The Oxford Edition of Charles Dickens: The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, the second volume of the new Oxford Edition of Charles Dickens, is Dickens's third novel, originally published in monthly parts between March 1838 and September 1839. Brilliantly comic, the novel quickly developed a strong strand of social criticism, exploring themes such as love and family, selfishness, work, and charity. It showcases a host of characters, from the earnest and passionate young hero Nicholas, the pathetic Smike, and the brutal schoolmaster Wackford Squeers, to sparkling minor players like John Browdie, Mrs. Squeers, Mr. Mantalini, Mr. Crummles, and the infuriatingly inept Mrs. Nickleby. Solidifying the reputation for comedy and pathos Dickens had established with The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, this novel reached—and delighted—the widest audience Dickens had yet known. The manuscript of Nicholas Nickleby survives only in fragments, with the British Library, the Charles Dickens Museum, and The Rosenbach library holding substantial portions, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the Morgan Library also holding pages. This edition is presented in two volumes: the text in Volume I and Essay on the Text and Notes in Volume 2. The editors have closely examined all the surviving manuscript, recovering scores of deletions and recording all variants of wording in the textual apparatus. The text is based on that of the original serial instalments; all emendations from that text are fully documented. All lifetime British editions (the Cheap, the Library, the Illustrated Library, the People's and the Charles Dickens) have been carefully collated, and all verbal variants are recorded.

Elizabeth James's career as a rare books librarian chimed neatly with a research interest in nineteenth-century book trade history, and the evolution and transmission of texts during this period. Her first publications evolved from a Master's dissertation on an edition of Thackeray's 'The Newcomes'; and her PhD was a study of the publisher George Routledge. Until her retirement, she was Head of British Collections, 1801–1914 at the British Library, where she curated exhibitions on authors such as Shelley, Thomas Hardy, and Hans Andersen, and on topics such as the popular literature of the nineteenth century and the publisher Macmillan. Joel J. Brattin, born and raised in Michigan, began working with Dickens's manuscripts as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, where he earned his A.B. He continued that work at Stanford University, writing his first book, a bibliography of Dickens's last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend, and earning his PhD. After teaching in Joplin, Missouri for four years, he has devoted the rest of his career to teaching literature at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Brattin organized and hosted the first annual International Dickens Symposium in 1996 and has contributed to each subsequent symposium. He serves as honorary curator of WPI's remarkable Dickens collections. Though his primary area of scholarship is the life and work of Charles Dickens, he has also published well over 250 articles and reviews about the American guitarist and composer Jimi Hendrix. J. H. Alexander was educated at Campbell College, Belfast, and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, graduating BA in English in 1962 and going on to produce two dissertations: one on medievalism in Walter Scott's poetry and the second entitled 'Literary Reviewing in Five British Periodicals'. He was Sessional Lecturer in English at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon 1966–7, and in 1968 he joined the English Department at the University of Aberdeen, where he taught Honours courses ranging from Chaucer to Beckett, but centring on British Romantic literature. He retired as Reader in 2001 and moved to Oxford.