Kathleen Mary Tillotson 1906–2001

Kathleen Tillotson served as a member of the Council of the British Academy from 1968 to 1971, and as Vice-President from 1968 to 1969. Her work with John Butt on the Clarendon Dickens proceeded steadily from the late 1950s onwards. Their grand project was to establish a critical text of each novel, ‘free from the numerous corruptions that disfigure modern reprints’, and with an apparatus of variants that should record Dickens' progressive revision of the text, ‘accompanied by all such assistance as Dickens himself supplied in the shape of prefaces, descriptive headlines, illustrations and cover designs from the wrappers of the monthly part-issues, which often foreshadow the drift of the novel as Dickens originally conceived it’. The first volume in the series, Oliver Twist, appeared in late 1965. The other great scholarly enterprise with which Tillotson's name will be forever associated is the Pilgrim Edition (from Volume 8, called The British Academy Pilgrim Edition) of Dickens' letters.