The reception given to a writer by his contemporaries and nearcontemporaries is evidence of considerable

value to the student of literature. On one side we learn a great deal about the state of criticism at large and in

particular about the development of critical attitudes towards a single writer; at the same time, through

private comments in letters, journals or marginalia, we gain an insight upon the tastes and literary thought

of individual readers of the period. Evidence of this kind helps us to understand the writer’s historical

situation, the nature of his immediate reading-public, and his response to these pressures.

The separate volumes in the Critical Heritage Series present a record of this early criticism. Clearly for

many of the highly productive and lengthily reviewed nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers there exists

an enormous body of material; and in these cases the volume editors have made a selection of the most

important views, significant for their intrinsic critical worth or for their representative quality—perhaps

even registering incomprehension!

For earlier writers, notably pre-eighteenth century, the materials are much scarcer and the historical

period has been extended, sometimes far beyond the writer’s lifetime, in order to show the inception and

growth of critical views which were initially slow to appear.

In each volume the documents are headed by an Introduction, discussing the material assembled and

relating the early stages of the author’s reception to what we have come to identify as the critical tradition.

The volumes will make available much material which would otherwise be difficult of access and it is

hoped that the modern reader will be thereby helped towards an informed understanding of the ways in

which literature has been read and judged.