Bateson was born in Cheshire, and educated at Charterhouse and at Trinity College, Oxford, where he took a BA in English (second class), and then the B.Litt., which he completed in 1927.
From 1927-29 he held a Commonwealth Fellowship at Harvard, and from 1929 to 1940 he worked in England, editing the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, and occasionally lecturing for the Workers Educational Association (WEA).
In 1951, together with William Wallace Robson, he founded the Oxford journal Essays in Criticism.
Bateson is often mis-quoted as having asked the following rhetorical question: If the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, where are Hamlet and "Lycidas"?The question is a paraphrase by James McLaverty[2] of Bateson's comparison between the spatial presence of the Mona Lisa and the temporal experience of Hamlet and Lycidas.
He is commemorated in Oxford by the annual Bateson lecture, which is published in Essays in Criticism.