Note 4, Chapter 2 of the author's Christina Rossetti in Context which the University of North Carolina Press published in 1988. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
See Hamilton, Aesthetic Movement in England, and more recently, Hunt, Pre-Raphaelite Imagination. Both of these now-standard works convincingly argue that the aesthetic movement was generated largely by Pre-Raphaelitism and that its participants self-consciously looked to Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic values as the source of their own.
[Note by the web editor: One may add that even works that are seen by some as opposed to the Aesthetes and Decadents play key roles in the history of aetheticism. When John L. Bradley, the pioneering Ruskin editor, reviewed my first book on Ruskin (also available in the Victorian Web), he emphasized the critic's importance in the history of aestheticism — something to which, at the time, I paid little interest.]Last modified 24 June 2007