[1][2] He completed the MA with distinction in 1931 and, in the same year, became assistant lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature under Gordon's successor in Leeds, Bruce Dickins.
[4] He continued teaching at Leeds through the Second World War, also undertaking Home Guard duties.
Wilson moved to the University of Sheffield in 1946[5] as a senior lecturer and head of the Department of English there.
[6] Wilson was a co-editor of the journal Leeds Studies in English and Kindred Languages from its foundation in 1932 to a pause in publication caused by the Second World War.
[7] He is best known for his monograph The Lost Literature of Medieval England, which surveyed hints of evidence for traditional, vernacular stories otherwise lost from the written record, and his edition of The Equatorie of the Planetis, which Wilson and his collaborator Derek Price supposed not only to be by Geoffrey Chaucer but even in Chaucer's own hand (on which points they were, however, later proved wrong).