Edmund Wilson's The Wound and the Bow

September 05, 2026

I had read of this book long ago and was pleased to find it used a few years ago. When I finally read it I was rather disappointed. It is mostly long-winded and boring, with few notable insights. The titular essay reads, in substance, like a high school book review, reiterating plot points to the reader. I had hoped for the insights of a Segal, Vernant, or Verrall.

Wilson’s essay on Dickens is also long and boring, but at least has some humorous and churlish insults towards pedantic amateur scholars and Chesterton.

• “The typical Dickens expert is an old duffer who, as Mr. Straus has said, is primarily interested in proving that Mr. Pickwick stopped at a certain inn and slept in a certain bed” (4).
• “GK Chesterton, who turned out in his books on Dickens some of the best work of which he was capable and who said some excellent things, but whose writing here as elsewhere is always melting away into that peculiar pseudo-poetic booziness which verbalizes with large conceptions and ignores the most obstrusive actualities… Chesterton aserted that time would show that Dickens was not merely one of the Victorians, but incomparably the greatest writer of his time” (4).