Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby: An Annotated Bibliography by Robert C. Hanna (review)

Reviewed by: Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby: An Annotated Bibliography by Robert C. Hanna Dominic Rainsford (bio) Robert C. Hanna. Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby: An Annotated Bibliography. Edward Everett Root Publishers, 2024. 2 vols. xxi + 749 pp. and v + 626 pp. £145.00 and £125.00. ISBN 978-1-915115-28-7 and 9781915115324 (hb). As editor of this journal, with the privilege of reading a lot of fresh scholarship, I often get the impression that the series formerly known as the Garland Dickens Bibliographies is little known, and less used. This can lead to the assumption that a given approach to Dickens is wholly original, whereas a good look at the relevant volumes in the series would quickly show that it isn't – and would result, not necessarily in the abandonment of the project at hand, but in its development on a sounder, more useful, and more satisfying basis. I hasten to add that this point could certainly have been made about some of my own previous scholarly efforts. It may be that the problem is not so much lack of awareness of the series, as lack of access. The great majority of volumes are out of print, not least because the original publishers, Garland, and their successor AMS (originally Abraham's Magazine Service) sadly went bust, and residual stock was pulped. We can only be grateful that the enterprising British publisher Edward Everett Root has stepped in, and that the general editor of the series, Duane DeVries, continues to supervise this monumental project as a whole, as well as having personally edited the seven thick volumes of General Studies of Charles Dickens and His Writings and Collected Editions of His Works (2004–19). Nevertheless, the new volumes are very expensive (understandably, given their size and the likelihood that few will be sold to individuals), and the complex publishing history has probably disrupted regular acquisition by libraries. I doubt that many scholars have immediate access to a full set in Britain or the United States, let alone elsewhere in the world. The bibliography of Nicholas Nickleby currently under review is the first addition to the series since 2019. As we can see in the bibliography of bibliographies appended below, the next most up-to-date volume, thanks to a "Supplement" in Dickens Studies Annual (2005), is David Paroissien's Oliver Twist. The least up-to-date (with no supplement) is Sylvia Manning's Hard Times (1984). The last forty years have been a long time in Dickens scholarship. Nevertheless, all of the volumes are still extremely useful starting-points End Page 399 for a survey of the existing literature. The only two novels that have not yet been covered (in fact, the only works of any kind by Dickens, as far as I can see) are Bleak House and Little Dorrit. I understand from Duane DeVries that these are in progress, and should be completed within about two years. The Bleak House volume(s), I assume, will be especially bulky. Robert C. Hanna, who has already made a fine contribution to the series, back in the AMS era, with his volume on Dickens's Nonfictional, Theatrical, and Poetical Writings (2007), has now given us a tremendously impressive, enjoyable, and quite possibly paradigm-shifting two-volume survey of Nicholas Nickleby. It is not long ago that Jeremy Tambling remarked, in the first full critical monograph on the novel (2019), that "plenty of Dickens's readers, fewer academic scholars, have written on Nicholas Nickleby" (Tambling 1), and to some extent Hanna's bibliography bears this out: it contains thousands of items, but many of them come from sources that might well escape the attention of the academic critic. Hanna has been inspired to search for this material by his own belief and delight in "Dickens's splendid and often, in modern times, unappreciated and misunderstood third novel" (1: vii). In fact, the times may well be changing: Hanna's bibliography joins Tambling's monograph (which was published too recently for Hanna to include it) and the new two-volume Oxford edition of the novel itself (soon to be reviewed in this journal) in testifying to Nickleby's importance, while...