Editor's Note

For this issue's Forum, we invited art historians and literary scholars to contribute short essays on the theme of eminent Victorians. Looking back to Lytton Strachey's classic book of that title, we asked each scholar to pitch the importance of an understudied Victorian individual to Victorian studies now. Organized chronologically by subjects' birth dates, the forum articles present a fascinating group of both familiar and lesser-known Victorians. Whether by revolutionizing the postal service (Rowland Hill), working to improve women's lives (Edith Simcox), or inaugurating modern bodybuilding (Eugen Sandow), these individuals helped to reform the Victorian social institutions in which they participated. We hope that examining their achievements may, in turn, reform our understanding of the Victorian century.

We also laud the achievement of Natalie Huffels (McGill University) for winning the journal's annual Hamilton Prize for her essay "Tracing Traumatic Memory in The Woman in White: Psychic Shock, Victorian Science, and the Narrative Strategy of the Shadow-Bildungsroman." We offer our congratulations to this year's first runner-up, Christie Peterson (University of Michigan-Ann Arbor) for her essay "'The Level of the Beasts that Perish': Animalized Text in Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Helen Fleetwood" and to this year's two second runners-up: Keridiana Chez (City University of New York) for her essay "'You Can't Trust Wolves No More Nor Women': Canines, Women, and Deceptive Docility in Bram Stoker's Dracula"; and Fiona Crawford (Carleton University) for her essay "H. Rider Haggard, the Revival of Romance, and the Tattoo." We are grateful for the hard work of the four advisory board members who adjudicated this year's competition: Nancy Armstrong, Claudia Nelson, Matthew Rowlinson, and Peter Sinnema. Finally, we thank all the graduate students who entered the competition and the colleagues who alerted them to the Hamilton Prize.