Madeline House (née Church; 31 December 1903,

Colombo Colombo ( ; si, කොළඹ, translit=Koḷam̆ba, ; ta, கொழும்பு, translit=Koḻumpu, ) is the executive and judicial capital and largest city of Sri Lanka by population. According to the Brookings Institution, Colombo me ...

– 27 February 1978,

Huntingdon Huntingdon is a market town in the Huntingdonshire district in Cambridgeshire, England. The town was given its town charter by King John in 1205. It was the county town of the historic county of Huntingdonshire. Oliver Cromwell was born there ...

) was a British scholar of English literature, a specialist in the works of

Charles Dickens Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian e ...

, and known for her editorship of the Pilgrim edition of his letters. She was a winner of the

British Academy The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences. It was established in 1902 and received its royal charter in the same year. It is now a fellowship of more than 1,000 leading scholars span ...

Rose Mary Crawshay Prize The Rose Mary Crawshay Prize is a literary prize for female scholars, inaugurated in 1888 by the British Academy. Description The prize, set up in 1888, is said by the British Academy to be the only UK literary prize specifically for female sch ...

in 1965.

Life

Madeline Edith Church was born in

Sri Lanka Sri Lanka (, ; si, ශ්‍රී ලංකා, Śrī Laṅkā, translit-std=ISO (); ta, இலங்கை, Ilaṅkai, translit-std=ISO ()), formerly known as Ceylon and officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, is an ...

in 1903. She attended the

Royal Holloway College Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL), formally incorporated as Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, is a public research university and a constituent college of the federal University of London. It has six schools, 21 academic departm ...

, London. In 1933, she married Humphry House, a literary critic, with whom she began a new edition of the letters of Charles Dickens in 1949. Following his death, she took on the editorship, and worked with

Kathleen Mary Tillotson Kathleen Mary Tillotson CBE (3 April 1906 – 3 June 2001) was a British academic and literary critic, professor of English and distinguished Victorian scholar. Her various works on Elizabethan literature have accumulated significance in the lite ...

on the project. Twelve volumes were planned. The first volume of the letters came out in 1965, for which House received the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. Two more volumes were published, and at the time of her death, she was readying the fourth volume. The coverage of Dickens' correspondence was extensive and voluminous, leading one critic to complain that there was little separation of the dead wood from the letter that brought ''alive the marvellous young man in relation to his novels and journalism''. Others, praised the effort as superb, saying that its scholarly annotations contributed a ''companion-picture to the boisterous 1840s''. 250 previously unpublished letters were included in the second volume, which was called an ''exceptional scholarly text''. When the Houses began their editorial effort, around 12,000 letters were known. By time of volume V, another 1,452 had been discovered and documented. Madeline House died in Huntingdon in 1978.

Selected works

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:House, Madeline People from Colombo Rose Mary Crawshay Prize winners Alumni of Royal Holloway, University of London 20th-century scholars 1903 births 1978 deaths Sri Lankan people of British descent British expatriates in British Ceylon