Reading Order
Lucky Jim Reading Order
Lucky Jim (1954) by Kingsley Amis is the funniest first novel in the English language and the book that launched the 'Angry Young Men' movement in British fiction — though Amis himself would later disown the movement's politics. Jim Dixon is a junior lecturer in history at a provincial English university, deeply out of place in the academic world he finds himself in, loathing his boss Professor Welch (a man of spectacular mediocrity and unearned cultural pretension), trying to extricate himself from a relationship with the neurotic Margaret, and falling for Welch's son's girlfriend Christine. The novel's comedy works through Jim's fantasy reactions — the faces he pulls, the disasters he imagines — and through the actual disasters he causes, including a catastrophic lecture on 'Merrie England' that he delivers drunk and begins to deliver in the accents of his employers. Amis based Jim Dixon partly on himself (he was himself a junior lecturer at Swansea) and partly on his friend Philip Larkin, to whom the book is dedicated; Larkin's influence is audible in Jim's distrust of cultural pretension and his preference for the authentic over the cultivated. The novel's great achievement is that Jim's outsider perspective — his sense that the academic and cultural establishment is run by mediocrities for the benefit of mediocrities — is both genuinely funny and genuinely liberating: reading Lucky Jim, one wants to pull the same faces, imagine the same disasters, and say the same things that Jim can only think. Lucky Jim was one of the most influential British novels of the second half of the twentieth century, establishing a comic and satirical mode that runs through Amis's own later work and through a broad tradition of British campus fiction.
Where to start
Lucky Jim — best read in one sitting or two; the novel is compact and its comedy cumulative; the lecture scene is the peak.
Complete Lucky Jim Book List
- 1Buy
Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis·1954·The novel — Jim Dixon's disastrous academic career and his liberation from it. - 2Buy
Take a Girl Like You
Kingsley Amis·1960·Amis's third novel — a comic account of the sexual mores of the late 1950s; darker than Lucky Jim. - 3Buy
The Old Devils
Kingsley Amis·1986·Amis's Booker Prize-winning novel — a group of Welsh friends in old age; the funniest and most serious of his later work. - 4Buy
A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh·1934·Waugh's darkest comic novel — the satire on English society that Lucky Jim's comedy grew from. - 5Buy
The History Man
Malcolm Bradbury·1975·Bradbury's campus novel of a Marxist sociologist at a new university — the most important successor to Lucky Jim in the campus fiction tradition. - 6Buy
David Lodge: Changing Places
David Lodge·1975·Lodge's campus comedy of two English professors who exchange institutions — the comic tradition Lucky Jim established. - 7Buy
The Secret History
Donna Tartt·1992·Tartt's American campus novel — a very different tradition, but campus fiction readers will find the shared setting illuminating. - 8Buy
Money
Martin Amis·1984·Martin Amis's novel of 1980s excess — the son's darker comedy, clearly indebted to his father's satirical mode.
Lucky Jim — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Lucky Jim about?
Lucky Jim follows Jim Dixon, a junior lecturer in medieval history at a provincial English university, through the events of a single academic year. Jim loathes his work, his pretentious boss Professor Welch, the social and cultural obligations of academic life (houseparties, Renaissance madrigals, lectures on 'Merrie England'), and his relationship with the neurotic, unstable Margaret. He falls for Christine, the girlfriend of Welch's son Bertrand. The novel reaches its peak in a disastrous lecture on 'Merrie England' that Jim begins to deliver drunk and in unconscious imitations of his employers — and ends with Jim rescued from the university world by the benevolent millionaire Gore-Urquhart and united with Christine.
What is the 'Angry Young Men' movement and how does Lucky Jim fit?
The 'Angry Young Men' was a label applied by critics and journalists in the mid-1950s to a group of British writers and dramatists — including Kingsley Amis, John Osborne (Look Back in Anger), John Braine (Room at the Top), and Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) — who were seen as sharing an outsider's anger at the British class system and its cultural pretensions. Lucky Jim was retroactively included in this movement because Jim Dixon is clearly an outsider in the academic and social world he inhabits. Amis himself was ambivalent about the label and became increasingly conservative as he aged; by the time he wrote The Old Devils (1986), his politics were far from the left-wing anger the movement was originally associated with.
What are Jim Dixon's face-making and fantasy scenes?
One of the novel's most characteristic techniques is Jim's interior life: the faces he pulls when no one is looking — 'the agonized face', 'the Martian invader face', 'the sex life in ancient Rome face' — and the detailed fantasies of violence and disaster he indulges when dealing with people he dislikes. These interior performances are the novel's comic engine: they give the reader access to what Jim can only think, never say, and the contrast between his outwardly compliant behavior and his inward savagery is the source of most of the novel's humor. The technique also establishes Jim's fundamental honesty — he knows exactly what he thinks, even if he can't say it — and his fundamental decency: the fantasies remain fantasies; Jim is a good man constrained by a bad situation.
Why is Lucky Jim considered important in British literary history?
Lucky Jim is important for several reasons. It established campus fiction as a major British comic genre, directly influencing Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, Tom Sharpe, and others. It gave a voice — comic, satirical, provincial, anti-pretentious — to a generation of university-educated men from non-upper-class backgrounds who found themselves in a cultural world that didn't quite fit them. It influenced the anti-establishment comedy of the 1960s and beyond. And it is simply one of the funniest first novels ever written — the lecture scene and the houseparty fire belong to the comedy canon. Philip Larkin, to whom the book is dedicated, called it 'the greatest campus novel' and said that Amis's first three novels were among the best of the postwar period.
What should I read after Lucky Jim?
After Lucky Jim, readers typically continue with Kingsley Amis's novels: That Uncertain Feeling (1955), Take a Girl Like You (1960), and The Old Devils (1986, Booker Prize). For the campus fiction tradition Lucky Jim established, Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man (1975) and David Lodge's campus trilogy (Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work) are the key works. For the British comic tradition more broadly, Evelyn Waugh's novels (Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust) are Amis's predecessors, and P.G. Wodehouse is the comic ancestor both of them acknowledge.
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