Renascence

Volume 70, Issue 2, Spring 2018

John Coates
Pages 129-144

The numinous in Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget

Adopting the premise that Walter de la Mare’s writing cannot be fully understood without attending to its moral, spiritual and religious dimensions, this paper examines in detail his longest and most important novel, Memoirs of a Midget (1921). It draws analogies between his movement from a dogmatic moralism towards a sense of the numinous and compares them with similar tendencies in Arthur Machin and Algernon Blackwood.