Schumann's invention of Schubert's Mädchencharakter came at a time when gendered descriptions of music were aesthetic constructions common enough to find their way into the composer's prose and to have an impact on his compositional allusions to his predecessor. To judge by later references to his article, Schumann often served as the authoritative touchstone for the early attempts to place Schubert in a historical context. Certainly the reappearance of Schumann's Mädchencharakter essay in a collection of his writings in 1854 was an impetus to Schubert's emergence as a composer worthy of serious consideration, even as it encouraged the mimicry of a gendered interpretation of his creative life. Of course, the paucity of printed material about Schubert at mid-century left a documentary vacuum that needed to be filled. This very absence helps to explain why the handful of mid-century popular images to be discussed presently had a durability matching the more high-minded purpose of Schumann's prose. Further, to the extent that these images produced an idea of Schubert that to some degree echoed the gendered nature of Schumann's Mädchencharakter, the two might be said to be synchronous rather than competitive influences. For subsequent historians and biographers, however, Schumann had a stature that rendered him more worthy of reference, and consequently his presence is easier to document. There is a certain degree of artificiality in attempting to parse the history of Schubert's reception in the nineteenth century, yet given the appearance of Schumann's essays from the 1830s to the 1850s and the subsequent influence of their gendered language there is merit in pursuing several evidentiary threads during this period.