When one thinks of the effects of World War I upon English literary culture one recalls the young war poets, who were forced into a sudden flowering and then cut off in their prime. But there was another group of English writers, rather older, whose deaths in the war curtailed careers that had already begun to take shape--writers such as the novelist Saki (H. H. Munro) and the poet Edward Thomas. Among this group was the critic Dixon Scott, whose writing provides a lively record of literary opinion in the decade immediately preceding the war and whose best essays are truly prophetic of how later generations would judge the Edwardian and Georgian writers.

Walter Dixon Scott was born in a suburb of Liverpool in July 1881 (exact day unknown), the son of John Scott, a marine engineer with the Cunard Steamship Company, and Margaret (Dixon) Scott. (His father's family...