In a letter to his mother from Cambridge at the start of his graduate work there in 1939, McLuhan writes:

[Lionel] Elvin [McLuhan’s tutor] and Prof [F.P.] Wilson of Bedford College, London [University], were our [dinner] guests. Wilson is my new research supervisor, and is here in Cambridge in consequence of the [wartime] removal of his college [from London to Cambridge] (…) He is a man of 50 or so, stout, able, pleasant. He is not a critic but a scholar. And so I’m in for a dose of scholarship of the Oxford-London variety…¹

He then comments: “It will probably be a very good thing for me.” Aside from having the benefit of Wilson’s established expertise in the area of his proposed thesis on Thomas Nashe, McLuhan may have had in mind that literary criticism and textual scholarship can both tend to unproductive extremes, the one too wild, the other too restricted. And since McLuhan tended to the wild side, Wilson’s scholarship could help him find the mean, or medium, between the two.

A strangely worded footnote to this letter has:

Frank Percy Wilson (1889-1963), a distinguished scholar of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, was Professor of English Literature at Bedford College, University of London, when² he supervised McLuhan’s Ph.D. thesis on Thomas Nashe. (From 1947 to 1957 he was Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University.) During his wartime removal to Cambridge, the McLuhans saw much of him.³

A letter to his mother a few weeks later reads: ⁴

My supervisor, Prof Wilson, came to me in the Library yesterday and took me to the lunch room for a cup of coffee. We talked over my thesis and he is going to be most helpful. I feel a 100 times more like working at it now.

Six weeks later still, the relationship of the McLuhans with Wilson and his wife had warmed considerably:

Prof Wilson and his wife want us to call them David [?] and Joanna but we are a bit bashful about it yet!⁵

Wilson is named as ‘a friend’ in a 1943 letter to Wyndham Lewis:

I have to be in New York from Dec 19-21 . A friend is sailing for England — Professor F.P. Wilson of London University. Could he help you in any way in the matter of carrying something back there for you? He is a very competent and genial man.⁶

Given McLuhan’s precarious financial condition at the time, a trip to New York from St Louis testified to his affection for the man and his appreciation of Wilson’s quick approval of his thesis earlier that year.

On the other side of WW2, another letter to his mother from December 2, 1945 mentions the gift of Wilson’s 1945 book Elizabethan And Jacobean.⁷

Prof. Wilson sent me a copy of his latest book from London, in which I’m mentioned in a footnote.

The footnote in question (oddly not given in Letters) reads:

On the tradition of learning I have learnt much from the unpublished work of Dr. H.M. McLuhan — The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of his Time.⁸

This was high praise indeed from one of the world’s preeminent experts in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature — a man who was soon to hold the Merton chair of English Literature at Oxford. Since the final part of McLuhan’s thesis amounts to a kind of index to McKerrow’s multivolume edition of The Works of Thomas Nashe, it is hardly intelligible to anyone not closely familiar with that edition⁹ — as Wilson certainly was.¹⁰ In this way, the happenstance, or happenstances, that F.P. Wilson, “distinguished scholar of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature” and full professor at the University of London, removed to Cambridge in the one year McLuhan was there for his PhD residency, and became McLuhan’s thesis supervisor and friend there, constituted a crucial chain of events in his career: “It will probably be a very good thing for me”.¹¹

Wilson was one of a series of prominent European scholars who, unlike most North Americans, recognized McLuhan’s genius. Others included Rupert Lodge, Siegfried Giedion, Wyndham Lewis, Etienne Gilson, Peter Drucker and Karl Polanyi. Ezra Pound, as an elective European, could be added to the list.

Wilson’s praise of McLuhan’s work reflects the fact that the first chapter of Elizabethan And Jacobean relies extensively on his ‘classical trivium’ thesis:¹²

Education by grammatical exegesis of the greatest works in the arts and the sciences, of ‘the best that is known and thought in the world’, the training of the judgement through logic, such study of rhetoric as will lead a man not only to the writing of good Latin but to ‘the most sweet and sensible writing in English’, the aim to produce a Christian orator who shall put his learning and wisdom at the service of the state, these are ideals which had never entirely perished since Cicero’s doctus orator had become the Christian orator of St. Augustine. Nor is it an ideal which Francis Bacon would have disputed. To him too the dominion over nature which man had lost by his fall was only to be repaired by arts and sciences applied to the uses of human life; and it was to be repaired not by dialectic speculation but by methods which differ from those of traditional grammar only in their insistence that to the knowledge of man and nature inherited from past ages in books must be added a more diligent inquiry into the ways of man and nature as they may be investigated in the laboratory of life. Bacon was neither an ‘ancient’ nor a ‘modern’, but one who desired to establish a ‘sociable intercourse’ between antiquity and ‘proficience’. (Elizabethan And Jacobean, 4-5)

There may be a much later hint of McLuhan’s thesis in Wilson’s work as well. Just after he retired in 1957 as the Merton Professor at Oxford, a new edition of McKerrow’s 5 volume Works of Thomas Nashe appeared:

The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow,  5 volumes, 1910. Edited with corrections and supplementary notes, F. P. Wilson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958.