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This study explores the relationship between Thackeray's novels and what contemporary critics made of them, in the context of the gradual displacement of an "idealist" by a "realist" bias in critical assumptions. Chapter One analyses the reception of Vanity Fair and concludes that the prevailing "idealist" bias denies it the status of art, and that Thackeray's early work provides a tradition to confirm this judgement. Chapter Two discusses Thackeray's position as a popular writer, and concludes that his "public" and "private" personalities are separate, and find simultaneous expression in Pendennis. Chapter Three concludes that the reception of Pendennis testifies to his popularity, but cannot advance his status. Chapter Four suggests that Esmond continues what is revealed as a search for values in Thackeray's work, and discerns a tension between this and the cultural demands of the period. Chapters Five and Six discuss The Newcomes as the culmination of the search in a disjunction between values in literature and in the world which is so complete that the book is seen as a triumph of "realism" while having itself come to the limits of "realism". Chapters Seven, Eight, and Nine discuss retrospective analyses of Thackeray's work, clarifying the context of the critical debate in the social and cultural demands of the time. Chapter Ten suggests that in The Virginians, the autonomy of values is displaced by history conceived of as an impersonal force. Lovel the Widower explores the alienation consequent upon this; Philip is a pot-pourri of earlier works; Denis Duval a final enigma (Chapter Eleven). Reviews of these novels, and obituary notices (Chapter Twelve), reveal the extent to which "realism", which Thackeray had focussed and even initiated, had developed to overtake him.

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By exploring the influence of Milton on Wordsworth's poetry of 1800-1805, I seek to demonstrate that Milton's life and work forms a deep-rooted ideological inspiration for Wordsworth's greatest poetry and in particular his attempts to create a modern epic. In Section II, I explore the early Grasmere poems: <i>Home at Grasmere</i> and <i>Michael</i>. The former celebrates Wordsworth's natural locus for intellectual excursion and sees in the valley society an edenic exemplar of society's potential. In <i>Michael</i> this society is under threat as the economic reality of the early nineteenth century erodes the world of relationship exemplified by Michael's life. Such erosion leads to a trend of social and personal dislocation and discontinuity and in Section III, I trace the way Wordsworth deals with such experience in the lyrics of 1802. In <i>Resolution and Independence</i> and the <i>Ode: Intimations of Immortality</i> he feels his way towards a faith akin to the one Milton expresses in <i>Lycidas</i>. In the sonnets of 1802 Wordsworth faces the threat posed to his vision of human potential by the world of power politics, in particular the perverse leadership of Napoleon. In a mood of introspection and national criticism Wordsworth seeks hope in his own country's ideological history which found its greatest epoch in the society envisaged by Milton and his contemporaries of the English Republic. In the final section I explore the intimate relationship between Wordsworth's most successful epic <i>The Prelude</i> and Milton's <i>Paradise Lost</i>. In exploring the debt Wordsworth owes here, I seek to demonstrate that he worked with a sense of purpose, organisation and relationship to the work of his great predecessor that is not always granted him, and that by such work Wordsworth hoped to play his destined role in the historical process of human progress.

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