SOURCE: Wellek, René. “English Criticism: Historians and Theorists.” In A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950, Volume 4: The Later Nineteenth Century, pp. 141-54. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965.

In the following excerpt, Wellek provides an overview of contemporary literary criticism in the 1850s.

It would not be unfair to say that around 1850 English criticism had reached a nadir in its history: the great romantics, Coleridge, Hazlitt and Lamb, had died in the thirties; Carlyle, the strongest figure after them, had relinquished criticism for history and social pamphleteering; Macaulay and Mill were no longer concerned with criticism. The camp followers of the great romantics, De Quincey and Leigh Hunt, both lived till 1859, but were only pale ghosts of their youth. Poetic theory was practically nonexistent or simply a remote derivative of popularized romanticism: genius, imagination, sincerity of feeling, the moral and finally social function of the poet were the...