As critic, historian, and biographer, John Forster was a ubiquitous and powerful presence in the literary world of early-and mid-Victorian England. He befriended and exerted significant influence over many contemporary English writers, including William Harrison Ainsworth, Robert Browning, Edward Bulwer, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Leigh Hunt, Walter Savage Landor, and William Makepeace Thackeray. Chief literary and drama critic of the Examiner for more than twenty years and editor from 1847 to 1856, Forster was called by the Eclectic Magazine (October 1852) "perhaps the one most influential critic of the metropolitan press." His essays appeared in the major British periodicals, and he was editor or business manager of the New Monthly Magazine, the Foreign Quarterly Review, and the Daily News. Moreover, in his time he was considered one of the foremost authorities on the history of the Commonwealth of the seventeenth century. Between 1836 and 1864 he had many of his studies of that...