Greetings from the Editor

Victorians Journal of Culture and Literature, #131 / Summer 2017, marks our sixty-fifth year of continuous publication! Let that settle in for a moment. . . .

As the first, and longest running, Victorian studies journal, Victorians has featured many founding voices, many established academic stars, and many promising new scholars; it has initiated and participated in pertinent scholarly debates, discourses, and trends; and it has provided a provocative forum for introducing new scholars, new work, new ideas. What an inspiring history! And what an honor it is for me, as editor, and for all our authors, to be affiliated with this publication.

In terms of its future, #131 also marks our new collaboration with The Ohio State University Press, Periodicals Division, and with Johns Hopkins University Press. One key component of this affiliation is that Victorians will now be available in both traditional hard copy and online. Here is an overview of the remarkable lineup for this most significant of our numbers:

What is the status of current scholarship on Victorian Shakespeare? Surprisingly, few scholars responded to our CFP for a special number on “Shakespeare and the Victorians,” a project designed to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death (2016) through the framework of contemporary Victorian studies. If this dearth indicates a lack of scholarly interest in the topic, Richard Storer’s fascinating paper more than compensates. “‘Shakespeare appears in the character of the modern Prometheus’: C. M. Ingleby and Victorian Shakespeare Controversies” investigates a chapter in literary history that dramatizes the passion with which Victorians staked out and defended their corner of Shakespearean turf. Nodding to F. R. Leavis, New Criticism, and “New Bibliography,” Professor Storer relates, with wit and shrewd insight, the often hilarious war of words surrounding disputed standards of editing, pitting those defending the sanctity of the Bard’s language against those determined to make it align with “proper” (nineteenth-century) English. Storer’s claim that “few aspects of Victorian intellectual culture seem to stand out more clearly as distinct from our own—of their age but definitely not for all time—than Victorian Shakespeare scholarship” strongly suggests that here is a scholarly niche just waiting to be filled.

New work on George Eliot includes studies of “Janet’s Repentance” and Middlemarch. Dan Abitz, in his analysis of Eliot’s philosophical interests—“Eliot & Hobbes: Finding Leviathan in ‘Hints on Snubbing’ and ‘Janet’s Repentance’”—considers the author’s exploration of Hobbesian thought in her writing. Applied to Eliot’s portrayals of class and religion in Milby, Hobbes offers valuable insights into provincial attitudes toward Dissenters and Evangelicals, and to the significance of sympathy for overcoming mutual prejudice. Shifting from philosophy to affect theory, William Lee Hughes’ “How Anxiety Became Ordinary: Middlemarch, Feeling, and Serial Form” studies historical discourses of feeling in the context of anxiety. Hughes argues that anxiety variously shapes the novel’s characters, as well as its narrative voice, so that the feeling itself assumes an “ordinariness”: “If the novel’s explicit ethical project is to distribute sympathy, the form of the text’s affectivity . . . reveals that this ethical project is grounded on anxiety.” The “ordinariness” of anxiety “has a history,” and that history is grounded in the era’s serial publication.

Victorians #131 also features three new entries into Brontë scholarship. Miciah Hussey’s “Beside Myself: Fantasy, Form, and Authorship in Jane Eyre” examines the role of fantasy as both a psychic phenomenon and part of the aesthetic process of writing: “This novel, which Brontë places enigmatically between autobiography and fiction, emphasizes Jane’s continual re-positioning of the subject of her life story by empowering writing with a capacity to exceed bounded representation. . . . The narrative that links Jane Eyre to Jane Eyre offers her a self rendered in the psychic meshes of fantasy and reality.”

“Mooring Points: Manly Leaders, Trade, and Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley” by Deirdre Mikajulik analyzes the factors shaping this “Condition of England” novel, including Luddite activism and concepts of masculinity as portrayed by Robert Moore. By the novel’s end, “Moore’s machines, mill, and person undergo near-fatal attacks; but all three manage to survive and thrive...