Professor Malcolm Andrews

About

Malcolm Andrews is Emeritus Professor of Victorian and Visual Studies in the School of English, where he taught from 1971 to 2009. He was Editor of The Dickensian, the journal of the Dickens Fellowship, from 1991- 2021. He is a past President of the Dickens Society (of America).
He has been a visiting lecturer in China and Japan, as well in Italy and France and the United States, and continues to give talks both locally in Canterbury (for the Dickens Fellowship Branch there and for U3A) and more widely in UK, both on Dickens and on his other main interest, landscape in literature and the visual arts.
Malcolm Andrews has edited two novels for the Everyman Dickens series, David Copperfield (1993) and The Pickwick Papers (1998), and is the author of Dickens on England and the English (1979), Dickens and the Grown-up Child (1995), Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves (OUP 2006) - a study of Dickens's Public Readings and the relationship he developed with his readers and listeners during that career - and Dickensian Laughter (OUP 2013).
Book publications in landscape aesthetics and the visual arts include The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760-1800(1989) and The Picturesque: Sources and Documents (1994). The Search for the Picturesque examined developments in the taste for landscape in eighteenth-century England, in poetry and painting, and made a special study of the first wave of scenic tourists to the Lakes, North Wales and Scottish Highlands in this period, drawing on a range of published and unpublished contemporary travel diaries. His study of the evolution of the English countryside idyll in literature and art, A Sweet View: The Making of an English Idyll, was published by Reaktion Books in 2021.
The interest in landscape is also reflected in Landscape and Western Art (1999) a volume in the New Oxford History of Art series. This study reviews and explores some of the key 'moments' in the post-renaissance traditions of landscape art in Europe and North America, up to 2000, and considers the ideas and images of the natural world in art in the light of some recent theorising about landscape art. Both this volume and The Search for the Picturesque have also been published in Chinese translations.
Malcolm Andrews is currently working on a book-length study of Dickens’s imagination, particularly his visual imagination and affinities with artists such as J.M.W.Turner.