Need a Dickens expert? He's the man

By Robb Murray
Free Press Staff Writer

MANKATO July 24, 2008 11:24 pm

— It started years ago as a nudge from mom to read a book by Charles Dickens. Today, he’s known as a guy who literally wrote the book on Dickens.
Several, actually. And today Rob Hanna, an English professor at Bethany Lutheran College, is a go-to guy of sorts on certain aspects of the English great’s substantial body of work.
Hanna, who has spent a career studying and teaching Dickens, recently completed a book in a series of books on Dickens’ work. Hanna’s contribution focused on the letters, nonfiction and poetry of Dickens, and the exhaustive result is set to be a starting point for future scholars on Dickens’ more obscure writings.
“It’s really dealing in the lesser-known works by Dickens,” Hanna said of his latest book, “Dickens’ Nonfictional, Theatrical and Poetical Writings: And Annotated Bibliography 1820-2000.” “And nobody really new how much had been done.”
His work has gotten noticed by many in Dickens study circles. Recently, a prominent journal of Welsh writing and history, Llen Cymru, asked him to examine an anonymous poem in a memento album owned by a friend of the Dickens family.
The album is famous because of a poem Dickens wrote, and signed, inside. But another poem in the album, written in Welsh and not by Dickens, was the subject of the Welsh journal’s inquiry. And it was Hanna’s work with Dickens’ lesser-known works that brought the Welsh journal editor to Hanna.
On his publisher’s Web site, they say this about Hanna’s work:
“What Hanna modestly terms ‘all the rest,’ in this comment from his introduction, barely suggests the extraordinary labor he has undertaken in this bibliography,” it reads. “Hanna has generated more than 2,000 annotated entries identifying nonfictional, theatrical, and poetical works by way of extant commentary ... Even the most devoted Dickensians will be dazzled by all that Hanna’s spadework has brought to light.”
Hanna has spent a lifetime, however, appreciating Dickens in one form or another.
It began with that nudge from mom, who told him one year on the first day of school to go to his school library and check out a book called “Oliver Twist.”
He checked it out, read it, and liked it. A lot.
That led to his exploring other Dickens’ works, throughout high school and college.
And when it came time for a doctoral thesis, he, of course, chose a project relating to Dickens.
He focused on the very last book published under the Charles Dickens name. “The Life of Our Lord,” a sort of layman’s interpretation of the then-archaic King James Bible, was Dickens attempt to create a book his children could read and understand when they wanted to read about Jesus.
But Dickens never published that book. It was until long after his death that his grandchildren finally published it. Hanna’s dissertation used the book to develop a series of Sunday school lessons Dickens may have taught.
His scholarship on the subject continued over the years until, based on his life’s work, editors at AMS Press in New York called him to compile a detailed list of all the scholarly writings about Dickens’ nonfiction, letters and poems.
His book was part of a collection of books about Dickens, and it was the first of its kind. Nowhere else is there an exhaustive collection of writings on the work of Charles Dickens.
“A lot of folks were waiting for my book,” he said.
The book is not the kind one sits back and loses himself in a good yarn. It’s very much an academic book, but Hanna says he’s comfortable with his place in the history of Dickensian research.
And if you want a copy, better save your pounds and pence. The clothbound volume sells for $187.50.

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