Jason Camlot provides a context for the nineteenth-century critic's changing ideas about style, rhetoric and technologies of communication. Camlot contributes to our understanding of how nineteenth-century critics used their own work to speculate about the changing conditions for the production and reception of ideas.

Contents: Introduction: sincere mannerisms; The character of the periodical press; The origins of modern earnest; The downfall of authority and The New Magazine; Thomas de Quincey's periodical rhetoric; The political economy of style: John Ruskin and critical truth; The Victorian critic as naturalizing agent; The style is the man: style theory in the 1890s; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.