My relationship with classic literature began with The Count of Monte Cristo. I was completely absorbed by it. From there came Sherlock Holmes, Dracula and the Gothic classics, and before long I was immersed not simply in individual books but in the worlds they created.
Those worlds did not remain confined to the page. Seeing Sherlock Holmes brought to life on screen, and discovering the atmosphere and imagination of Hammer horror, made them feel even larger. I have never seen books, film and television as rival forms. At their best, they complement one another. A novel creates a world in the imagination, while an adaptation can give that world another dimension through faces, voices, music, landscape and atmosphere.
Sometimes the screen version changes the original considerably. I find that interesting too. The Sherlock Holmes most people recognise, for example, is partly Conan Doyle and partly more than a century of actors, illustrators, filmmakers and cultural memory. Understanding where the original ends and the later version begins does not diminish either of them. It makes the journey of the story more interesting.
That fascination with imagined worlds found another outlet surprisingly early. In the days of the Commodore 64, my cousin and I began writing computer games inspired by the Gothic worlds we loved. One of those games was licensed to a games developer. Looking back, there was already a pattern emerging: I wanted not only to experience these fictional worlds, but to understand how they worked and explore them through different forms.
Literature at school was another turning point. Studying books properly felt like an awakening. Reading had always been enjoyable, but studying literature revealed another layer. A novel could be a story and something more at the same time. Its structure mattered. Its language mattered. The period in which it was written mattered. The assumptions its first readers brought to it mattered.
That curiosity has never gone away.
My professional life developed along what might seem like a very different path. I was as comfortable with technology as I was with language. I worked in programming and later across marketing, SEO and PPC, often at the leading edge of technologies that were changing quickly.
In practice, the two sides were never as separate as they might appear. Programming teaches you to understand systems, structure and cause and effect. Search and digital marketing require research, pattern recognition and an understanding of how people look for information. Language and marketing require something different again: taking complex ideas and communicating them clearly to another person.
Throughout all of it, classic literature remained the constant.
Over time, history became inseparable from that interest. When I read an extraordinary book, one of the questions I instinctively ask is: what was happening when someone imagined this?
That question fascinates me.
We live in a world saturated with influences. We have films, television, photographs, recordings and an almost unlimited archive of stories available instantly. It can be difficult to put ourselves back into the world of an earlier writer and appreciate how radical some of their imaginative leaps were.
Consider Frankenstein. Today its creature belongs to popular culture. The idea feels familiar because nearly two centuries of theatre, film, illustration and imitation stand between us and Mary Shelley.
But Mary Shelley did not inherit Frankenstein from popular culture. She had to imagine it.
That immediately makes me want to understand her world. What ideas about science were circulating? What were people debating about electricity, life and the limits of human knowledge? What had Shelley read? Who was around her? What intellectual and political currents shaped the atmosphere in which such a book could become conceivable?
The same question can be asked again and again.
What kind of nineteenth-century world produced Dracula?
What was happening in London, science, policing and popular culture when Sherlock Holmes appeared?
What social rules did Jane Austen’s first readers understand instinctively that a reader today may no longer recognise?
What developments in science and technology made the extraordinary imagination of H. G. Wells possible?
For me, historical context is not background decoration. It can bring you closer to the moment of creation. The more you understand about the world surrounding a great book, the more extraordinary the act of writing it can become.
That is a large part of the motivation behind Brentwood Classics Annotated Editions.
I wanted to create editions for readers who love the books themselves but also find themselves asking questions around them. Who was this writer? Where did this idea come from? What did the first audience understand that we might miss? Why does a character behave in a way that seems strange now? Which details would once have carried an obvious meaning? What has film, television or popular culture changed about the story we think we know?
The aim is not to turn classic literature into an academic exercise, and it is not to tell readers what a book is supposed to mean.
It is to provide useful company around the original work.
That may mean exploring the life and circumstances of the author, reconstructing the historical world behind the book, explaining unfamiliar social conventions, following recurring ideas, separating the original text from later adaptations, or answering questions that naturally arise once the final page has been turned.
Most of all, it means treating these books as living works of imagination.
The classics are often called the foundations of modern literature, but that description can make them sound safe and conventional. Many were anything but. They experimented with form, created characters and ideas that entered cultural memory, challenged expectations and imagined possibilities that later generations would take for granted.
That innovation is one of the things I find most compelling about them.
Brentwood Classics Annotated Editions grew from a lifetime spent reading those books, exploring the worlds around them and continually asking the same question:
How did they do this?
The search for that answer rarely makes the books smaller.
It usually makes them more extraordinary.