Walter Horatio Pater was born in East London in 1839 and lived for a time in Enfield before the Pater household moved to Canterbury in 1853. There Walter attended the King’s School, proceeding in 1858 to the Queen’s College, Oxford, as an undergraduate. In 1864, having remained in Oxford, he was made a fellow of Brasenose College, where he taught Classics and Philosophy. He retained his fellowship for the rest of his life. From around the time of this appointment, Pater began publishing critical essays on literature and art, gradually gaining a reputation for fine, idiosyncratic prose, sceptical philosophy, and a distinctive aestheticist outlook. Some of these essays were included in his first book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), which made his name not only as a stylist and perceptive critic, but also as a controversial thinker whose sympathy with the `pagan’ sensibility and the `epicurean’ mode of life attracted considerable hostility. Other critical essays were collected in the 1889 volu
