Contributors to this Issue
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Contributors to this Issue
Dominic Rainsford is Professor of Literature in English at Aarhus University, Denmark, having previously taught at universities in England, Wales, Poland and the United States. He gained his BA and PhD at University College London. His publications include Authorship, Ethics and the Reader (Palgrave, 1997), Literature, Identity and the English Channel (Palgrave, 2002), Studying Literature in English (Routledge, 2014) and many articles, especially on Dickens. He is currently writing a book about literature, ethics and quantification.
Leslie S. Simon is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at Utah Valley University, where she has served as Director of Humanities and has been awarded the Faculty Excellence Award. She has published in Dickens Quarterly, Dickens Studies Annual, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts; has an article forthcoming in Studies in the Novel; and is completing a study of Dickens, heaps, and nineteenth-century mathematics.
William F. Long Is Emeritus Professor in Biochemistry at the University of Aberdeen. He has published several articles for The Dickensian and Dickens Quarterly and contributed to the Oxford Readers’ Companion to Dickens. [End Page 291]
Not one of our Insularities is so astonishing in the eyes of an intelligent foreigner, as the Court Newsman. He is one of the absurd little obstructions perpetually in the way of our being understood abroad. The quiet greatness and independence of the national character seems so irreconcilable with its having any satisfaction in the dull slipslop about the slopes and the gardens, and about the Prince Consort’s going a-hunting and coming back to lunch, and about Mr Gibbs and the ponies, and about the Royal Highnesses on horseback and the Royal infants taking carriage exercise, and about the slopes and the gardens again, and the Prince consort again, and Mr Gibbs and the ponies again, and the Royal Highnesses on horseback again, and the Royal infants taking carriage exercise again, and so on for every day in the week and every week in the year, that in questions of importance the English as a people, really miss their just recognition. … It is in vain to represent that the English people don’t care about these insignificant details, and don’t want them; that aggravates the misunderstanding. If they don’t want them, why do they have to have them? If they feel the effect of them to be ridiculous, why do they consent to be made ridiculous?
“Insularities,” Household Words, 19 January 1856 [End Page 292]
