Madeline House

Madeline House (née Church; 31 December 1903, Colombo – 27 February 1978, Huntingdon) was a British scholar of English literature, a specialist in the works of Charles Dickens, and known for her editorship of the Pilgrim edition of his letters. She was a winner of the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 1965.

Life Madeline Edith Church was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka in 1903. She attended the Royal Holloway College, London. In 1933, she married Humphry House, a literary critic, with whom she began a new edition of the letters of Charles Dickens in 1949. Following his death, she took on the editorship, and worked with Kathleen Mary Tillotson on the project. Twelve volumes were planned.

The first volume of the letters came out in 1965, for which House received the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. Two more volumes were published, and at the time of her death, she was readying the fourth volume. Others, praised the effort as superb, saying that its scholarly annotations contributed a companion-picture to the boisterous 1840s. 250 previously unpublished letters were included in the second volume, which was called an exceptional scholarly text.

Madeline House died in Huntingdon in 1978.

Selected works