The teenage punk in me that never successfully eclipsed the real-life nerd found as much delight in lines like “the conversation would have been appropriately rounded off by Welch’s death” as in the opening chords to ‘London’s Burning’. Forgive the self-indulgence, but I read Lucky Jim the same year I heard the Clash’s first album and, perhaps this is unlikely, but, born twenty years and genres apart, they share an energy and clarity born of anger, even if Lucky Jim has better jokes and the Clash has a better beat. That Amis channeled his anger at postwar Britain through the lens of a campus comedy did not blunt its edge. Cover for the Penguin edition of Lucky Jim, 1965. In later life, Amis complained to his son Martin that he couldn’t abide modern literature, swearing: “I’m never going to read another novel that doesn’t begin with the sentence, ‘A shot rang out.’.” Fittingly, perhaps, Lucky Jim was itself a shot that rang out in the early 1950s, an opening salvo of the ‘Angry Young Men’ movement that helped blow away the cobwebs of Victorian repression and deference in British society. To be clearer: I continue to read all three.Īmis’ novel of Jim Dixon, a disaster-prone History lecturer at a British university in the years following the Second World War, is a hilarious, rage-filled attack upon the fustiness of bourgeois, provincial England, its pretensions, its petty but stultifying class differences, its sexual unease. To be clear: I was a child when I read Fry and Unstead. The third was Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (1953). Unstead’s Story of Britain (1970), with beautiful illustrations by Victor Ambrus. Rather, the first was Hamlyn Children’s History of the World (1969) by Plantagenet Somerset Fry (oh, that name) and the second was R.J. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class.

There were three foundational texts in my early development as a historian.

Amis kingsley lucky jim