David Trotter is a literary and film critic, now Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge. He held the King Edward VII Professorship there from 2002 and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2004. He contributes regularly to the London Review of Books, and he co-produced the documentary Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War (2022) and acted as its script consultant.
His field is British and American writing from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, often read next to cinema and other media. Cooking with Mud (2000) follows the idea of mess through Victorian art and fiction. Paranoid Modernism (2001) takes three novelists, Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis, and asks how their experiments relate to psychosis and to the professionalization of English society. Later books turn to technology. Literature in the First Media Age (Harvard University Press, 2013) looks at Britain between the wars. The Literature of Connection (Oxford University Press, 2020) builds its argument on three terms: signal, medium and interface. Brute Meaning, a collection of essays, also appeared in 2020.
In the Penguin Classics edition of Great Expectations he wrote the introduction, while Charlotte Mitchell edited the text and supplied the notes. That is the book most readers of this page will have in hand.
If you have just finished the novel, his introduction is the natural next step. Readers who want more of his criticism could try Cooking with Mud, which stays in the Victorian period and is the easiest way into his habit of reading nineteenth-century fiction through the things it would rather not look at.
