Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis as the master of peripheral characters

Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim is a classic novel, popular both with readers and critics. It has been in print ever since the date of its first publication, 1954, and still attracts critical attention. Most criticism concerning Lucky Jim focuses on the academic milieu it delineates and its main representatives, Jim Dixon and Professor Welch. However, a discerning reader will immediately notice that Amis’s novel is crowded with marginal characters, whose presence contributes immensely to Amis’s masterpiece. The aim of this article is to revisit Lucky Jim in order to focus on a number of background characters and give more prominence to their role in the novel.