A central emphasis in this wide-ranging collection of essays is how variously Victorians fashioned the image of the Romantic writer and individual for their own ends. In terms of this broad conception, and in its alertness to the interrelations of issues of periodization and culture with issues of literary creativity, this book accordingly takes its place alongside such works as Stephen Gill's Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford, 1998), Richard Cronin's Romantic Victorians (Houndmills, 2002), and the comparable collection by Joel Faflak and Julia Wright, Nervous Reactions: Victorian Recollections of Romanticism (Albany, NY, 2004). What makes this book work impressively as a collection, however, is not any hegemonic consistency of focus or method but the assurance and invention with which the contributors work within its broad themes, while preserving the cogency of particular topics and the nuances of personal, aesthetic, and cultural contexts. The result is a genuinely invigorating book that crisscrosses its nineteenth-century terrain often uncovering new paths and viewpoints, as well as picking out much hitherto unregarded local detail. The editors’ influence is evident in the ways that essays are tightly and suggestively written, and the efficient use of footnotes prevents unnecessary knots obscuring the lines and textures of particular arguments.

The fact that for the Victorian writer finding a voice might mean incorporating someone else's is the topic addressed by Andrew Radford and Mark Sandy in their introduction. They usefully condense many of the main issues by identifying, after an epigraph from Wallace Stevens, two main types of literary echo—controlled and conscious allusion of a conventionalized kind, and a freer style of more or less accidental or unconscious echoing or even ventriloquizing. Thus, Victorian writers can find their commitment to the “civilised and rational” undermined by the uncanny return of the “potentially subversive, governing essence of Romanticism” that “will begin to work independently and possess the Victorian possessor” (3). Such a conception of Romantic poetry as both troubling and inspiring surfaces in several of the essays that turn directly on questions of influence. Julie Crane's piece probes the afterlife of Chatterton—contradictorily forger and genius and an endlessly magnetic, suggestive figure—in the mind of successors like Collins, Dickens, and Arnold. Sarah Wooton offers a subtle and sympathetic case study of Dante Gabriel Rossetti as a writer who used his worship of Keats as a way of limiting his own aspirations to originality. The fascination of other essays lies in their uncovering of more unsuspected or neglected kinds of affiliation or self-modeling. J. R. Watson surprisingly but persuasively argues that Hopkins found in Wordsworth a poetics of the numinous and the charismatic adaptable to his own spiritual purposes, remaining “benignly haunted or inspired by Wordsworth throughout his life” (154). Likewise, in Marjorie Stone's formidably conceived piece, Byron, as poet and persona, is discovered as a formative influence on Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, whereas Vincent Newey convincingly recovers a Dickensian dialogue with the same poet, as mediated by silver-fork fiction, by Bulwer-Lytton and Benjamin Disraeli.

More familiar kinds of Victorian reaction or critique emerge as a governing theme in several essays. James Narajan outlines how Elizabeth Gaskell's fiction incorporated a critique of Romantic poetic effeminacy as a foil for the complex reconfiguring and valorization of masculinity in her fiction, while for Andrew Radford, the tragic turn of Hardy's later fiction is internally related to a self-excoriating critique of ineffectual or dishonest Shelleyan dreamers (an argument that raises interesting questions about the Shelleyan elements in Hardy's poetry and short fiction). In an intriguing piece of close literary detective work, Lisa Vargo demonstrates how family members successively refined in print the dissident or otherwise unruly elements of their forebearers, “Mrs. Shelley” and “Mrs. Barbauld.” Issues of posterity also govern Andrew Bennett's very different interest in how Victorian literary culture was, as the editors put it, “haunted by the spectral figure of Romanticism” (1). Bennett's deconstructive reading issues in the contention that Joseph Severn was the crucial medium through whom Keats, as a dead poet, came to exert a ghostly fascination over later literary society, in the “second half of the nineteenth century” (42).

The sense of poetic belatedness that emerges at key points in Bennett's piece is similar to that traced in two beautifully worked pieces dealing with Victorian poets: Mark Sandy describes how poets like Arnold, Tennyson, Hopkins, and Hardy used the representation of birds and birdsong to revise and undo Romantic figurings of ideality and inspiration, and Michael O’Neill discusses how Romantic figurations of affectivity as flights of passion, bordering the infinite and visionary, were later to be transposed by the Victorians into a reflexive and allusive engagement with more mundane human passions painfully at odds with finite actuality. Finally, the two closing pieces in the collection offer something different: Ve-Yin Tee offers an interesting homoerotic revision of the cultural code by which, in the paintings of Henry Scott Tuke, “the Romanticised figure of the Child is transmuted, unashamedly, into the Victorian Boy” (208), whereas John Holmes charts the shifting courses and revisions of the Prometheus myth, throughout the nineteenth century, ambivalently signifying both ambition and overreaching, before John Addington Symonds was to wrest it for his own pagan, postreligious, ends, freeing Prometheus “from the interpretative shackles of mid-Victorian Christianity, conservative Hellenism and Shelleyan optimism” (224).

So, this is a book that distinctively reworks and deepens our understanding of the interrelations of the Romantic and Victorian periods. As a collection it will remain of great interest to scholars of both periods, as well as offering an accomplished model of critical writing that works on a case basis to illuminate, often with verve and imagination, the larger historical, cultural, and literary issues associated with the long nineteenth century.