48 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, which is a transcription of the eleven lectures that he delivered in Cambridge from 1961 to 1968. (This is not to suggest that he did no work on the novel in the interim.) If the former book is overtly Leavisite, the gap of twenty-one years seems to have sustained the influence. Eagletom believes: 'The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence is an implicit riposte to The Great Tradition . . . the book is a rewriting of the 'great tradition* from an alternative stand-point, rather than a total displacement of that critical terrain.112 Although Williams extends the tradition, he adheres to the main course charted by Lea vis and had it not been for this particular influence, he would not start his assessment of the novel1 'the 1840s but in the 1790s'.13 It would then hardly seem a coincidence that he discusses mainly canonical texts in most of his discussions of the novel, that is, in The English Novel, in Modern Tragedy and in The Country and the City. However, the latter includes a discussion of working-class novels as well. While he is working within the 'dominant literary paradigm'14 in The English Novel, in The Country and the City he takes up literature not for the purposes of literary analysis but as historical evidence to expose the ideology that would maintain the country/city dichotomy. Highly selective, Leavis opens The Great Tradition with the announcement that, 'The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad... .*15 Williams discusses these writers at some length, with the sole exception of James whom he brackets with Wells. At the same time he accords a place of honour to the writer who had been referred to patronizingly by James as 'the good little Thomas Hardy'.16 Leavis and Williams both install George Eliot as the superior novelist when compared with Jane Austen. Leavis then discusses the early phase of Eliot's development, paying special attention to Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, whereas according to Williams Adam Bede is the novel of primary merit. James is treated with reverence by Leavis while Williams finds Wells superior in some respects. After studying the novels of Conrad, Williams focuses attention on the trauma of being 'alone in th^ city', with reference to the city novelists, Gissing, Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell, Joyce and Lawrence, praising Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley's Lover, taking up for censure the very novel that Leavis praises. Women in Love. So while Williams' alternate tradition implicitly takes off from the earlier one, the emphasis has changed. It is clear that the differing perspective is based on the ideological positions of the two critics. For example, critics have traced Williams' favouring of Hardy to his own working-class origins. This may not be strictly true, but throughout his preoccupation with the tension between the 'educated* and the 'customary', one' can see his own life situated in the 'bordet- country* between Wales and Cambridge and betweeh middle and working-class consciousness. (Williams' attempt to maintain his Welsh links is