Farewell

As we end our five years as coeditors of J19, we'd like to thank our editorial board members for their unstinting commitment to the journal, along with our generous and thoughtful colleagues in the field who have provided invaluable appraisals of essays. The care, concern, and goodwill all these individuals have given to helping authors improve their work have earned our deepest gratitude and respect. We are also grateful for the assistance of Chance Woods and Gabriel Briggs, who served the journal in various capacities and helped us in crucial ways.

We survived a very steep learning curve with the good-natured and expert help provided by the staff of the University of Pennsylvania Press. We particularly thank Dave Lievens, Paul Chase, and Emily Stevens—and our newest team member, Kerry Boyles. The presidents of C19—Christopher Looby, Elisa Tamarkin, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, and Hester Blum—have been enthusiastic supporters of our efforts from start to finish, for which we thank them. Without our managing editor, Natalie Baggett, the journal would not be the success it is. Natalie is the unsung hero of J19, but every day we sing her praises. Above all we thank our husbands, Kirk and Chris, for sharing in the excitement and ignoring the irritation the journal brought into our homes.

We have loved bringing J19 to life. The generosity of our colleagues and the dedication to first-rate scholarship by our authors have made us proud to be nineteenth-century Americanists and to have provided an outlet for some of the extraordinary intelligence and creativity that make that field what it is. We are particularly proud of the Pleasure Reading format, which kept intimacy, kindness, courage, and whimsy at the start of every issue, where they belong.

As coeditors our relationship with each other has deepened over the past years, our mutual trust and respect always growing, and our capacity to make each other laugh when things went wrong—and they did more often than we hope was visible—kept us buoyant even when things seemed unfixable. Working so closely with someone one loves and admires was the best part of editing J19.

We know the journal will continue to evolve and thrive under the editorship of Betsy Duquette and Stacey Margolis, whose wit, generosity, and good sense readers of the journal will soon appreciate, as their friends and colleagues do now. We wish them the greatest success and all the satisfaction editing J19 has given us.