SOURCE: "T. F. Powys, Coppard," in The Short Story in English, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1981, pp. 176-80.

Allen is an English novelist of working-class life and a distinguished popular historian and critic of the novel. Below, he discusses "The Higgler, " "Dusky Ruth, " and "The Field of Mustard," as examples of Coppard's best work.

A late starter as a writer, Coppard did not publish his first collection of tales until he was forty-five. He was entirely self-educated, having been apprenticed to a tailor in Whitechapel at the age of nine. When he was thirty he became a clerk at an ironworks in Oxford, where he cultivated and was cultivated by a number of dons and undergraduates and began to write. For a time he made his home in a caravan, and in his best work one can feel the sense of freedom, the exposure to nature and country...