Editors’ Note

With this issue, our editorial team welcomes digital dissemination coordinators Ruth Knechtel (Laurier University) and Constance Crompton (University of British Columbia, Okanagan). Thanks to their hard work, we now invite you to follow the journal on Twitter @victorianreview and look forward to launching our new website in 2014.

For this issue’s forum, “Built Victorian Environments,” we invited leading scholars from a variety of disciplines to examine buildings and built environments constructed during the Victorian period. As contributor G.A. Bremner writes, “It is no easy task to consider what might be counted among the most important or influential buildings of the Victorian age.” He highlights “landmark monuments” such as the Crystal Palace, the Oxford Natural History Museum, and the spectacular St. Pancras train station and hotel, now restored as the Eurostar’s London terminus (18). We urged our contributors, however, to eschew such monumental buildings in favour of eclectic and overlooked structures. Their choices range from the first public toilets, some of which featured “elegant classical façade[s] with Doric and Corinthian pilasters” (Penner 27) to Orrell’s Stockport Cotton factory, eulogized by contemporary Andrew Ure as rivaling “aristocratic mansions” in architectural “grandeur, elegance, and simplicity” (Ketabgian 14).

In this issue, we also celebrate Alana Fletcher (Queen’s University), whose essay “No Clocks in His Castle: The Threat of the Durée in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” won this year’s Hamilton Prize. Honourable mentions go to Benjamin D. O’Dell (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) for his essay “Privilege, Agency, Representation: Reframing Colonial Indian Education Reforms, 1850–1900” and to Frederick David King (University of Western Ontario) for his essay “Teleny: An Erotic Manifesto of Queer Resistance.” Many thanks go to our judges, Anne Clendinning (Nipissing University), Catherine Delyfer (Université Toulouse II–Le Mirail), and Kristen Guest (University of Northern British Columbia)