Faculty of Business, Humanities and Social Sciences | School of Humanities and Social Sciences | English and Digital Media

Dr Peter Orford

Lecturer in English Literature

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Photograph of Peter OrfordPeter Orford is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature, and the Course Director for the MA by Research in Charles Dickens Studies. His most recent publications are The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Charles Dickens’ unfinished novel and our endless attempts to end it (2018) and The Life of the Author: Charles Dickens. He has contributed several articles and chapters to significant works including The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens and The Blackwell Companion to Charles Dickens. He is also a prolific editor of Dickens’s works, specifically Pictures from Italy and Dombey and Son for Oxford University Press, and The Plays of Charles Dickens for Edinburgh University Press.

Qualifications

  • BA, English Literature and Philosophy, University of Kent
  • MA, University of Kent
  • PhD, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham

Modules Taught

  • Victorian Literature
  • Plays in Performance
  • Poetry and Poetics
  • Children’s Literature
  • Fiction and Theory
  • The Gothic Legacy
  • The Long Eighteenth Century
  • Renaissance Literature

Research Interests

  • Charles Dickens
  • Travel writing
  • Fitz-James O’Brien
  • Shakespeare
  • Nineteenth-Century Literature
  • Early Science-Fiction
  • Children’s Literature

External Roles

Contact Details

Recent Publications

  • (ed.), Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens (Oxford: OUP, forthcoming)
  • ‘Dickens and Serialisation’ in David Paroissien and Leon Litvack (eds.), A Companion to Charles Dickens, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell Wiley, forthcoming)
  • (ed.), Pictures from Italy by Charles Dickens (Oxford: OUP, 2025)
  • (ed.) with Emily Bell and Claire Wood, Digital Dickens (York: White Rose Press, 2025)
  • (ed.) with Joanna Hofer-Robinson, The Plays of Charles Dickens (Edinburgh: EUP, 2025)
  • ‘The spike that intervenes: The corruption of the East by the decadence of the West in The Mystery of Edwin Drood’ in Giles Whitely and Jonathan Foster (eds.), Dickens and Decadence (Edinburgh, EUP, 2025)
  • ‘Dickens and Shakespeare’ in Juliet John and Claire Wood (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to Dickens and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2024)
  • The Life of the Author: Charles Dickens (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2023)
  • ‘Speculation and Silence: Reading Dickens by instalment in time, at the time, and for all time’ in Leon Litvack (ed.), Reading Dickens Differently (Oxford: Blackwell Wiley, 2020)
  • ‘The Unfinished Picture: The Mystery of Rosa Bud’ in Emily Bell (ed.), Dickens After Dickens (York: White Rose Press, 2020)
  • ‘Italy is not his ground: Dickens on the Outside in Pictures from Italy’ in Nineteenth Century Prose, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Spring 2019)
  • The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Charles Dickens’ unfinished novel and our endless attempts to end it (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2018)
  • ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’, in The Oxford Handbook to Charles Dickens, ed. by John Jordan, Robert Preston and Cathy Waters (Oxford: OUP, 2018)
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