Simon J. James

co-editor of Professor Challenger

Memory, at least, will never fail me, for so long as the breath of life is in me, every hour and every action of that period will stand out as hard and clear as do the first strange happenings of our childhood.

Edward Malone, The Lost World (1912)

Simon J. James is Professor of Victorian Literature at the Department of English Studies, Durham University and is editing the first volume of Professor Challenger novels, The Lost World and The Poison Belt. His research interests are largely in the literary culture of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, especially fiction. He is the author of Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative in the Novels of George Gissing (2001) and Maps of Utopia: H.G. Wells, Modernity and the End of Culture (2012). He has also written on Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and Victorian bestsellers, and on food in the Sherlock Holmes stories for Critical Quarterly. He has edited four H. G. Wells novels for Penguin Classics, and The First Men in the Moon for World’s Classics. He is currently editing Decline and Fall for OUP’s Collected Works of Evelyn Waugh; current projects also include studies of autobiographical memory in Dickens, and male bonding in fin-de-siecle fiction. Professor James was the Principal Investigator of the Durham Commission for Creativity and Education, in partnership with the Arts Council, investigating how young people can be taught to be creative, and think creatively.