Images of Englishness: The Daily Chronicle and ‘Proposed Laureates’ to Succeed Tennyson

Ever since Roland Barthes asserted that the ‘image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life,’ literary criticism has embraced the author’s putative entry ‘into his own death’ (143). We would do well to remember, however, that for nineteenth-century critics there was a powerful connection between life and work, image and text. The figure of the author played a prominent role in the construction of moral and aesthetic considerations in Victorian criticism.