Introduction

This festschrift commemorates Robert Maccubbin's twenty years as editor of Eighteenth-Century Life; its distinguished contributors are among the many friends Bob has made during his thirty-odd year career--as teacher, editor, and scholar--in eighteenth-century studies. As one contributor has remarked, "Bob is one of the unsung heroes of eighteenth-century studies, and I think it is high time he were sung."

As pleasurable as compiling the essays has been, it is a relief to have this issue in print, as two years of fibbing to Bob about its focus and contents has taxed my ingenuity on many occasions. I owe a special debt to the managing editor for his skills at subterfuge. And thanks to Martha Hamilton-Phillips for coaxing biographical details out of her unsuspecting husband.

Bob assumed the editorship of Eighteenth-Century Life with the October 1980 issue; the journal had been started six years earlier at the University of Pittsburgh by Cynthia Sutherland and Jean Hunter. Bob prefaced his first issue as editor with the following policy statement:

In a "statement" prefacing the first issue of the first volume, the editors cast their net: "Our subject is implicit in our title--the life of the eighteenth century--social life, political life, literary life, intellectual life; the life of the great and the obscure; the life of the mind and of the body; life in France, in America, in Germany, in England; life throughout the western world. It is no longer necessary either to define or defend the interdisciplinary approach to eighteenth-century life.... A few new features will, however, distinguish the new series. First, we shall feature the publication of virtually unknown cartoons.... Second, we shall encourage the publication of recently discovered and hitherto unpublished documents: poems, letters, diaries, etc., and shall be especially receptive to articles based upon newly discovered material.... And finally, at least one every-other-year, we shall produce an issue devoted to a special topic.

Other features that developed over the next decade were film forums, museum and exhibition reviews, and high-quality reproductions of illustrations, including color. Bob also incorporated the review essay, which offers a "state of the art" view of a certain topic or area of interest--for example, intellectual biographies of late eighteenth-century philosophes (January/May 1981), and gender studies of English fiction (Fall 2000). Other eighteenth-century journals would later imitate these innovative features of Eighteenth-Century Life, as well as the interdisciplinary approach Bob nurtured in eighteenth-century studies. As Cedric Reverand writes:

While Eighteenth-Century Studies remains a prestigious journal with excellent articles, its submission and reviewing structure is such that the articles on philosophy seem to be aimed at experts in philosophy, those on the visual arts aimed at art historians, on literature at literary scholars, and so forth. Eighteenth-Century Life, by contrast, has a consistent record of actually being interdisciplinary, rather than just multidisciplinary, of publishing articles on music that literary scholars find appealing, on art that sociologists read, on sociology that art historians read. It is also filled with surprises, articles on topics we didn't know existed, like unbuilt national monuments, the origins of syphilis, Cowper's rabbits, Goethe's botany, the possible connections between gin and gender, displays of anatomical specimens (I'm thinking of the article on Frederick Ruysch's Kunstkammer, where pieces of babies were preserved under glass in decorative, sentimental, floral-like arrangements). And the there are the special issues, on the architecture of Versailles, on monstrosity, on the topology of food, not to mention the volume on Unauthorized Sexual Behavior, perhaps the only academic journal ever to be mailed out in a plain brown wrapper. Eighteenth-Century Life has become that rarity of academic journals, a journal many of us read rather than just consult. This is not only a tribute to Maccubbin and his able staff, but also a reflection of his devotion to scholarship, his wide-ranging interests, his style, and his wit.

A brief life of Bob seems in order. Bob's...