The Charles Dickens Letters Project
- Submitting institution
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Queen's University of Belfast
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 168414410
- Type
- H - Website content
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2016
- URL
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https://dickensletters.com/
- Supplementary information
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-
- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This online resource publishes, free of charge, all the correspondence of Charles Dickens which has come to light since 2002, the year in which the final volume of the Pilgrim Edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens (OUP) was published. Leon Litvack is the Principal Editor; the project team also includes Emily Bell (Leeds University), Editor, and Michael Slater (Birkbeck London, another world authority on Dickens's life and work) as Consultant Editor. In the past the project included two other scholars: Paul Schlicke (University of Aberdeen) [Editor, 2017-19, now retired], and Jenny Hartley (Roehampton University) [Editor, 2017-19, now retired]. The total number of annotated letters now stands at more than 550, with an additional 150 in the process of being edited.
These online letters are edited to the same standard as the printed outputs. Each one is assessed for its authenticity, and then transcribed and annotated. The aim is to provide scholars, enthusiasts, and indeed anyone who wishes to know more about this fascinating Victorian personality, with open access to Dickens’s letters, which tell us a great deal about the private and public lives of the most famous writer of his day. The bulk of Dickens’s letters (numbering over 14,000), published in the Pilgrim Edition, are not available to the general public free of charge (but are available online through subscription). This site only publishes new Dickens correspondences and features regular updates. We do not publish facsimiles; however, we have obtained permission from the Dickens family (the copyright owners for all unpublished material), to reproduce the texts of these letters.
Once a sufficient number of letters are collected (1200 or so), the whole of the collection will be published by Oxford University Press, under Litvack's editorship, as the thirteenth volume of the Pilgrim Letters.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -