Editor's Note

This issue's forum, guest edited by Charles LaPorte and Mary Ellis Gibson, explores the varieties and denominations of Victorian Christianity. Whereas the Victorian Review editorial team initially conceived the forum as a broad survey of spiritual traditions of importance to Victorian culture, Gibson and LaPorte, sensitive to the importance of denominations to the history of religion, opted to focus on the internal complexities of Victorian Christianity. The engaging and very informative essays they share here reveal the centrality of denominational difference to nineteenth-century Christian experience and identity.

This issue features, too, our second cluster of essays on animal studies. The essays explore topics ranging from animal language in Kipling's fiction and ape cognition in post-1859 science writing, periodical satires, and animal welfare advocacy, to the representation of flesh-eating in theories of totemism (the belief that religion has its origins in animal worship) and the role of tiger hunting in the rhetorical strategies of imperialism. Taken together with the well-received articles published in our Spring 2019 issue, these essays make a persuasive case for the role of animal studies in any consideration of the value of the humanities today.

Let me close this note with a word of hearty congratulations. Lisa Hager's essay "A Case for a Trans Studies Turn in Victorian Studies: 'Female Husbands' of the Nineteenth Century" has received the Donald Gray Prize, awarded by the North American Victorian Studies Association for the best essay in the field of Victorian studies published in the past year. Hager's article appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of Victorian Review as part of the special issue on trans Victorians guest edited by Ardel Haefele-Thomas. The essay has helped provoke a much-needed rethinking of gender binaries in Victorian studies and brought long overdue recognition of the lived experiences of trans people in the nineteenth century. We are delighted to have provided a forum for Hager's innovative research and to see it so richly rewarded.