When originally published, Lucky Jim received enthusiastic reviews. In the New Statesman, Walter Allen wrote, "Mr Amis has an unwaveringly merciless eye for the bogus: some aspects of provincial culture – the madrigals and recorders of Professor Welch, for instance – are pinned down as accurately as they have ever been; and he has, too, an eye for character – the female lecturer Margaret, who battens neurotically on Jim's pity, is quite horribly well done. Mr Amis is a novelist of formidable and uncomfortable talent."[7]
W. Somerset Maugham praised Amis' writing while disdaining the new generation he represented: "Mr. Kingsley Amis is so talented, his observation is so keen, that you cannot fail to be convinced that the young men he so brilliantly describes truly represent the class with which his novel is concerned... They have no manners, and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public bar and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious... They are scum."[8]
In response to Maugham's criticism of the new generation, the New Statesman and The Nation held contests to get readers to respond to Maugham in the voice of Jim Dixon.[9]
Retrospective reviews have solidified its legacy as one of Amis' finest novels. Christopher Hitchens described it as the funniest book of the second half of the 20th century, writing: "Lucky Jim illustrates a crucial human difference between the little guy and the small man. And Dixon, like his creator, was no clown but a man of feeling after all."[10]
Olivia Laing, writing in The Guardian: "Remarkable for its relentless skewering of artifice and pretension, Lucky Jim also contains some of the finest comic set pieces in the language."[11]
Margaret Drabble, although defending Monica Jones, Philip Larkin's paramour, against Amis's caricature of her in Lucky Jim, wrote in the New Statesman that "Monica as Margaret Peel, a needy, dowdy academic spinster, was the version that first lodged in my consciousness, as a scarecrow alarming enough to warn any woman off the academic life".[12]
Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker, wrote that the vacant Professor Welch was at least partially modeled on Oxford professor J. R. R. Tolkien, who his students, Amis and Larkin, had found to be tedious and almost unintelligible.[13]
