Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist, art and literary critic, and fiction writer known as one of the great stylists. His first and most frequently 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 for an ideal of intense inner life, was interpreted by many as an Aestheticism manifesto (whether stimulating or subversive). Walter Pater, born in Stepney in London's East End, was the second son of Richard Glode Pater, a physician who migrated to London in the early nineteenth century to practice medicine among the poor. Dr. Pater died while Walter was an infant, and the family relocated to Enfield. Walter attended Enfield Grammar School and was tutored privately by the headmaster. In 1853, he was transferred to The King's School in Canterbury, where the cathedral's magnificence left an impression on him that would last his entire life. He was fourteen years old when his mother, Maria Pater, died in 1854. Pater was a "reading man" in college, with literary and philosophical interests beyond the required readings. His early favourites included Flaubert, Gautier, Baudelaire, and Swinburne. During his vacations, he visited his aunt and sisters in Heidelberg, Germany, where he studied German and began reading Hegel and German thinkers.
