Portrait of Walter Pater

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Walter Pater

Walter Pater, English author, critic, and academic (died 1894)

Born
August 4, 1839
Died
July 30, 1894
Zodiac sign
Leo
Birth year
1839

About Walter Pater

Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist, art and literary critic, and fiction writer, regarded as one of the great stylists. His first and most often reprinted book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), revised as The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1877), in which he outlined his approach to art and advocated an ideal of the intense inner life, was taken by many as a manifesto of Aestheticism. From 2019 the Oxford University Press began publishing its ten-volume Collected Works of Walter Pater, the first complete annotated edition. This volume contains a reverie on the boyhood of Hippolytus, 'Hippolytus Veiled' (first published in Macmillan's Magazine in 1889), which has been called "the finest prose ever inspired by Euripides". Pater's The Renaissance is praised as a "wonderful new volume" in Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence (1920), set in the 1870s.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

Walter Pater timeline

  1. This volume contains a reverie on the boyhood of Hippolytus, 'Hippolytus Veiled' (first published in Macmillan's Magazine in 1889), which has been called "the finest prose ever inspired by Euripides".
  2. Pater's The Renaissance is praised as a "wonderful new volume" in Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence (1920), set in the 1870s.
  3. From 2019 the Oxford University Press began publishing its ten-volume Collected Works of Walter Pater, the first complete annotated edition.

The world when Walter Pater was born

Walter Pater was born in 1839. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Headlines and milestones

  • Top headlineFirst Opium War begins between Britain and China
  • Technology milestonePhotography (daguerreotype) announced to the world
  • Notable inventionDaguerreotype camera
  • World population~1.19B

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderMartin Van Buren
  • U.S. population16.7M

1839 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in Walter Pater's birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure18392026
Population16.7M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

This profile combines a biographical source with structured birthday and historical context. Sources recorded for this profile: Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Library of Congress, Wikidata. See our editorial policy for sourcing, corrections, and review standards.

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