In Memoriam David Paroissien 1939-2021

Photographs courtesy of David's family

David Paroissien, who died suddenly but peacefully, while reading, at his home in Oxford on September 8th, was the general editor of Dickens Quarterly from March 1984 to December 2019, having edited the journal under its old title, Dickens Studies Newsletter, since March 1983. He had been the review editor of the Newsletter since 1979. In other words, his editorial role with the journal spanned no fewer than forty years: a period during which Dickens studies grew up, proliferated, and diversified immensely. David contributed to that growth to an extraordinary extent.

David taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, from 1968 to 2001. He returned to his native England towards the end of this period, organizing the UMass Study Abroad program in Oxford. It is pleasant to see the affectionate tributes to him from some of his former students, as well as many of his scholarly peers, on the tribute page that was opened on the Dickens Society website on September 16th, this year.

David's work on Dickens began with the important critical edition of Pictures from Italy that formed the substance of the dissertation for which he received his PhD from UCLA, in 1968, and which culminated in a very attractive volume published by Andre Deutsch in 1973. This meticulous work on one of Dickens's less famous texts was typical of David. All of his work was directed to serving the needs of the Dickensian community–filling a gap in the coverage of Dickens's work, providing information and resources that others might build upon, and of course fostering talent in the Newsletter and Quarterly. His "Companions" to Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, as well as the general Companion to Charles Dickens (a posthumous 2nd edition of which is in the works) will go on nourishing other people's efforts for many years to come. The same goes for his Garland bibliography of Oliver Twist and his Penguin Classics edition of Edwin Drood. But David was also an original scholar with a profound knowledge of Dickens's whole oeuvre, and of his literary and social context, as can be seen in the 40-item bibliography below. At the center of this output is Dickens in history and Dickens on history, including his relations with contemporaries such as Macaulay and Carlyle. There is an emphasis on fact in this work that has been entirely salutary for Dickens studies, and that was not at all Gradgrindian! It was about finding out what Dickens really knew, what mattered to him, and what would be useful for Dickens scholars to know. It went along with a disgust for the political manipulation of truth in our own era, but also with a rich appreciation for the free spaces of the literary imagination and all that is fun in Dickens.

The bibliography that appears below is selective. Notably, it omits all of David's reviews apart from the last (a long, learned and enthusiastic one, published in these pages, on the monumental Oxford edition of Carlyle's French Revolution). There were at least 70 of these reviews, many published in the Quarterly, and they testify again and again to the primary importance that David attached to acknowledging fellow scholars and supporting their work.

Personally, I owe David a huge amount. I met him first at conferences in the 1990s (the first was probably Dijon, in 1996). He invited me to teach at the UMass summer school in Oxford in 1999. After that, we carried on meeting intermittently at conferences, until eventually, at the beginning of 2020, I took over the general editorship of the Quarterly. The enthusiastic support and encouragement that David gave me over the last two years, while I experimented with various impetuous changes (even a new cover!) to the journal in which he had been so invested for such a long time, were quite extraordinary. I hope and believe that it remains very much David's journal.

David leaves behind his wife Miriam and his three children, Catherine, Edwin, and Margery. Innumerable Dickensians will recall...