Any discussion of literary precedents in Pritchett's short fiction must begin with those writers who he had read and with the literary impressions that their works stamped upon his imagination. In 1986, Pritchett told critics Ben Forkner and Philippe Sejourne that, as a journalist in Ireland during the civil uprisings of the early 1920s, he "read a great deal of the Irish writers then such as Yeats, George Russell [A.E.], Loam O'Flaherty, Frank O'Connor, Sean O'Faolain, in fact all those remarkable writers. They all read the Russians."

Insofar as concerned Dickens and critics' attempts to label his characters as Dickensian, Pritchett had, sixteen years earlier, told another interviewer, William Peden, that he denied any direct influence from Dickens and saw nothing Dickensian in his characters, even the most eccentric among them. "There are a lot of people in England," he maintained. Two years after that statement...