Tom Mason obituary
My friend Tom Mason, who has died aged 74, was a senior lecturer in English at the University of Bristol and an author of books and essays on literature. He and I collaborated on two books, Selected Poems of Abraham Cowley (1994), and Chaucer in the Eighteenth Century (2022), and he also wrote chapters for multi-authored editions, including The Oxford History of Literary Translation, Vol 3 (2005) and John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays (2000).
Tom was born in Basel in Switzerland during a period when his father, Harold, an academic, was working there. His mother, Eva (nee Vest), was Swiss, and both parents eventually became teachers at Cambridge University; his father specialising in English literature and his mother in German. When the family moved to Britain shortly after the second world war, Tom was educated at Hele’s school in Exeter and the Perse school in Cambridge before going to Lincoln College, Oxford, where he obtained a first in English, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he completed his PhD in 1976.
He worked as a freelance supervisor at various Cambridge colleges until in 1979 he was appointed to a lectureship in English at Bristol, and remained there for the rest of his career.
The university greatly valued him as a researcher, tutor and administrator. His teaching, particularly of his specialist subjects of poetry and comedy and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, was extremely popular with students. He was also a resourceful and committed PhD supervisor and his published work, mainly on 17th and 18th-century poetry, was distinctive and original.
He retired in 2013, but carried on as a part-time teacher of MA units on Shakespeare and English poetry. Otherwise he indulged his interests in classical music, gardening and feeding the garden birds, and constructing an endless model railway with his neighbours’ children.
Tom was brilliantly insightful about books and life. He didn’t miss anything about anybody. But whereas an ability to “look quite through the deeds of men” can lead some to cynicism or arrogance, he was always benign, open-minded, good-humoured, courteous, generous, modest and forgiving. He was also particularly loved by children.
In 1992 he married the publisher and teacher Catherine Bradley. She survives him along with their children, Eva and Sam; a son, Jack, from his first marriage, to Maggie Medhurst, which ended in divorce; a daughter, Annie, from his second marriage, to Sarah Machon, which also ended in divorce; by his grandchildren Josie and Ben; and his brother John. His other brother, Charles Mason, died in 2013.