Obituary: Robert A. Colby

Robert A. Colby, a member of the Senior Advisory Council of Victorian Periodicals Review, died on October 3, 2004 at the age of 84. His passing is an immense loss to RSVP and to VPR, to whose work he had contributed substantially for many years.

Bob Colby was one of the most distinguished Victorian scholars of his generation. He was trained initially at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in 1949. His dissertation was on "The Spectator as a Literary Journal under the Editorship of Richard Holt Hutton," and from this subject flowed his lifelong interests in the critical reception of writers and the social and cultural contexts of fiction and journalism. After teaching literature at Lake Forest College and Hunter College he moved to Queens College in 1953, where he became a member of the Library Science Department. He spent the bulk of his professional career at Queens College, CUNY, and retired there as Professor of Library Science in 1986.

Bob's background in both literature and library science enabled him to move easily across disciplines. He helped to develop collections in English, American, and European Literature, as well as in Theatre History and Communications. He also became a skilled bibliographer and produced a number of publications and exhibitions relating to holdings of the Divisions of Arts and Humanities in Queens College. Yet, Bob's chief interest lay in Victorian cultural history, and early on he began to publish articles and reviews on eminent figures such as Richard Holt Hutton, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. In 1966, he and his wife, Vineta, an outstanding Victorian scholar and a member of the English Department at Queens College, collaborated in the writing of The Equivocal Virtue: Mrs. Oliphant and the Victorian Literary Market Place. This important study of Margaret Oliphant remains a definitive work on this nineteenth-century writer. It was likewise well ahead of its time in emphasizing author-publisher relations and critical attitudes towards the novel.

In 1967, Indiana University Press published Bob's Fiction with a Purpose: Major and Minor Nineteenth-Century Novels, in which he singled out the common didactic aims between representative great novels of the Victorian years and more ephemeral novels. This argument was intended to bridge the gap between "elite" and "obscure" texts, and to illuminate the nature of reader choice within a specific social and literary milieu. In 1979, after a decade in which Bob focused on this contextual approach to the reading of fiction he published perhaps his most important book, Thackeray's Canvass of Humanity: An Author and His Public, which was brought out by Ohio State University Press. This book sought to apply the contextual method to a single great writer. It also established Bob as one of the world's foremost authorities on Thackeray, a reputation that was solidified by subsequent articles and essays. In the following years Bob published articles on other Victorian and Edwardian writers, including Dickens, Wells, Shaw, and Walter Besant, the latter being of particular interest to him because of his involvement in the evolving profession of authorship.

To his many friends in RSVP Bob was likewise an outstanding scholar in the field of periodicals research. He was an influential figure in the organization, serving on its Advisory Board and Senior Advisory Council for more than a quarter of a century, and he was a fixture at its annual conferences and on many of the panels it sponsored. He served as Assistant Editor on the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals from 1978 to 1989, and in recent years was the Wellesley Index editor for VPR. His bibliographical updates of the Wellesley Index have been of particular profit to readers of the journal. In addition, Bob published several seminal articles on aspects of periodicals history, including "Goosequill and Blue Pencil: The Victorian Novelist as Editor" (1985). At his death he was working on Thackeray's travel writings, a project that, hopefully, will be brought to completion in the near future.

Some personal words are in order concerning Bob Colby. He was an immensely learned man who wore his knowledge lightly. He...