The Victorian literary reception of Schelling

pp. 139-175

in: Giles Whiteley, Schelling's reception in nineteenth-century British literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

This chapter follows the ways in which Victorian writers began to carve out their own responses to Schelling in the period after Romanticism. It begins with Julius Hare, his meeting with Schelling, and his influence on two generations of Cambridge Apostles. It then looks at a number of other important figures who studied with and/or read Schelling: Richard Cleasby, Henry Reeve, John Chapman, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning and Thomas Hardy, amongst others. The chapter also considers two of Schelling's translators, Sarah Austin and Arthur Johnson, and the significance of the first publications of British translations of Schelling into English, as well as suggesting the ways in which some of Arnold's most famous aesthetic pronouncements may have derived either directly from his reading of Schelling, or diffusely through that of Edmund Walker Head.