Ian Jack was one of the most accomplished literary scholars of his generation, best known for his meticulous and pioneering editorial work on the Brontës and Browning, and for a series of substantial critical studies ranging from the poetics of 18th-century satire to the reception of modern verse.

Ian Robert James Jack was born in Edinburgh in 1923. He attended George Watson’s College and took a first in English literature at Edinburgh University. As a student he was an ardent fan of Lord Beveridge whom he tried to persuade to stand for the rectorship. Arriving at Merton College Oxford in 1947, he took his DPhil under the formidable Helen Gardiner.

On the strength of early intellectual promise he secured the post of lecturer at Brasenose College in 1950 and became a senior research Fellow in 1955. He moved to Cambridge in 1961, becoming a Fellow of Pembroke College and university lecturer in the English Faculty. He was promoted to reader in 1973 and held a personal chair from 1976 until the beginning of a very busy and productive retirement in 1989. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1986.

During his career, as well as undertaking many international speaking engagements for the British Council, Jack also held several distinguished visiting professorships, most notably at Berkeley during the revolutionary semesters of 1968-69. He wryly recalled how, while sheltering beneath his desk during a minor riot, he took a phone call from the President of Pembroke asking if he would support the radical proposal to introduce Fellows’ spouses to High Table once a term. He said yes, and crept back under, thereby helping Cambridge to take a tentative step into the Swinging Sixties.

As a boy in Edinburgh he began to develop his lifelong passion for book collecting. Over the coming years he amassed a superb collection of old and rare volumes, from 16th-century quartos to modern first editions and incorporating a huge collection of Scottish material, including a complete run of The Edinburgh Review. Such knowledge of books and the book market ideally equipped him for the role of librarian at Pembroke College, which he expertly combined with his other academic duties from 1965 to 1975.

He continued to collect in a private capacity well into his retirement, displaying a particular fondness for David’s Bookshop in St Edward’s Passage where he was often to be seen in his later years inspecting the most recent acquisitions. Bibliophilia was a passion he communicated to the many graduate students that he and his second wife, Elizabeth, entertained so generously at their splendid home at Fen Ditton. As an undergraduate tutor and research supervisor, Jack resembled Goldsmith’s famous schoolmaster “kind: or if severe in aught/, The love he bore to learning was at fault”. He was enormously supportive and proud of his former students, following their careers with great attention and encouragement long after they had left Cambridge.

Jack’s own critical work was marked by meticulous scholarship and an unfailing dedication to what he regarded as the intrinsic value of literature. He rejoiced in the creative vitality of the author even as others were proclaiming its death. At the outset of his career he wrote that “enthusiasm led me to literary history”, and that same enthusiasm sustained his work to the end. There was an element of celebration in everything he wrote, a revelling in the very fact of literary accomplishment that was equally evident in his contribution to several literary societies: he served as president of the Charles Lamb Society (1970-80), the Browning Society (1980-83), and the Johnson Society (1986-87) and as vice-president of the Brontë Society from 1973 onwards.

Jack’s first monograph, Augustan Satire: Intention and Idiom in English Poetry 1660-1750 (1952), was stunningly successful and remains in print. Its witty, lucid exposition of texts by Butler, Dryden, Pope and Johnson introduced generations of undergraduates to 18th-century satire. There followed in 1963 the massive English Literature 1815-32, the tenth volume of the Oxford History of English Literature, and in 1967 Keats and the Mirror of Art, the first sustained study of the poet’s considerable debt to the visual arts. After Browning’s Major Poetry (1973), Jack turned to the complex relationship between creativity and contemporary reception, to the ways in which poets tried to shape, and were shaped in turn, by their readership. “When a poem is read in an anthology,” he argued, “or in the artificial situation required by the demands of ‘Practical Criticism’, it is reduced to the condition of a cut flower. If we wish to understand the poem it becomes necessary to try to see it, in the manner of an ecologist, in its natural habitat.”

The result was The Poet and his Audience (1984), a compelling study of author and reader from Dryden to Yeats. If some felt dissatisfied by the self-professedly “descriptive” cast of Jack’s later critical writings, his editorial labours won widespread admiration. He was general editor of the Clarendon Editions of the Brontë novels (1969-92) and The Poetical Works of Robert Browning (1983-95). As well as serving as general editor for the Brontë series, Jack co-edited Wuthering Heights (1976) with Hilda Marsden, establishing the first reliable text with a full critical apparatus. He also co-edited the first five volumes of the Browning edition, including the notoriously difficult Sordello (1984) and the important collection Men and Women (1995).

The many marks of recognition for Jack’s extraordinary talents included his selection as British Academy Warton lecturer in Poetry in 1967 (delivering a celebrated talk on Browning) and his election as honorary Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, in 1998, an event which gave him immense pleasure. Many of his former pupils and colleagues combined to contribute to his Festschrift in 1995, Presenting Poetry: Composition, Publication, Reception. Essays in Honour of Ian Jack. He listed his recreations in Who’s Who as “collecting books, travelling hopefully and thinking about words”. He did all three remarkably well.

Jack is survived by his second wife, Elizabeth, and their son, and by two sons and a daughter from his previous marriage.

Professor Ian Jack, literary scholar, was born on December 5, 1923. He died on September 3, 2008, aged 84