Then Dixon rescues Christine from the university's annual dance after Bertrand treats her offhandedly, and takes her home in a taxi.
After a bad start Dixon realises that he is attracted to Christine, who is far less pretentious than she initially appears.ĭixon's growing closeness to Christine upsets Bertrand, who is using her to reach her well-connected Scottish uncle, Julius Gore-Urquhart, and get a job from him. The attempt goes wrong, however, and the drunken Dixon drops a lighted cigarette on the bed, burning a hole in the sheets.ĭuring the same weekend Dixon meets Christine Callaghan, a young Londoner and the latest girlfriend of Professor Welch's son, Bertrand, an amateur painter whose affectedness particularly infuriates Dixon. While she is staying with Professor Welch, he holds a musical weekend that seems to offer an opportunity for Dixon to advance his standing among his colleagues. Margaret employs emotional blackmail to appeal to Dixon's sense of duty and pity while keeping him in an ambiguous and sexless limbo. To establish his credentials he must also ensure the publication of his first scholarly article, but he eventually discovers that the editor to whom he submitted it has translated it into Italian and passed it off as his own.ĭixon struggles with an on-again off-again "girlfriend", Margaret Peel, a fellow lecturer who is recovering from a suicide attempt in the wake of a broken relationship with another man. In his attempt to be awarded a permanent post he tries to maintain a good relationship with his absent-minded head of department, Professor Welch. He has made an unsure start and, towards the end of the academic year, is concerned about losing his probationary position in the department. Jim Dixon is a lecturer in medieval history at a red brick university in the English Midlands. Time magazine included Lucky Jim in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. Lucky Jim is dedicated to Larkin, who helped to inspire the main character and contributed significantly to the structure of the novel. The novel follows the exploits of the eponymous James (Jim) Dixon, a reluctant lecturer at an unnamed provincial English university.Īmis arrived at Dixon's surname from 12 Dixon Drive, Leicester, the address of Philip Larkin from 1948 to 1950, while he was a librarian at the university there.
It was Amis's first novel and won the 1955 Somerset Maugham Award for fiction. Lucky Jim is a novel by Kingsley Amis, first published in 1954 by Victor Gollancz.
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