The details of his early life are sketchy. Walter Horatio Pater was born on 4 August 1839 in Shadwell in east London, the second son of Richard and Maria Pater. His father, a surgeon, died when Walter was four, and the family moved to Enfield, a north London suburb, near the home of Maria's sister, Pater's favorite "Aunt Bessie." His older brother, William, left home at fifteen in 1851, and Pater remained at home with his mother and sisters, Clara and Hester. The family moved again in 1853, to Harbledown near Canterbury, where Pater attended the King's School as a day student. He seems to have had few friends and to have taken little significant part in school life. The psychological isolation of his adolescence, especially from authoritative men and close friends his own age, is significant for the central figures in his later quasi-autobiographical imaginary portraits.
Pater entered Queen's College, Oxford, in 1858 and that same year visited his sisters in Heidelberg, where they were studying under Aunt Bessie's supervision. There he developed the interest in German Romantic literature--G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich von Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe were among the authors he read--that served eventually as the basis of his appointment as a fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford.
This is a free page. This page contains 185 words. This
biography contains 6,257 words (approx. 21 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Walter (Horatio) Pater Access Pass.
