Frederick (Noel) Wilse Bateson (1901 – 1978) was an English literary scholar and critic.
Bateson was born in Cheshire, and educated atCharterhouse and atTrinity College, Oxford, where he took a BA in English (second class), and then the B.Litt., which he completed in 1927. From 1927-29 he held a Commonwealth Fellowship at Harvard, and from 1929 to 1940 he worked in England, editing theCambridge Bibliography of English Literature, and occasionally lecturing for theWorkers Educational Association (WEA). During the Second World War he worked as a statistical officer for the Buckinghamshire War Agricultural Executive.
He is best remembered for his work of the post-war years. In 1951, together withWilliam Wallace Robson, he founded the Oxford journalEssays in Criticism.[1] He edited it until 1972, when he entrusted the editorship to Stephen Wall and Christopher Ricks. Bateson was sceptical of 'scientific' approaches to literary criticism, and of historicist approaches.
He became a fellow ofCorpus Christi College in 1963, and was made an Emeritus Fellow on his retirement. In 1931 he married Jan Cancellor; they had two children, a son and a daughter. He died on 16 October 1978.
Bateson is often mis-quoted as having asked the following rhetorical question:
If theMona Lisa is in theLouvre, where areHamlet and "Lycidas"?
The question is a paraphrase by James McLaverty[2] of Bateson's comparison between the spatial presence of the Mona Lisa and the temporal experience of Hamlet and Lycidas.[3] He is noted also for his 1959 essayThe English School in a Democracy. He is commemorated in Oxford by the annual Bateson lecture, which is published inEssays in Criticism.
