A scholarly edition of Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend was recently published by WPI Professor Joel J. Brattin as the last volume of the Everyman Dickens series.
Brattin, who specializes in English Literature, was approached by Michael Slater to edit Our Mutual Friend. Slater, who wrote Dickens and Women, had read Brattin's first book about Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, An Annotated Bibliography, which was the first volume in the Garland Dickens Series, published in 1984. For the last five years Brattin has been working on Our Mutual Friend.
Brattin is currently using his edition of Our Mutual Friend in his A term class: Popular Fiction: Reading in Installments. He read Our Mutual Friend as an undergraduate and he loved it, but it came to mean more to him when he wrote his first book on it. Brattin wanted to promote more enjoyment of the book. He will be discussing his book at seminars, but he will not be doing a book tour.
Not only did Brattin edit Our Mutual Friend, but he has also reviewed many books and articles, worked on another of his interests, Jimi Hendrix, taught classes, advised projects, and lately was elected President of the Dickens Society.
When asked if he saw any similarities between his editing and either Charles Dickens's or Jimi Hendrix's work, he responded, "Both did a lot of editing: Dickens edited literature and one of the lesser known facts about Jimi Hendrix was his music mixing. Both had great attention to detail. My own editing is less obviously creative than either Dickens's or Hendrix's, but it is still creative."
After five years of work, Brattin feels satisfaction that his work is done and the results are out there and available for people to see. Professor Brattin is not actively seeking out another project of this type. If approached, he may help with the Clarendon Series on Dickens, put out by Oxford University Press. He has mixed feelings about taking up another editorial project because it takes up so much time. However, he knows he can do it right.