Editor’s Note

Editor's Note Christopher Keep Guest edited by Tom Ue, this issue's forum began as a post on Facebook. Addressing the many Victorianists who conduct a vigorous and often insightful conversation about the field on the platform, Tom asked about "go-to" novels, poems, and plays—the texts that instructors had come to depend on as sure-fire winners in the classroom but that students no longer seemed to respond to so readily. In the age of Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and the moral panic occasioned by the spectre of "wokeness," were there texts that simply no longer resonated with students born after the turn of the century or that instructors themselves no longer felt comfortable teaching? Conversely, were there texts that had failed to elicit much response in the classroom in the past that now seemed strikingly relevant? With a nod to Trollope's The Way We Live Now (1875), the essays assembled here take up the conversation first begun in the comments thread of Tom's Facebook post. They address the shifting challenges in teaching canonical texts, from Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) to Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), the joys of teaching texts not previously at the forefront of the field, such as Mary Seacole's Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), and new online tools with which to study those texts, such as those provided by the Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education and Hypotheis.is. The forum concludes with a timely plea from Pamela Gilbert, a member of the journal's advisory board, to put "very different voices side by side" so that our students can "see the full conversation in which these authors were engaged, both across and within boundaries of time, nation, and race." The essays for this issue's forum make a persuasive case that instructors and researchers are creatively and energetically responding to the call to "undiscipline" Victorian studies. The articles in this issue were gathered in response to a call for papers on clothing and cloth. An increasingly influential area of research in fashion studies and museum and curatorial studies, the history of clothing is of particular importance to students of Victorian literature and culture. The textile industry was among the first to experience the effects of industrialization, with technologies such as the cotton gin transforming the ways and means by which cloth was woven, making quality clothing cheaper and more widely available than in the past but also throwing many hand-loom weavers out of work. As a result, clothing of all kinds, both mass-manufactured and handmade, acquired new and often contentious meanings within the cultural imagination: what one wore and how one wore it were important social signs within a new economy of sartorial signification. The essays gathered here explore a wide range of topics related to this signifying economy, from [End Page v] the representation of paisley shawls in the paintings of Francis H. Newbery and the use of mourning crape in fashion to the pivotal role played by Scrooge's bed curtains in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843). This issue also sees five additions to the Editorial Advisory Board: Jill Galvan (Ohio State University), Priti Joshi (University of Puget Sound), Charles LaPorte (University of Washington), Daniel A. Novak (University of Alabama), and Clare Pettitt (Cambridge University). Advisory board members serve as an important sounding board for the journal's editorial policy and assist with the mentoring of emergent scholars through our Hamilton Prize competition. We are very fortunate to have such highly respected scholars, with so many demands on their time, join our team. As this issue marks my last as editor, I would like to take the occasion to reflect briefly on my tenure in the post and to pay thanks to those who have supported me so generously. Although I had been previously associated with the journal, having served on the advisory board since 2006 and co-editing (with Jennifer Esmail) a special issue on Victorian disability in 2009, my role as editor began with an invitation from Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge in early 2016. They had been serving as co-editors of the...

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