From VPN to VPR: The Toronto Years, 1973–1984

Michael Wolff's earliest issues of Victorian Periodicals Newsletter were sent gratis to everyone on the mailing list of the journal Victorian Studies, which he then edited, and which I began subscribing to as an eager, first-year graduate student in 1967.¹ Five years later, Michael published my first, brief, scholarly article in VPN. Slight effort though it was, it brought me to the attention of Hans de Groot, who, with the late Peter Morgan, undertook the editorship of the journal, and moved it to the University of Toronto in 1973. The following year, when they sought a business manager for VPN and a treasurer for RSVP—jobs that were inextricably linked—I was recruited for what proved to be a decade of increasing responsibility, including service as co-editor (1979–1980) and sole editor of the journal (1981–1984).

The RSVP conference, held in Minneapolis in the autumn of 1974, was an intimate affair attended by no more than two dozen of the early faithful. There I was introduced as the new treasurer and business manager, and made the acquaintance of a number of scholars who became my long-time friends and collaborators: Bill Scheuerle, Barbara and David Schmidt, Rosemary VanArsdel, and Don Vann, among others. My signal achievement at that conference was to argue successfully for an increase in annual subscription rates to VPN from $3 for individual subscribers ($5 with optional RSVP membership) and $5 for institutions, to a flat $5 for individuals with a non-optional membership in the Society, and $7 for institutions. The optional surcharge to individuals for membership in RSVP was, predictably, a money loser, and so was discarded. British subscribers were also given the option of paying in sterling through the Victorian Studies Centre at the University of Leicester. Equally important was the task of purging the mailing list of numerous charter subscribers, enlisted during the journal's early, "evangelical" phase, who had long neglected to pay even the modest sums later requested.

Morgan and de Groot, the co-editors, had secured the use of a tiny, windowless office, located on the second floor above the cloisters of the University of Toronto's University College. More significantly, they persuaded the Department of English to supply an editorial assistant, a post ably filled by a succession of graduate students. A single desk and swivel chair furnished the narrow office, in which were shelved the journal's entire stock of back issues; the sale of back issues constituted a small, but steady trade.

Production of the journal was straightforward, if somewhat primitive by today's technical standards. Once the editors selected the finished and revised articles and reviews that were to form the next issue, I delivered the copy texts to Patricia Kennedy, secretary to the Bursar of Massey College, who was commissioned to type the body texts onto 8½ x 11-inch layout sheets using an IBM Selectric typewriter, which enabled the changes of font needed to reproduce italics. Spaces were left for illustrations, where required, and then the headings were laboriously applied, transferred letter-by-letter from sheets of Letraset¯ characters. The finished camera-ready copy then went to Dart Printing in Downsview, Ontario, thence to Holmes Binding Services in Don Mills, another suburb of Toronto, and a week to ten days later several hundred copies would be delivered, neatly printed, trimmed, saddle-bound, and stapled in colourful stiff covers. The Toronto format was a significant advance over the earlier issues, but pales in comparison with today's slickly printed and bound octavo format produced by the University of Toronto Press.

Meanwhile, manila mailing envelopes had to be labelled, hand-stamped with return address and second-class mailing permit, and sorted by country of destination and postal code, ready to be stuffed, bundled into canvas mail sacks, and driven to the Canada Post processing plant on Toronto's Eastern Avenue. While this was usually a quarterly ritual, Morgan and de Groot had covered the unavoidable time lapse created in moving the journal to Toronto from Amherst, Massachusetts, by producing a double issue to fill out that...