SOURCE: "The Novelists of the Next Generation," in The Georgian Literary Scene—1910-1935: A Panorama, Farrar, Straus and Company, 1950, pp. 228-41.

In the following essay, Swinnerton praises the "practised and finished craft" of Beresford's work.

But today writers and painters no longer speak from Sinai-clouds. Rather, from the pavementedge, packed closer than the vendors of pennytoys.

—Oliver Onions: Little Devil Doubt.

I turn now to two men who belong more directly than any of the women I have named to the school which was modern in 1910. The major works of both are in the key of Wells and Bennett. Little Devil Doubt, by Onions, and the Jacob Stahl trilogy of Beresford are alike in the sense that both skim the lives of young men who, with artistic impulses, have their misadventures in business, and especially in the business of advertising. Drawing was Onions's first love; and architecture Beresford's...