Editors' Introduction

Two men, traveling companions, paddle effortlessly with a river's current through long, empty, eventless days; the Government Stationery Office issues a report on wine duties; a Bengali man in London plays a hoax on a British waitress, claiming to have forty wives; children in nonconformist Sunday Schools read A Missionary Alphabet for Little Folk; British administrators eagerly eye Mayan antiquities; a woman in a walled garden reads a Bible in which we can see an inset illustration of another woman, also reading; Queen Victoria insists that envoys from Burma prostrate themselves before her at court; a physiologist, reading, imagines a theory of reading derived from musical patterns.

These particular, vibrant, often enigmatic figures, pictured as if forming a collage of Victorian society, were, as you may already have guessed, all jostling together at the inaugural meeting of the North American Victorian Studies Association held in October 2003 at Indiana University in Bloomington. And now they are gathered again, in the volume you are holding in your hands, elbowing past one another to enliven the pages that follow. They certainly provide nothing like a representative portrait of the papers delivered last fall— much less a comprehensive picture of Victorian Britain itself. Other papers, had we room to include them, would fill the scene: two men, lovers, pass the reading physiologist; a menagerie and an imperial garden are in the background; Augusta Webster looks up after finishing the first sonnet of her Mother and Daughter sequence; a London man is poisoned while Silas Wegg is tossed into a garbage cart; a photograph is taken and an art dealer closes his doors; Gladstone gives a speech; Newman delivers a sermon; some men go bathing.

We won't delay you for long as you move to mingle with the figures we have collected; a more thorough description of the setting in which they found their animated existence can be found, along with pictures and even video, on the NAVSA website at www.sla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/navsa/. There you can also learn about the Donald J. Gray Prize for best essay of the year and the award for best paper given by a graduate student at the conference; about the exhibits at the Lilly Library and the Kinsey Institute for Research into Sex, Gender, and Reproduction; about the plenary lectures delivered and the seminars held. But, before we step aside, we should let you know something of our aims in gathering these figures together.

The excitement generated by the NAVSA Conference was remarkably open-ended. Panelists delivered a mix of speculative papers on topics just cresting the horizon and revisionist talks addressing issues of traditional importance, and people left the panels in eager conversation. We hoped here to extend that conversation in a new form to those who were not able to come to Bloomington. To this end, we asked three scholars to attend the Conference with an eye toward selecting papers for us to publish in VS. Papers that were especially forward-looking, that made vivid contrastive perspectives on emergent topics, that prosecuted distinctive methods, or that, more simply, exemplified outstanding critical practices were especially welcome. We then invited our three scholars to respond to the papers in print, taking the occasion to make the points they think should be made about what matters most to them, now, in their fields.

And here are the results: three collections of papers from last fall's gathering. The first set, organized by Leah Price, concerns the rapidly developing, complexly constituted field of study concerning practices of reading; the second, organized by Lee Sterrenburg, variously engages revisionist interpretations of the Empire, asking us to consider what counts as a significant exception to received historical narratives; and a last set, organized by Philippa Levine, addresses the nature of the archive—unruly, haphazard, and generative—and the uses to which we put it. As an introduction to the figures who floated through the conference corridors at last year's gathering, we hope that the issue also serves as an irresistible invitation to participate in future NAVSA conferences, beginning this coming October in Toronto.