Such darling dodos, and other stories

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Conradi, Peter, Isobel Armstrong and Bryan Loughrey (editors), " Angus Wilson", Northcote House, 1997, ISBN 0-7463-0803-5.

However, if one could not be a Breton fisherman, but had unfortunately been born a middleclass young man dependent upon one’s parents, the most important thing was to have some private means. Without them one would have to obey the father’s will or, unsuited by a classical education to perform any craft, one would be forced into what we now call “the white-collar class” — to be a shop assistant or a clerk. How dreadful was the life of shop assistants Maugham shows in Philip’s most agonizing shame in the whole of Of Human Bondage. How contemptible was a clerk and his genteel aspirations Forster suggests in the character of Leonard Bast in Howard’s End. There is a strange combination of realism and snobbery about all this; for distasteful as this emphasis on dividends may be as a basis for the great truth of progress, it is a truer estimation of money power than many later progressives have allowed themselves.THERE is an aspect of Butler’s advice to young men who wish to be free that is even more disturbing than his realistic assessment of the powers of money and of social class: his warning against following the dictates of the heart. The danger of a young man of talent and means being entrapped into marriage with a girl of the lower classes as Ernest Pontifex was trapped into marriage with Ellen, the country girl turned prostitute, was not new to Victorian readers. Mrs. Pendennis had saved her beloved son Arthur from such a marriage, when his heart and honor were more fully engaged than the goose Ernest; Trollope had warned his hero Johnnie Eames off entanglements with barmaids and landladies’ daughters. The danger was no doubt a real one, and Butler unnecessarily weakens the case by making Ellen a drunken tart.

a b c "Wilson, Sir Angus (Frank Johnstone), (11 Aug. 1913–31 May 1991), author; Professor of English Literature, University of East Anglia, 1966–78, then Emeritus". WHO'S WHO & WHO WAS WHO. 2007. doi: 10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.u176296. ISBN 978-0-19-954089-1 . Retrieved 15 April 2021. If they were muddled, however, it was not a little because their prophets had been muddled also. Anti-Victorianism had been intended as a straight from the shoulder tidy-up of a muddled, blinkered world; but if we return to its gospels — to Shaw and Wells, Forster, Douglas, and the Maugham of Of Human Bondage, to name only those who owed debts to Samuel Butler — we shall find often brute force muddled up with freedom, class prejudices accepted as honesty, optimistic generalization masking despair, and personal quirks generalized into universal dogmas. To say all this is not to deny their achievement — they were one and all brilliant demolition men, skilled parricides — where the buildings were ratinfested and had stood too long, where the fathers were corrupted and ripe for death. Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, vol. 2, R. Reginald, Mary A. Burgess, Douglas Menville, 1979, pg 1130 Meg’s marriage had been sexually happy and yet – she now, after Bill’s death, begins to understand – in need of repair; and she comes to see how life had gone sour on him so that, unhappy and unfulfilled, he gambled much of their money away. For her part Meg comes down in the world and so learns how she has used her class and sexuality to get her own way in life.The work situation was stressful and led to a nervous breakdown, for which he was treated by Rolf-Werner Kosterlitz. He returned to the Museum after the end of the War, and it was there that he met Tony Garrett (born 1929), who was to be his companion for the rest of his life. Gerstner, David A. (2006). Routledge International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. p.615. ISBN 0-415-30651-5. He worked as a reviewer, and in 1955 he resigned from the British Museum to write full-time (although his financial situation did not justify doing so) and moved to Suffolk.