SOURCE: "How it Strikes a Compatriot," in Partisan Review, Vol. 27, 1960, pp. 353-62.

In the following review, Wollheim discusses the ideas on politics and class in The Glittering Coffin, providing a brief historical backdrop and examining the personal and social issues implied in the English class structure.

In The Glittering Coffin Mr. Dennis Potter, a young working-class undergraduate just down from Oxford, raises a voice of genuine social protest. Unfortunately he accompanies it with so much rant and rhetoric that he virtually drowns his own words. It seems to me dubious whether the few scraps of coherent sense that are likely to drift across to the reader will mean much to him, particularly if he is at all unfamiliar with their place of origin. May I say how it strikes a compatriot?

But to do so one must go back in time. In 1853, Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer...