When Is a Book Not a Book? Oliver Twist in Context

About the Author

Robert L. Patten

Robert L. Patten is Lynette S. Autrey Professor in Humanities at Rice University and editor of SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900. Forty years ago he became interested in the original publications of Victorian novels and has been writing on that subject ever since. He has published a study of author-publisher relations, Charles Dickens and His Publishers (1978, paperback 1991), many articles about the relation between illustrations and texts in Victorian serials, and a two-volume analysis of a major British graphic artist, George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art (1992, 1996). Patten has edited Dickens's Pickwick Papers for the Penguin English Library, a collection of essays entitled George Cruikshank: A Revaluation (1974, rev. ed. 1992), and, with John O. Jordan, a collection of scholarly studies on nineteenth-century book publishing, Literature in the Marketplace (1995, paperback 2002). In addition, he has written articles on Dickens's Christmas Books, on Jane Eyre, on the commercial success of Vanity Fair, and on the motif of journey in nineteenth-century British fiction, and he has contributed nearly 30 entries on Victorian artists, authors, and publishers to Oxford University Press's New Dictionary of National Biography (forthcoming, 2004). He served as advisory editor for and was an extensive contributor to the Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens, and he wrote a chapter for the Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens; now, with John Bowen, he is co-editing the Palgrave Guide to Dickens.

Patten has held Fulbright, NEH, and Guggenheim Fellowships and been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. His Cruikshank biography was selected by Choice as an outstanding book and in April 1999 as the best biography of the decade by the (London) Guardian. He is co-founder of the Dickens Society and serves as a director of the Dickens Project housed at Kresge College, University of California, Santa Cruz. He also serves as treasurer of SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing), the international association of book historians. Among Patten's other interests are European fiction, Victorian poetry, the detective novel, opera, and British art.

Credits

This illustrated presentation is adapted from the article "When Is a Book Not a Book?" originally published in the spring 1996 issue of Biblion: The Bulletin of The New York Public Library. Copyright The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. All rights reserved.