Photo by David Norris
Dr. Robert Hanna with his newly published reference books.
Dr. Robert Hanna (English) has just completed his fortieth year in the teaching profession and is now in his twentieth year at Bethany. “My publisher has presented me with quite the anniversary present,” he states, referring to the 2024 publication of his two-volume reference book Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby: An Annotated Bibliography (Edward Everett Root, Brighton, England).
Hanna’s research for this book began in 2012, when he was asked by the book’s series editor, Dr. Duane DeVries of Polytechnic Institute of New York University, to prepare the thirteenth of fifteen volumes of individual reference books for each of Dickens’s fifteen novels. Hanna readily accepted, as Nicholas Nickleby is one of Dickens’s earliest novels (1838-39), and Hanna had already edited two collections of the novelist’s earliest writings: “Before Boz: The Juvenilia and Early Writings of Charles Dickens, 1820-1833” for Dickens Studies Annual (2009) and Dickens’s Uncollected Magazine and Newspaper Sketches, as Originally Composed and Published 1833-1836 (AMS Press, New York, 2012). “I had an invaluable grounding in his earliest writings, which proved essential to my examinations of his 1838 and 1839 manuscripts and my ability to locate rare and lesser-known publications about Dickens,” Hanna explains.
For instance, the sole surviving copy of a “Scrap Sheet” of original illustrations of Nickleby characters is found in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand, while Samuel Clemens’s (American novelist Mark Twain) handwritten comments on Nickleby are found in the margins of his personal copy of the novel, held by Elmira College’s Gannett-Tripp Library in New York. (Similarly, British novelist Charlotte Brontë recorded her own comments on the reverse of one of her manuscript pages.) The unpublished manuscript of William T. Moncreiff’s 1839 play Nicholas Nickleby and Poor Smike; or, The Victim of the Yorkshire School is in the Department of Manuscripts of the British Library in London.
Hanna conducted his research and its resulting writing primarily during summer breaks, with travel to examine fragile documents, manuscripts, and non-circulating items not only during the summer months but also during some Spring and Christmas Breaks. He also applied for a sabbatical leave, which Bethany Lutheran College reviewed and approved for the Fall 2016 semester (see the April 2017 issue of Bethany Magazine).
In the upper division course “British Literature: Romantics and Victorians,” Hanna teaches and has his students practice compiling and preparing, as if for publication, sample annotated bibliographic entries for novels by Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, using only authoritative sources. For example, they locate and report on manuscripts, contemporary and later reviews, illustrations, and adaptations. However, an examination of Hanna’s table of contents reveals the breadth necessitated by a Dickens novel. Topics include the Nickleby manuscript, its serialization, its illustrations, contemporary British and American newspaper commentary, editions published during Dickens’s lifetime (both authorized and unauthorized, in all languages), public readings from the novel by Dickens, speeches in which Dickens mentioned the novel, all formats of adaptations of the novel, audio books, prototypes of characters, topography, simplified editions for children and schools, plagiarisms, critical commentary 1838-2018, and dissertations.
According to Hanna, “This is the first two-volume annotated bibliography in the series for one of Dickens’s novels. Each entry is numbered, for a total of 2955 entries.” Bethany’s Memorial Library has added this work to its collection.