The Pardoner's Wallet — A Reader’s Guide

The Pardoner as a Narrative Frame

The title figure is not a character in the essays but a rhetorical device. Crothers borrows Chaucer's pardoner to license his own blend of moral commentary and playful self-deprecation. In the opening essay, he notes that the medieval pardoner "took advantage of their weaknesses" by selling indulgences to credulous country people, yet the author's own project—selling essays on human nature—is presented with a wink. The preface insists that if the author "touches upon the foibles of his betters, he at least has the grace to know that they are his betters." This ironic posture recurs throughout: Crothers adopts the pardoner's voice to critique without preaching, and to acknowledge his own complicity in the very failings he examines.

Shifts in Pace and Register

The essays vary markedly in tempo and tone. Early pieces like "Unseasonable Virtues" and "An Hour with Our Prejudices" move at a brisk, conversational clip, with short paragraphs and aphoristic turns. Later essays, such as "The Land of the Large and Charitable Air," adopt a more expansive, lyrical rhythm. In that essay, Crothers describes America as a continental expanse where "the fear of the lean kine is dispelled" and the land offers "a challenge and an invitation." The prose here becomes almost Whitmanesque, with long, rolling sentences and catalogues of scenery. This shift from tight argument to open description mirrors the thematic movement from individual foibles to national character, and it gives the collection a dynamic, unhurried quality that rewards patient reading.

Concrete Detail and Figurative Language

Crothers grounds his abstract reflections in vivid, specific images. In "The Land of the Large and Charitable Air," he contrasts the snug insularity of Britain—"the tumultuous privacy of storm"—with the vast openness of America, where the Mississippi valley offers "fields of wheat and corn" that stretch for days. He quotes Longfellow and Tennyson to evoke Spain and the American West, but his own prose is equally pictorial: the New England hymn-writer who "described New England and called it America" is gently mocked for provincialism. These concrete references—rocks and rills, templed hills, the Red River valley without a stone—give the essays a tactile immediacy. The recurring motif of the "wallet" itself, a pardoner's bag "bretful of pardoun," serves as a unifying image for the collection's miscellaneous contents.

Readers will find that The Pardoner's Wallet rewards attention to its shifts in voice and pace. Crothers moves easily from the aphoristic to the lyrical, and his essays, though occasional in origin, cohere through a consistent ironic stance. The book is best approached not as a systematic treatise but as a series of conversations with a learned, witty companion who knows his own limitations.

Crothers’s pardoner never scolds; he just tilts his head and notices. That reminded me of sitting on my grandfather’s porch last autumn, rereading old margins in Literary and Social Essays — his penciled “yes” beside a quiet passage. Both books felt less like instruction and more like someone keeping me company with their own half-finished thoughts. Literary and Social Essays — Edition Insights left that same warm, unhurried ache.