"The Child in the House of Print": "Henry Daniel’s edition of Walter Pater’s “An Imaginary Portrait”"

International audienceThis article is devoted to the edition of Walter Pater’s “The Child in the House” printed on the private press of C.H.O. Daniel in Oxford in 1894. This edition may appear all the more surprising as it is deprived of illustrations, ornaments and miniation. However, if actual illustrations are missing—a usual practice of Pater’s since the second edition of The Renaissance in 1877—they are nevertheless implied in the very facture of the 68-page booklet printed by the Provost of Worcester College. Both the edition and the literary portrait partake in a specific form of literary impression understood as a process that stamps the brain and remains there, to be aroused anew when one reads or when one is confronted with art, either visually or musically. Arguably, Pater chose the most appropriate form and edition for his quasi-autobiographical text, hovering between disclosure and self-concealment and exploring one’s intimate past. Content and material form coalesce to present readers with an experiment in the representation of subjectivisation that was to find an echo in Freud’s Entwurf to describe the workings of the psychical apparatus (1895)