Obituary: Robert A. Colby

Abstract

Robert A. Colby, a member of the Senior Advisory Council of Victorian Periodicals Review, died on October 3, 2004 at the age of 84. His passing is an immense loss to RSVP and to VPR, to whose work he had contrib uted substantially for many years. Bob Colby was one of the most distinguished Victorian scholars of his generation. He was trained initially at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in 1949. His dissertation was on Spectator as a Literary Journal under the Editorship of Richard Holt and from this subject flowed his lifelong interests in the critical reception of writers and the social and cultural contexts of fiction and journalism. After teaching literature at Lake Forest College and Hunter College he moved to Queens College in 1953, where he became a member of the Library Science Department. He spent the bulk of his professional career at Queens College, CUNY, and retired there as Professor of Library Sci ence in 1986. Bob's background in both literature and library science enabled him to move easily across disciplines. He helped to develop collections in English, American, and European Literature, as well as in Theatre His tory and Communications. He also became a skilled bibliographer and produced a number of publications and exhibitions relating to holdings of the Divisions of Arts and Humanities in Queens College. Yet, Bob's chief interest lay in Victorian cultural history, and early on he began to publish articles and reviews on eminent figures such as Richard Holt Hutton, Charlotte Bront?, and George Eliot. In 1966, he and his wife, Vi?eta, an outstanding Victorian scholar and a member of the English Department at Queens College, collaborated in the writing of The Equivocal Virtue: Mrs. Oliphant and the Victorian Literary Market Place. This important study of Margaret Oliphant remains a definitive work on this nineteenth