The Roots of RSVP: An Interview with Founding RSVP President Michael Wolff

Michael Wolff with Marysa Demoor.

Photo credit: Marianne Van Remoortel

Marysa Demoor:

Michael, one of the keynote addresses at our annual conference is named for you. How did you come to be one of the founding fathers of Victorian periodical studies?

Michael Wolff:

There was an extraordinary amount of material nobody had really studied, and I became one of the founding editors of Victorian Studies in 1955 when I was recruited to Indiana University. There were the three of us: Phil Appleman, who was the steering wheel, Bill Madden, who was the brake, and I, who was the accelerator. Victorian Studies was an interdisciplinary journal. This was the result of my own interdisciplinary background: I started as a classicist (Latin and Greek were my favourite subjects), and then I switched to history.

Let’s go back in time. I was born in London in 1927, and I went to prep school in Hampstead. I was a precocious child with execrable handwriting; I was left-handed, and at the time that wasn’t allowed. During the blitz in 1940, I was thirteen. I then attended an English boarding school, Oxford St. Edwards School (located in a safe area), which was founded by a protégé of Newman and was Anglo-Catholic. I was introduced to Greek there.

In 1945, the war was over, and I was supposed to do my national service. I decided, however, to go to university first. I wrote a lot of poetry in those days, and I assumed I’d be writing poetry in English literature courses. I went to St John’s College in Cambridge with Hugh Sykes as my tutor. Sykes was probably the laziest supervisor in Cambridge; consequently, I was given an extraordinary amount of freedom, especially compared to the regime of the public school. At the time, there was an influx of demobilized soldiers who’d had pretty grim experiences, and the university didn’t know how to cope with that. I realized I didn’t want to stay with Sykes, so I moved on to another subject, the queen of sciences—philosophy (called “moral science” in those days). It was wonderful—the high point of my education. It allowed me to meet two great men: Ludwig Wittgenstein and the composer John Cage. Wittgenstein was obsessively depressed and was always thinking aloud. Graduate students took him to the movies to help him to stop thinking. He wiped out traditional philosophy and cured me of ideology. I was then supervised by Wittgenstein’s pupil, John Wisdom, who had a great sense of humour and a good knowledge of psychology.

In 1948, I began my two years of national service even though I had failed the commission interview, possibly because I had told the interviewer that I thought I’d be a coward. I left the army in 1950, and in January 1951, I stopped shaving. I then got a job at the Festival of Britain. It was the hundredth anniversary of the Crystal Palace Exhibition, and I worked in the contract management branch. In that context, I met a number of American Fulbright scholars, including the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson, who told me about graduate study possibilities in the United States. Both my parents lived in the US by then, so going there seemed very attractive.

In the fall of 1951, I arrived in America on the SS Rotterdam. I first went to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and then to Princeton University. I really blossomed at Princeton; this was a turning point. I thought I’d be working on the Renaissance and Sir Thomas Browne’s Religion of a Doctor, but the graduate professor in Renaissance was dreadful. The graduate professor in Victorian literature was the energetic E. D. H. Johnson. I started working on the Victorian period and fell in love with George Eliot. I decided to study her essays; I wanted to compare her book reviews to others to see what was special about them. But how...