Editor's Note

Editor's Note Janice Schroeder (bio) This issue's forum, "Victorian Talk," began as a one-day colloquium at St Hugh's College Oxford in the spring of 2022. Delayed by the pandemic by a couple of years, the Belcher Colloquium, organized by Martin Hewitt and Patrick Leary, brought together scholars working on the category of Victorian talk and related terms, such as conversation, chat, speech, and orality. I was fortunate to be one of the participants at this event. For most of us, it was the first face-to-face academic gathering we had attended in years, and the rather uncanny coincidence of the topic and the medium of communication was not lost on us. Talking together in a room about talk itself felt both familiar and strange. The essays in this forum address the many permutations of Victorian talk as subject: its ubiquity, influence, uses, settings, rules, and genres, as well as its celebrated and unsung practitioners. Talk was central to official cultures of increasingly democratic governance, to the world of leisure in the club and the home, to street commerce and sociability, and to the burgeoning spaces of instruction and education. Even in a period marked by an explosion of print material, talk, speech, and conversation were not eclipsed by written forms but rather incorporated into them, then spat back out, so to speak, in daily conversations about the printed talk in the newspaper or the latest novel. A difficult subject to research given its evanescence, the history of face-to-face talk and conversation often rests "between the lines" of the print record in a period before mechanically recorded sound. The scholars in this forum have put an ear to written and illustrated texts for evidence of not only recorded speech but also—a much more difficult task—strains of "the otherwise imperceptible echo of unrecorded conversations," as Hewitt and Leary put it in their introduction. It is the hope of the editors, forum contributors, and all who attended the Belcher Colloquium that our investigations will spur other scholars to consider the uses, spaces, forms, and permutations of a mode of communication at the heart of Victorian life. The Hamilton Prize winner for 2023 is an essay by Anika Zuhlke (University of Victoria), entitled "Frames of Glass: Goldfish and Gender in Paint, Performance, and Print, 1870–1914." The Hamilton Prize is awarded to the best essay submitted to the journal by a graduate student. Congratulations, Anika! We are also pleased to acknowledge the runner up, "Reading Behaviour, Systems of Knowledge, and Ecoliteracy in John Ruskin's Proserpina," by Amy Wells (Linacre College, Oxford). As a former member of the Victorian Review Advisory Board, I served as one of the judges on this round of competition, and I would like to thank my co-panelists, Mark Knight and Nancy Rose Marshall, for serving on the committee. End Page v Readers of the journal may know that this issue marks my first as editor of Victorian Review. To be more precise, it is something of a transitional issue between Christopher Keep's editorship and my own, since the articles here by Abby Clayton, Jennifer Conary, Meegan Kennedy, Jeffrey Swim, and Anika Zuhlke came together during Chris's tenure. I am thrilled and honoured to take on the editorship of a journal that has been so important to me since my graduate-school days at the University of Alberta, and that has only gone from strength to strength since Chris became editor in 2016. Chris's contributions to Victorian Review—and therefore to the field of Victorian studies at large—are immense and uncountable. On behalf of the journal's many contributors, the editorial committee, the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada, and our field, I want to thank you, Chris. We commend you for your hard work, dedication, patience, and brilliance as scholarly editor of one of the world's leading English language journals in Victorian studies. I would guess—certainly, I would hope!—that no editor of an academic journal has ever put together an issue by themselves. As I find my footing as editor of Victorian Review, I want to take this opportunity to welcome...