Margaret Cardwell was a reader in English at Queen's University Belfast, a specialist in the works of Charles Dickens.
She attended the Fleetwood Grammar School and read English at Leeds University, where she obtained a first class degree.
[1] Edwin Drood, famously, is Dickens' unfinished novel, and Cardwell's edition was noted for its restoration of meddlesome phrases and judicious use of various readings, as well as the most comprehensive record of the evolution of the book.
Cardwell demonstrated the affinities between Oliver Twist and Drood, and indeed traced the change in Dickens's emphasis from the characters of Rosa and Edwin to Jesper.
As sixteen of nineteen of the work's monthly print installments were missing the proofs, she faced the complexity of determining the variations from manuscript to the first edition, and dealt judiciously with extracting the appropriately annotated final form.