Roy McKeen Wiles, 1903–1974

Abstract

RoyMcKeen Wiles, 1903-1974 Roy Wiles was bom on October 15, 1903, in Truro, Nova Scotia; a province noted, like old Scotia, both for its beauty and for the piety and love of learning of its inhabitants. He went to school there, and was an undergraduate at Dalhousie University in Halifax, graduating in 1927. He then spent a year at Harvard, taking an A.M. degree. After a brief period as Instructor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where he was also organist and choir­ master in the Anglican Church, he returned to Harvard, completing his Ph.D. in 1935, with a thesis on eighteenth-century periodicals—never published, but so authoritative in its fullness and accuracy that it is still consulted and referred to. A short spell back in Nova Scotia, as a church organist, preceded his coming as Assistant Professor of English to McMaster University, in Hamil­ ton, where he remained until his death on 10 March this year: a period of almost forty years. In 1928 he married Olwen Jones of Springhill, Nova Scotia; they had two sons. Roy Wiles was one of a generation of teachers dedicated to the establish­ ment of scholarship, research, and speculation throughout Canada. In the early 1930’s, only a handful of Canadian universities had large graduate pro­ grams; the rest, McMaster among them, were basically undergraduate schools, of slender resources and rather modest aims. Many of the best and liveliest students and faculty tended to drift from the small to the large. Roy Wiles, committed early to the viability of provincial culture, resisted that drift per­ sonally, and worked to moderate its effects. He saw that in any university discipline a valid undergraduate program and a functioning, busy graduate school were mutually necessary. It was three decades before his department started extensive graduate work, but from the beginning of his career at McMaster he worked with his colleagues towards an undergraduate English degree that would be a valid training for future specialists and also an orxv xvi / Roy McKeen Wiles, 1903-1974 dered, meaningful education for students who did not intend further studies. No one will be surprised that he felt a thorough grounding in eighteenthcentury literary studies should be the focal point. Here was a period—largely neglected in the schools—in which a sophisticated and aware society created a literature that was at once lucid and various. It spoke to the young men and women ofprovincial Canada with the clear voices that Addison and Johnson had used to educate their newly-structured world. It stimulated them with the elaborate modulations of Collins and the manly playfulness of Gay. Cer­ tainly, from the eighteenth century much of North American society sprang, and many of the students at McMaster in the ’30’s and ’40’s traced their ancestors to eighteenth-century Scotland or Ireland or Wales. The lavish prod­ ucts of Augustan literature, then, were instructive, delightful, and relevant. By 1936 Roy Wiles had created a course, English 2b, described as “A compre­ hensive study of the main currents of English prose and poetry from the death of Dryden to the publication of the Lyrical Ballads.” By 1938 the title had been purified and the boundaries extended—now it was simply English literature “from 1660 to 1800.” That year the course enrolled 43 students: a testament to its attraction in a small school. I have a course outline for second-year students, from the old Bredvold, McKillop, and Whitney anthol­ ogy, which aptly shows the range of his instruction. Much, obviously, from Swift, Dryden, Pope and Johnson, but a large helping of the instructive (various periodical essays and expository poems) and the burlesque joined to provide a delicate lesson in urbanity. Seriousness did not preclude a deft pricking of pomposity, and the sobriety of Ontario life could be graced by the smile of reason. As an early believer in visual and tactile aids, Roy Wiles always had with him some object to point his classes’ imaginations; copies of old books, maps, paintings, coins-splendid shillings to bring John Philips home—and the like. But perhaps the clearest demonstration of the Enlightenment he believed in was his own appearance...