Are We There Yet?: Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments I am very grateful to Middlebury College, and to President Ron Liebowitz, for the generous leave support that made it possible for me to complete this book even in the midst of an appointment as provost. Research for this project began in the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and ended in a virtual reality lab at Stanford. I benefited greatly from the opportunity to participate in the vibrant intellectual communities of these two universities. An appointment as Visiting Fellow at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, in 2001–­ 2, allowed me to spend a year doing research in England, and I thank Harris Manchester College, and Principal Ralph Waller, as well as Ann-­Marie Drummond, Claire Harman, and many other Oxford colleagues for their warm hospitality during that time. In 2008–­ 9, I was fortunate in having the opportunity to be a visiting scholar in English at Stanford University. I am grateful to Bryan Jay Wolf, Ramon Saldivar, Jennifer Summit, Andrea Lunsford, and John Bender for helping me to feel welcome at Stanford, and to Dagmar Logie for helping me to figure out how everything worked. I owe special thanks to Jeremy Bailenson, founder of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, for allowing me to visit the lab, and to Nicole Fernandez for her tour and demo. For assistance in making research materials available, I am grateful to Mrs. Julie Lambert at the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, Bodleian Library; the Museum of London, and former assistant curator Gail Cameron; the Museum of London–­ Docklands; the National Railway Museum,York; the British Library; and Henry Lowood, Curator for the History of Science and Technology Collections and Film and Media Collections at the Stanford University Libraries. At Middlebury, I have benefited from the assistance of our own excellent staff in Library and Information Services,as well from substantial legwork at the book’s inception by research assistant Sarah de Guzman. For permission to reprint material that appeared originally in Nineteenth-­ Century Contexts, “‘A Prodigious Map Beneath His Feet’: Virtual Travel and the Panoramic Perspective,” vol. 29, nos. 2–­ 3 (June–­ September 2007): 151–­ 69, I viii Acknowledgments thank the editors of that journal, as well as Taylor and Francis/Routledge, and Keith Hanley and John Kucich, coeditors of Nineteenth-­ Century Worlds: Global Formations, Past and Present (2008), where the same essay was reprinted. An early version of some material in Part Two appeared as “Rivers, Journeys, and the Construction of Place in Nineteenth-­Century English Literature,”in Steven Rosendale, ed., The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the Environment (Iowa University Press, 2002), 77–­ 94. My thanks to Iowa University Press for permission to use it here. I greatly appreciated the advice of colleagues who were kind enough to discuss this project with me at various points, or to read portions of the manuscript . These include David Bain, Jim Buzard, Jennifer Green-­ Lewis, Jonathan Grossman, David Herman,Antonia Losano, Jason Mittell, Paul Monod, Sujata Moorti, Jay Parini, Ted Perry, John Plotz, Lisa Rodensky, Marie-­ Laure Ryan, Margery Sabin, Elaine Scarry, and Susan Zlotnick. I am also grateful for the comments of the anonymous University of Michigan Press readers, and for the expert guidance of my editor at UMP, Tom Dwyer. This book would not have been possible without wide-­ ranging conversations in its earliest stages, and detailed editorial advice in its final stages, offered by my husband, Steve Jensen. Nor would it have been possible without the willingness of Laramie and Ryan Jensen to follow the project from our home in Middlebury, Vermont, to Oxford and California. They often wondered, but seldom asked, when this book’s journey would be over. I am glad to be able to tell them that we are finally there. A.B. ...