An Interview with Andrea Broomfield, the First Recipient of the VanArsdel Prize

Photo credit: Bret Gustafson, 2015

Andrea Broomfield, PhD, is a professor of English at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas, and has been a longtime member of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. In 1990, she was the recipient of the first VanArsdel Essay Prize. A mentee of the late Sally Mitchell, Broomfield transitioned into her current focus on food writing and historicism more than fifteen years ago. Throughout that time, she has done extensive research and writing, especially on Victorian food and dining. She was the co-editor with Sally Mitchell of Prose by Victorian Women: An Anthology. She is also the author of Food and Cooking in Victorian England: A History and Kansas City: A Food Biography. Her publications in Victorian Periodicals Review have included "Interdisciplinary Work and Periodicals Connections: An Issue in Honor of Sally H. Mitchell" and "Rushing Dinner to the Table: The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine and Industrialization's Effect on Middle-Class Food and Cooking, 1852–1860."

Jordan Osterman:

What has it been like for you to be involved with RSVP over the years?

Andrea Broomfield:

If it wasn't for Sally Mitchell, my route as a food historian would have taken a very different path, maybe not a path at all. I was brought up in RSVP; it made me who I am. I didn't have to go through the anxiety and fear that a lot of young grad students have about scholarship because I was so welcomed into this group. There's no way I would have been able to build my network and confidence, to understand the ropes of academe, if not for RSVP.

After first being introduced to the society, my network continued to grow. When I won the VanArsdel Prize in 1990, I did not merely fly down to Waco, Texas, where the RSVP Conference was held that year, to pick up a plaque. Instead, I was invited by many scholars in the organization to play an active part in the conference. Sally was instrumental in introducing me around, but I was tremendously grateful that I could meet people on my own and begin to develop professional relationships. George Worth, Maria Frawley, Barbara Quinn Schmidt, Dick Fulton, and Louis James were just some of the RSVP members I met in Waco and began to develop important connections with. While I was never able to meet Rosemary VanArsdel in person, she and I began a letter exchange and occasionally talked on the phone. She wrote reference letters for me and opened doors. This type of generosity and collegiality was overwhelming to someone who had always assumed that academe was a cutthroat business where you had to watch out for potential sabotage. Maybe I had read too many David Lodge novels! The next thing I knew, I was graduating and starting my first job. Once I became a professor, RSVP members still nurtured me, giving me leads and helping me. I feel like I didn't contribute very much to RSVP, but its members contributed a lot to me. I owe them a very big debt of gratitude.

What makes this society so special is that it started as a group of people with a desperate need for information about periodicals, but much of that information didn't exist. A group of people had to come together with a mission of trying to attribute hundreds of anonymous articles to authors and create a theory for how to read and understand this journalistic material, whether the author was known or was stubbornly anonymous. The mission these founders had was straightforward but pretty profound. The society still retains so many vestiges of that mission: why periodicals matter and how they should and shouldn't be used. The organization has grown, but it still has an intimacy. RSVP has a unique story about how and why it started, and it welcomes members and embraces newcomers. It doesn't make people feel excluded.

Jordan Osterman:

You wrote in your tribute to Sally Mitchell (in...