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Timeline of Walter Pater


1839----> Walter Horatio Pater is born August 4 in Shadwell, East London, the second son of Dr. Richard Glode Pater and Maria, née Hill.


1844----> Dr. Pater dies January 28: his widow moves with her four children to a small house in the northern London suburb of Enfield.


1853----> The family moves to the village of Harbledown, near Canterbury, so that Pater may enroll (February 3) at the King's School as a day student.


1854----> Pater's mother dies February 25; Hester E. M. Pater ("Aunt Bessie") becomes the guardian of the children


1858----> Pater matriculates (June 11) at Queen's College, Oxford, with a King's School scholarship of sixty pounds a year for three 1861years; his studies begin in October: Aunt Bessie takes his two sisters to Heidelberg to complete their education.


1861----> Between January and March, Pater receives private tutorials in Greek from Benjamin Jowett.


1862----> Pater receives B.A. with second-class honors in Literae Humaniores and takes rooms on Oxford's High Street to coach private pupils, among them C. L. Shadwell, a future friend; Aunt Bessie dies (December 28) in Dresden, leaving the sisters to fend for themselves in Germany for several years until they return to take a house with Pater in Oxford.


1863----> Early in the year Pater and Ingram Bywater are elected members of the radical Old Mortality Society.


1864----> Pater is elected on probation (February 5) to a classical fellowship at Brasenose College, going into residence there as its first non-clerical fellow; his February 20 essay on J. G. Fichte's Ideal Student, read before the Old Mortality, causes a stir in Oxford; he writes "Diaphanéité" in July as an Old Mortality essay


1865----> Pater is granted continuous academic tenure: he proceeds routinely to the Master of Arts degree; that summer in the company of Shadwell he travels for the first time in Italy, particularly to Ravenna, Pisa, and Florence.


1866----> Pater breaks into print with "Coleridge's Writings," the first of three iconoclastic articles in the Westminster Review.


1873----> Studies in the History of the Renaissance is published March 1; an immediate hostile reaction to its supposedly hedonistic Aestheticism occurs.


1877----> The second edition of The Renaissance is published with the "Conclusion" omitted as a consequence of the machinations of Jowett and of others and such public ridicule as W.H.Mallock's satiric attack in The New Republic.


1883----> Pater returns in January from Rome where he had worked for two months on the background to Marius the Epicurean; he resigns his Brasenose tutorship (but remains a fellow of the college) to devote himself completely to its composition.


1885----> Marius the Epicurean is published March 4; Pater gives up his Oxford house and, during vacation time, lives in London with his sisters at 12 Earl's Terrace, Kensington.


1887----> William Pater, Walter's older brother, dies on April 24; Imaginary Portraits is published May 24.


1888----> Gaston de Latour runs serially in Macmillan's Magazine, but Pater's pace falters and he abandons it after the October issue: third edition of The Renaissance is published with the "Conclusion" restored and slightly toned down.


1889----> Appreciations is published November 15 and contains one of Pater's most important essays, "Aesthetic Poetry" (the retitled 1868 review-essay of William Morris' poetry); it is suppressed in all subsequent editions.


1891----> Pater reviews Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and condemns the loss of the moral sense" in Wilde's heroes.


1893----> Plato and Platonism is published February 10; in the summer Pater and his sisters give up their London house and return to Oxford, 64 St. Giles Street.


1894----> Pater is made an honorary LL.D. of Glasgow on April 13, he dies July 30 in Oxford of a heart attack following rheumatic fever and pluerisy; buried in Holywell Cemetery



Sources:

Walter Pater by Monsman, Gerald, 1940-


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