F. W. Bateson (Frederick Noel Wilse Bateson) Biography

British critic and editor, the son of a cotton broker, born at Styal in Cheshire, educated at Trinity College, Oxford, and Harvard. His early publications include English Comic Drama, 1700–1750 (1929). As an editor with Cambridge University Press from 1929 to 1940, he was responsible for preparing the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (1940). After a period as an agricultural administrator during the Second World War, he lectured at Oxford University from 1946 to 1969. In 1951 he founded Essays in Criticism, which succeeded Scrutiny as the pre-eminent scholarly journal in its field after the latter's demise in 1953; he continued to edit the periodical until 1974. Among his principal critical works, which emphasize the need to evaluate literature with reference to its historical contexts, are English Poetry and the English Language (1934), Wordsworth: A Re-interpretation (1954), and The Language of Literature (1971). Other publications under his editorship include The Works of Congreve (1930) and Matthew Arnold's Essays on English Literature (1965).