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Dr Tom Mason, 1948-2022

Dr Tom Mason

2 November 2022

Dr Tom Mason, formerly Senior Lecturer in English, passed away on 24 September at the age of 74. His friend, Emeritus Professor David Hopkins, offers a remembrance.

There are some people whose distinction, intellectual and human, is perhaps most fully apparent when one has lived and worked closely with them. Such a person was Tom Mason.

Tom was a distinguished scholar and teacher, but far more than that. He came from a high-powered academic family and was able to observe from an early age both the delights and fascination, and the limitations and hazards, of academic life. He married early, and during his undergraduate career at Lincoln College Oxford, and later his doctoral research (on Dryden’s translations of Chaucer) at Trinity College Cambridge, he combined an intense immersion in scholarship with a commitment to the equal, but very different, demands of running a household and bringing up a young son.

Tom was brilliantly insightful both about books and life. He didn’t miss anything about anybody. But whereas an ability to ‘look quite through the deeds of men’ can lead some to cynicism or arrogance, and a commitment to literary scholarship can sometimes be accompanied by parti pris,aggression, or pedantry, Tom was, in both his intellectual work and in his dealings with colleagues, friends, and students, always benign: open-minded, good-humoured, courteous, generous, modest, and forgiving. He loved children, and children loved him – perhaps because they sensed that he never attempted to patronise or bully them, but was paying attention to them in and for themselves.

As a colleague and teacher, Tom was unstintingly generous in giving his time and attention to the work of others. He genuinely loved discussion, collaboration, and the free exchange of ideas, helping both colleagues and students to develop their own thoughts without the slightest hint of coercion or dominance. Like his hero Samuel Johnson, he was kindly and supportive to a wide range of people of very different – and sometimes very needy and demanding – kinds.

His own writing, mainly on the poetry and literary criticism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was refreshingly and often radically free from the clichéd wisdom and idées reçues that have bedeviled so much literary history of those centuries. He examined each text and critical problem with a freedom and fairness that made him alive to issues that others had overlooked or misrepresented. He was thus able to offer brilliant readings of literary texts that had frequently been neglected or misdescribed – like Abraham Cowley’s Anacreontics and Dryden’s version of Chaucer’s The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. He also was able to cast new light on more familiar material, such as Johnson’s Shakespeare criticism – the subject of his last essay, to be published posthumously in the New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson. His last major work was Chaucer in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2022), a book on which I was privileged to collaborate with him, a collaboration from which I learnt so much.

Tom will be greatly missed by his friends, his colleagues, his students, by his children and daughter-in-law, Jack, Emma, Annie, Eva, and Sam, his grandchildren Josie and Ben, his first wife Maggie, and by Catherine, with whom, in a very happy marriage, he enjoyed the last thirty years of his life.

 

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