Earlier this year, Angus Wilson’s finest novel, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, was reissued by St. Martin’s Press.[1] Along with his other fiction, it has been out of print in this country since 1985. That one of the oddest and most fascinating bodies of work in postwar literature should have been so long ignored is shocking; so is the fact that its author, an elderly and respected knight, should have died penniless.

Throughout his life, Wilson was fascinated by Dickens, with whom he was frequently compared. The similarities are obvious enough: lavish histrionic gifts; a genius for mimicry; a fascination with the intensity of childhood experience; an uncanny ability to cut across class boundaries based on a rackety, déclassé childhood. Yet Dickens was a great popular writer, while Wilson’s books remained a fairly esoteric taste. The most fundamental difference would seem to lie in sentiment; it was a condim ...

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