Placing writers in the context of ideas current in their time has two dangers; one may catalogue the components of the environment and neglect the central concern, the writer’s achievements, or, on the other hand, one may impose upon the achievement a rigid clarity which reveals only a desire for “neatness” in the intellectual history. No study worthy of the name can avoid these dangers entirely indeed, used warily, they are tools for unravelling the complexities of the critical theories in England in the Victorian period.