Charles Dickens, ,Joel J. Brattin, Professor, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

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.