SOURCE: Eagleton, Terry. “Chapter III.” In The Function of Criticism: From the Spectator to Post-Structuralism, pp. 45-67. London: Verso, 1984.

In the following excerpt, Eagleton explains the role of the nineteenth-century man of letters as commentator and interpreter of literature for the middle-class reading public.

The nineteenth century was to produce a category which yoked sage and critical hack uneasily together: ‘man of letters’. It is an interestingly elusive term, broader and more nebulous than ‘creative writer’, not quite synonymous with scholar, critic or journalist. T. W. Heyck has argued that it is the nearest term we have in nineteenth-century England to the significantly absent category of ‘intellectual’, which was not to gain currency in its modern sense until the 1870s.¹ Like the eighteenth-century periodicalists, the man of letters is the bearer and dispenser of a generalized ideological wisdom rather than the exponent of a specialist intellectual skill, one...