F.P. Wilson

In a letter to his mother from Oct 19, 19391 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…

He then comments: “probably be a very good thing for me.” He seems to have meant that literary criticism and textual scholarship can both tend to unproductive extremes, the one too wild, the other too restricted, and that Wilson could help him in finding the mean 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 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

Indeed, the first chapter of Elizabethan And Jacobean relies extensively on McLuhan’s trivium thesis:

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. Just after he retired as the Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, a new edition of McKerrow’s 5 volume works of Thomas Nashe appeared with his corrections and notes:

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.

  1. Letters, 118-119. ↩
  2. The footnote has ‘while’ instead of ‘when’ here. ↩
  3. Letters 118n1. ↩
  4. November 4, 1939, Letters 120. ↩
  5. McLuhan to his mother, December 27, 1939, Letters 123. Since Wilson was named Frank Percy, ‘David’ here, unless it was a nickname of sorts, seems to be a slip either by McLuhan himself or by the editors of the Letters. Joanna is correctly named as Wilson ‘s wife, so McLuhan was not thinking of some couple other than the Wilsons. ↩
  6. Letters 139n1: “Wilson (…) had delivered the Alexander Lectures at University College, University of Toronto, in November. They were published in Elizabethan and Jacobean (1945).” ↩
  7. Letters 120. ↩
  8. Elizabethan And Jacobean, 1946, 131n6. A note in Letters (167n2) locates this footnote on 118n1 in the wartime 1945 edition. Wilson’s book was reissued in the following year after the war concluded in a reset and perhaps corrected edition. ↩