Before he made the big time as a fully fledged comic
novelist David Lodge was principally a literary critic who wrote the occasional
novel. When I was taught by him at Birmingham University his reputation rested
not on his four novels—Ginger You’re
Barmy, The Picturegoers, The British Museum is Falling Down, and Out of the Shelter, but on his doorstep-sized
anthology of literary theory and his books
and articles on mainstream twentieth century Catholic novelists.
Lodge’s article on the hardly known late Victorian novelist
Edmund Randolph, which I discovered in a copy of the Aylesford Review for Spring 1960, belongs to the period when he
regarded himself as primarily a writer on the history of Catholic novel, a
subject he had chosen for his M.A. dissertation at London University. This
research involved reading a number of ‘forgotten Catholic novelists‘of the nineteenth
century. Clearly, he had not been impressed by their quality:
