John Carey, Oxford Critic Who Challenged Literary Snobbery, Dies at 91

John Carey, a critic and professor of literature at the University of Oxford who challenged high-culture snobbery, died on Dec. 11 in Oxford, England, at 91. His death in a nursing home was confirmed by his son, Leo. Carey was the Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford from 1975 to 2002 and his byline appeared in The Sunday Times from 1977 to 2023; the reviews he wrote for the paper spanned nearly 50 years.

He built a reputation for pugnacious, contrarian criticism, arguing in books such as "The Intellectuals and the Masses" (1992) that some modernists wrote abstrusely to exclude the "rabble," and in "What Good Are the Arts?" (2005) that appreciating culture did not automatically confer moral or spiritual benefits.

In his 1992 work and other pieces Carey attacked what he saw as pretension in academia and the arts, writing in one review that "This book is richly stocked with people whom any person of decent instincts will find loathsome," and in 2005 arguing that public funding of opera risked the poor "subsidizing the entertainment of the 'well-fed, well-swaddled' elite," asking, "What is difficult about sitting on plush seats and listening to music and singing?" Critics were divided over his arguments; some denounced the book while others praised his scorn of cultural mandarins.

Key Topics

Culture, John Carey, Merton Professor, Modernists, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens