When, forty-six volumes ago, Dickens Studies Annual took on its subtitle Essays on Victorian Fiction, a series of fundamental modifications and transformations took root; these changes are evident in this Volume 54.
As the new subtitle announced, the journal welcomed essays on Victorian novelists other than Dickens and on the history or aesthetics of Victorian fiction. Evidence of that approach in this issue is the discussion of the suppressed “Wasp in a Wig” episode to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, by Laura White. Volume 8, that first transitional volume and the first one associated with the PhD Program in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, featured an interview with the “distinguished critic, scholar, and biographer” Edgar Johnson by then coeditor Fred Kaplan. Following in that tradition, current coeditor Natalie McKnight has interviewed “distinguished critic and scholar” Michael...
