Abstract

This article conceptualises the issue of "marginality" in nineteenth-century British reception of Dante and tackles it from the unexplored prospective of the life and works of a minor Victorian dantista, Philip Henry Wicksteed. It reassesses the pivotal role he had in the dissemination and popularisation of Dantean scholarly knowledge between the late 1870s and the 1910s, through the unconventional - and yet, extremely successful - cycles of sermons and series of lectures for the University Extension Movement.