Williams was educated at St. Albans School and finished it in 1901.
College/University
Gallery of Charles Williams
Gower St, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 6BT, UK
Williams attended University College London from 1901 to 1904. He left school in 1904 without attempting to gain a degree due to an inability to pay tuition fees.
Career
Gallery of Charles Williams
Great Clarendon St, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK
Williams was hired by the Oxford University Press as a proofreading assistant in 1908 and quickly climbed to the position of editor, working first in London and then, after World War II broke out in 1939, in Oxford. He continued to work at the OUP in various positions of increasing responsibility until his death in 1945.
Achievements
Membership
Inklings
1939 - 1945
A corner of the pub, formerly the landlord's sitting-room where the Inklings met.
Williams attended University College London from 1901 to 1904. He left school in 1904 without attempting to gain a degree due to an inability to pay tuition fees.
Williams was hired by the Oxford University Press as a proofreading assistant in 1908 and quickly climbed to the position of editor, working first in London and then, after World War II broke out in 1939, in Oxford. He continued to work at the OUP in various positions of increasing responsibility until his death in 1945.
("The Descent of the Dove" is an unconventional study of t...)
"The Descent of the Dove" is an unconventional study of the Church as governed by the activity of the Holy Spirit in history. It the most significant of Williams' theological writings.
(Charles Williams's Figure of Beatrice is outstanding amon...)
Charles Williams's Figure of Beatrice is outstanding amongst Dante scholarship and criticism for the sympathetic enthusiasm and clarity with which he eases that approach without simplifying the achievement in a highly personal introduction to Dante's work.
Taliessin through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars
(When Taliessin through Logres was published in 1938, it r...)
When Taliessin through Logres was published in 1938, it received widespread critical acclaim. Alongside its partner companion The Region of the Summer Stars, it stands as one of the most profound and challenging works in Williams’ body of work—and one of the most important to understanding him fully.
(Romantic theology is the working out of ways in which an ...)
Romantic theology is the working out of ways in which an ordinary relationship between two people can become one that is extraordinary, one that grants us glimpses, visions of perfection.
Charles Walter Stansby Williams was a British poet, novelist, playwright, theologian and literary critic. He was the unjustly neglected third member of the Inklings, after C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.
Background
Charles Walter Stansby Williams was born on September 20, 1886, in London, United Kingdom, the only son of (Richard) Walter Stansby Williams and his wife Mary (née Wall). He had one sister, Edith, born in 1889. The Williams family lived in 'shabby-genteel' circumstances, owing to Walter's increasing blindness and the decline of the firm by which he was employed, in Holloway. In 1894 the family moved to St Albans in Hertfordshire.
Education
Williams was educated at St. Albans School and at University College London. However, he left school in 1904 without attempting to gain a degree due to an inability to pay tuition fees.
The honorary degree of Master of Arts bestowed upon Williams by the University of Oxford in 1943 was a well-deserved recognition of two successive courses of lectures which brought brilliance and a climate of intellectual excitement into the atmosphere of Oxford in war-time.
Williams started his career in 1904 in a Methodist bookroom. He was hired by the Oxford University Press as a proofreading assistant in 1908 and quickly climbed to the position of editor, working first in London and then, after World War II broke out in 1939, in Oxford. He continued to work at the OUP in various positions of increasing responsibility until his death in 1945. His duties, however, as a literary adviser in a publisher’s office, although carried out with enthusiasm and wisdom, occupied a relatively small place in his life.
In 1912 Williams published his first book of verse, The Silver Stair, and, for the next thirty-three years, wrote, lectured and conversed with a tireless and brilliant energy. In that time he produced, apart from anthologies, a number of prefaces, and a rarely interrupted series of reviews, over thirty volumes of poetry, plays, literary criticism, fiction, biography, and theological argument.
Due to his affiliation with the publisher and his writings, William was active in the literary circles of his day, and his friends included such prominent British writers as W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Barbara Ward.
During his career, Williams also lectured extensively on English literature for evening institutes and latterly for Oxford University.
Williams was an unswerving and devoted member of the Church of England.
Views
Quotations:
"The Divine Thing that made itself the foundation of the Church does not seem, to judge by his comments on the religious leadership of his day, to have hoped much from officers of a church. The most he would do was to promise that the gates of hell should not prevail against it. It is about all that, looking back on the history of the Church, one can feel that they have not done."
"Are the riches of Catullus and Carnegie so unequal, though so different? Sooner or later, nearly everyone is surprised at some kind of rich man being damned."
"The denial of the self has come, as is natural, to mean in general the making of the self thoroughly uncomfortable."
"Job plunges into a series of demands on and accusations of God which may be and indeed are epigrams of high intelligence, but are not noticeably patient."
"The famous saying ‘God is love’, it is generally assumed, means that God is like our immediate emotional indulgence, not that the meaning of love ought to have something of the ‘otherness’ and terror of God."
Membership
Williams was a member of the literary society known as the Inklings. The Inklings were an informal literary discussion group associated with the University of Oxford, England. The Inklings were literary enthusiasts who praised the value of narrative in fiction and encouraged the writing of fantasy.
Williams was also a member of A.E. Waite’s occult secret society, the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, for ten formative years, till 1939. He rose high in the ranks, leading initiates in practising alchemy, astrology, Cabalism, conjuration, divination with tarot cards, and meditation on the Sephirotic Tree.
Inklings
,
United Kingdom
1939 - 1945
A.E. Waite’s Occult Secret Society
,
United Kingdom
1929 - 1939
Personality
By all accounts, Williams himself was like his writing: charismatic, saintly, loquacious, and inspiring—but complex and confusing. According to C.S. Lewis, everyone who met Williams fell in love with him.
Quotes from others about the person
C.S. Lewis on Charles Williams's novels: "He is writing that sort of book in which we begin by saying, let us suppose that this everyday world were at some one point invaded by the marvellous."
Interests
Writers
T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis
Connections
In 1917 Williams married his wife, Florence Conway. Their son Michael was born in 1922.
Charles Williams: The Third Inkling
This is the first full biography of Charles Williams (1886-1945), an extraordinary and controversial figure who was a central member of the Inklings—the group of Oxford writers that included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Charles Williams—novelist, poet, theologian, magician and guru—was the strangest, most multi-talented, and most controversial member of the group.
2015
To Michal from Serge: Letters from Charles Williams to His Wife Florence
These letters to “Michal,” Williams endearing name for his wife, from “Serge,” a moniker by which his most intimate friends addressed him, are more than just a collection of love letters―they are significant for what they tell us about the man, for the light they throw on his work, and for the way they show Williams in the context of his literary contemporaries.
2002
The Rhetoric of Vision: Essays on Charles Williams
Charles Williams (1886-1945) was hailed by Eliot, Auden, Agee, and others for his metaphysical, ethical, and social vision. In this collection, nineteen scholars examine the rhetorical means he employed to convey that vision and the rhetorical theories that guided him.