its methodology, a now nearly obsolete critical mode, the source study, it tracks in the transition from essayists of the Romantic era to their Victorian successors, a changing relation between 'ideal' and 'real', or 'self' and 'other'. Naming as 'realism', an English literary practice of the nineteenth century that, mimetic in its expression, remains committed to the absolute and uncompromised reality of the other, it argues for the importance of the Romantic essay to the genesis and evolution of this practice. The familiar or conversational essay is key to its argument, but the book draws widely, too, on pertinent material in other essay forms: the critical essay, the character sketch and its near relation, the biographical portrait.

The literary history that it narrates discloses the extent of William Hazlitt's intellectual legacy to later writers. The progression from Romantic to post-Romantic thought is marked by the gradual demise of the Romantic imagination. From that demise arises a new and peculiarly Victorian persuasion of other grounds—or the absence—of moral possibility.