Having received at Princeton University Library a donation of some documents ‘of great interest for the literary history of the nineteenth century in England and America’, Morse Peckham set out to discover what he could about the fi gure with whom they were concerned. It turned out to be a diffi cult task because the editions, manuscripts and correspondence were related to Philip James Bailey's Festus, a poem Peckham found ‘the literary world’ had both ‘misinterpreted’ and ‘underestimated’. More shockingly for Peckham, scholars had been ignoring it, leaving questions ‘still unanswered’, such as ‘what is the nature of the appeal of a long, complex, and to many people, heretical poem’? Where was the record of scholarly commentary a poem of Festus’ reach and complexity warranted?

Calls for rejuvenation, based either on the poem's staggering popularity among Victorians, or on its infl uence on other authors, proliferate. The whimsically named F. B. Money-Coutts pleads, for example, in The Academy (1901), ‘not from any audience chamber ought this great, this conscientious prophet-poet to be dismissed without being fully heard’ and ‘Mr. Bailey's life-work deserves, not an ephemeral comment, but a volume of earnest analysis.’ The Athenaeum (1876) avers that ‘in the study of English poetry, it is always necessary to consider the infl uence of … Festus … upon most subsequent poetry’. For some readers, the poem's obvious quality all but guaranteed it a place in posterity. The Saturday Review (1889), for instance, contends, ‘the fact remains that schools of poetry rise and fall, one infl uence yields to another infl uence, and Mr. Bailey's … poem rides every storm and survives every revolution of taste’.