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
condiment that Dickens used generously and fearlessly, Wilson
sparingly and with a kind of bleak honesty. The British, in the
postwar years, “had been congratulating themselves smugly on having
won the war, and Angus exposed them to themselves as a nation of
beggars, snobs, bullies, black-marketeers and hypocrites,
ill-dressed, plain, timid, and adventurous only in pursuit of selfish
ends: it was not a flattering portrait.”

So writes Margaret Drabble in her satisfying new biography[2]
of the writer who, she claims, strongly influenced her own work and that of a number of her contemporaries including Ian McEwan and