Norman Douglas - Reception

Reception

H.M. Tomlinson, a contemporary of Douglas's, concluded his 1931 biography by saying that Douglas's kind of prose "is at present out of fashion". He compared the writing to that of great English essayists and novelists: to Jonathan Swift's irony and Laurence Sterne's warmth. Douglas is, writes Tomlinson, "a sad and lonely man", confined to a distant and sterile "Ultima Thule".

Peter Ackroyd describes Douglas's London Street Games as "a vivid memorial to the inventiveness and energy of London children, and an implicit testimony to the streets which harboured and protected their play."

John Sutherland reports that "Douglas's Mediterranean travel writing chimed with the public taste", and that "there was a time when, in smart literary conversations, Norman Douglas was regarded as one of the smartest things going. Part of that smartness was his keeping, for the whole of his long depraved life, one jump ahead of the law."

In "The Grand Tour and Beyond: British and American Travellers in Southern Italy, 1545-1960", Edward Chaney, wrote that "the true heir to the great tradition of the 'pedestrian tour' in our own century has been 'pagan-to-the-core' Norman Douglas. Having first visited the south of Italy with his brother in 1888, before he was 30 he had abandoned his pregnant Russian mistress and his job at the British Embassy in St Petersburg and purchased a villa at Posillipo. By then he had also published his first piece on the subject of southern Italy.."