Modern Essays

The essay form at its finest: curious, personal, and utterly unafraid to wander. This anthology gathers thirty-three pieces from Britain, America, and Canada, written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by journalists, critics, and men of letters who treated the essay as conversation rather than lecture. Here you will find the grand manner of literary criticism alongside outright foolery, pathos beside politics, the picturesque beside the practical. What unites them is something harder to define: a belief that ideas deserve to be pursued even when they lead nowhere useful, that style matters, that the reader is a companion rather than a pupil. Morley chose these pieces not from the studies of retired aesthetes but from the trenches of daily and weekly journalism, where writers met deadlines and readers with minds as sharp as any academic's. The result is a parliament of philomaths, arguments made with wit and sincerity, essays that work as art.