To whom did the critic speak, and who could occupy the office of ‘critic’? This chapter explores the roles of men and women of ‘letters’ in the Romantic age as a framework for understanding the vocation of Romantic criticism. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, critics and reviewers of poetry, drama or the novel worked within the wider context of two closely related early modern categories: ‘polite literature’ and the ‘republic of letters’. The crisis of both categories, between 1780 and 1830, produced changes in culture and criticism that would profoundly alter the status of literature itself in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ‘Polite letters’ embraced the genres of historiography, natural philosophy, moral philosophy and political discourse as well as poetry, drama and criticism itself, while significantly excluding the new genre of the novel. Resting on this basis, the early modern idea of a ‘republic of letters’ defined a territory that existed on no European map – an ‘elusive, often deliberately mysterious domain’, as Elizabeth Eisenstein remarks – yet shaped the self-understanding of European criticism until the last decade of the eighteenth century.

At that point, the historian's road map to the republic of letters becomes more obscure. By 1800 its authority over the organization of reading and writing seems to have diminished as quickly as Edmund Burke's ‘political Men of Letters’ were discredited in the French Revolution controversy of the 1790s. Instead of an idealized unity of critical reasoners embedded in modern print culture, the republic of letters became in the Romantic age a confusing clash of those ‘sects and systems’ that, according to David Hume, the early modern republic had triumphantly suppressed.