Michael Slater

Michael Slater worked and taught continuously at Birkbeck for 36 years. He was brought up in Reading and went up to Balliol College Oxford, after a stint of National Service, during which the Russian he learnt in the expectation of reading Pushkin and Dostoevsky was put to use in army intelligence in Berlin. After graduation, he joined the legendary Geoffrey Tillotson as a research assistant in 1962, while he worked on his Oxford DPhil on the materials, the making and the public reception of Dickens's The Chimes. Three years later he joined the department of English as a lecturer.

By this time, he had began his long and continuing dedication to the work of Dickens. His work on The Chimes expanded into an edition of Dickens's Christmas Books for Penguin, which succeeded in drawing serious attention to these popular, but until then critically neglected works.

Michael's study of Dickens was nourished by a deep and extensive knowledge of nineteenth-century theatre. An edition of Nicholas Nickleby produced in 1973 made Michael Slater the explicator in chief of the RSC's groundbreaking dramatisation of the novel in 1980. Thereafter, his intense responsiveness to and shrewd awareness of theatricality meant that he started to be regularly in demand from directors, producers and editors, to advise and comment on the many adaptations of Dickens's works.

The decade before Michael's retirement saw him furiously at work on a number of great projects. One of these was his editing of Dickens's voluminous journalistic writings for the magnificent 4-volume Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens's Journalism.

During the 1990s, Michael also oversaw as general editor a complete new edition of Dickens's works published by Dent, which set new standards in the editing of nineteenth-century texts for general readers.

His marvellous biography of Douglas Jerrold is a fascinating recovery of the life and career of a man who, along with Dickens and Thackeray, formed the most celebrated comic triumvirate of the Victorian era.

Michael Slater was one of the most highly-regarded scholars of nineteenth-century literature. He held most of the important offices in the Dickens world. From 1958 to 1977 he edited The Dickensian. He served as President both of the International Dickens Fellowship and of the Dickens Society of America, and was always been extremely actively involved in the affairs of Dickens House Museum. He also taught and lectured in the US, across Europe, Australasia and the Far East.