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To my astonishment, I find myself not "old," not as we all feel at least for moments during middle age, but really old: eighty-seven-years-plus as I write this piece. It won't be finished until I am eighty-eight! That hard-to-swallow fact is what allows me this rather self-indulgent retrospective on a Victorianist career that has spanned several generations of criticism and scholarship. Perhaps, I dare to think, a look back at the arc of that career might be of interest to someone beside myself, moving as it does from the time—around Christmas 1958, when I began writing on a portable electric typewriter a dissertation on George Eliot and determinism—to this moment, when writing a dissertation on a single author seems rather risky and professionally unhelpful, especially if one tries to do it on a typewriter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In one of the fictive dialogues from his 1872 book The Poet at the Breakfast-Table, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. dispensed advice to any scholar planning to start a private library: I have a kind of notion of the way in which a library ought to be put together – no, I don't mean that, I mean ought to grow. . . . A scholar must shape his own shell, secrete it one might almost say, for secretion is only separation, you know, of certain elements derived from the material world about us. And a scholar's study, with books lining its walls, is his shell. It isn't a mollusk's shell, either; it's a caddice-worm's shell. (211) Here, the scholar's library entails separation in several senses both physical and ideal. On the one hand, books form a literal carapace insulating the scholar from the outside world – and perhaps even from the distractions of home life. At the same time, the library operates by separation in the sense of discrimination. In accumulating his library, the scholar winnows a vast textual tradition into the manageable dimensions of a single room, and curriculum just enough for a singular human life. Most interesting, however, is the suggestion that the scholar “secretes” the library, as though the books are somehow synthesized from within as an expression of, and memorial to, the scholar's essential self. The caddice worm, as Holmes informs us, “has his special fancy as to what he will pick up and glue together, with a kind of natural cement he provides himself” (211). This may strike us as a crudely glandular way of envisioning the relationship between tradition and the individual talent. Nevertheless, the passage is in keeping with the late-Victorian obsession with the private library, as well as with period representations of the scholar, who is best encountered within a concealing womb of books, carrying on secret exchange with the dusty relics of his own intellectual pilgrimage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Examines the Victorian culture and politics in Great Britain. Insensitivity of the English masses to the merits of high culture in the late twentieth century; Absence of anthropological relativism in the liberal cultural politics of the Victorian period; Propagation of the liberal political culture by reformers with ambivalent goals.

In discussing the work of indexing the Harvard Theological Review, I shall begin by describing the organization and development of the project, and the various ideals and principles involved in [...]