Comments & Queries

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On the Cover is a detail from “Disastrous Result of Beautymania,” an illustration by George Du Maurier, from Punch 3 May 1879: 193. On the back cover is another detail from the same illustration.

Changes at VS: With this volume, we must bid a reluctant goodbye to two spectacular VS editors. Managing Editor Beth Bevis has finished her time at the office and is working on her dissertation about Victorian religious conviction and literary form. She spends her days teaching professional writing, reading Victorian sermons, and learning to be a long-distance aunt. Her thoughtful editing and stellar cover designs will be greatly missed. Book Review Editor Brian Eschrich has also tried to leave VS, but to our relief, he seems to have failed and continues to stop by the office at least twice a week. He is continuing work on his dissertation on Victorian philosophy and cultural criticism.

Now Managing Editor, Molly Boggs continues to enjoy telling the office all about TV shows they are not watching, video games they have never played, and her theories about hyphenation. She has begun work on her dissertation, which will examine Victorian representations of lodgings, landladies, and tenants.

Mallory Cohn has stepped into the position of Assistant Managing Editor, where she asks her predecessor about ten silly questions each day, all prefaced with “yo Boggs?” She prides herself on a forgiving attitude toward late evaluations and a merciless one toward stray commas. She is also pleased to have introduced the eating of yogurt-in-a-tube to the VS office. Mallory is beginning a dissertation on Victorian childhood and the shifting concept of precocity.

Now Book Review Editor, Ben Bagocius, finishing his dissertation on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century science and sexuality, is reading Paul Monette’s final memoir on the AIDS catastrophe, Last Watch of the Night (1995), in which Monette quotes Sappho:

Some say a cavalry corps,some infantry, some, again,will maintain that the swift oars

of our fleet are the finestsight on dark earth; but I saythat whatever one loves, is.

Lindsay Munnelly, our new Assistant Book Review Editor, is responsible for office etiquette and all references to Brad Neely. Her time at the journal has so far been spent resisting Ben’s attempts at a hostile takeover of the office using unexplained cell phone ringtones and an endless supply of Post-it notes. Lindsay is beginning a dissertation on the ways in which Victorian literature employs nontraditional forms of financial and aesthetic agency to query the humanist representation of a coherent, bounded subject.

This fall, we have also had the privilege of working with two excellent undergraduate interns.

Amber Hendricks will graduate this May with a degree in English and sociology. During her time at VS, she also held four other internships/jobs. She credits monster, Starbucks, and the VS staff for giving her the ability to survive such madness. amber is currently in a complicated relationship with Oscar Wilde.

Belle Kim is a senior double-majoring in English and journalism with a minor in psychology. She hopes to get a PhD in English literature from some prestigious university upon graduation so she doesn’t have to live out of a cardboard box somewhere. She is particularly interested in Victorian literature, American ethnic literature, and post-colonial theory. Perhaps the coolest thing she got to do as an undergraduate was report on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Kenya for a month.