Introduction:A Discursive Duet Linda K. Hughes (bio) and Phyllis Weliver (bio) PW: Isn't it interesting, Linda, what happens when we think of a poem as an event as well as a work? I'm thinking about what happened on a Wednesday in March 1885 when some friends stopped by 10 Downing Street to see Prime Minister Gladstone's daughter. Two of these friends, along with Mary Glad-stone, formed an impromptu "Browning Society aft. G.R. [Liberal MP George W.E. Russell] read aloud The Dss ["The Flight of the Duchess"] with much emotion + I Mr. Holland's paper" on the same poem, the last a "bewildering little paper, half serious half mocking," delivered to the Oxford Browning Society the year before.1 This coupling of poetic recitation with unpublished commentary occurred again in July 1888 when "DD [novelist and playwright Edith Balfour] read beautifully the familiar Duchess + I read HSH's [Henry Scott Holland's] paper" with "great success" in Mrs. Buxton's room.2 Mary's type of socializing in these instances combined emotional poetic recitation with reading aloud criticism—transmitting the poem and its reception orally and corporally. Taken together, the content mirrors the fizzy-but-earnest repartee of the salon. LH: And just how would you define the Victorian salon, Phyllis, having written your 2017 monograph on Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon?3 Was the phenomenon we call a salon also "fizzy," or at least bubbling over with variant possibilities? In this special issue, for example, Kathleen McCormack in "Poetry at the Priory: George Eliot and Benevolent Imperialism" details how George Eliot's "Sundays at the Priory," the weekly literary salon McCormack examines in George Eliot in Society, shaded into both a networked salon and Britain's imperial governance.4 Vincent Lankewish's "Danger Lurks in the Darkness: The Ruskin/Burne-Jones Medieval Poetry Salon for Girls" demonstrates how a kind of virtual salon emerged from John Ruskin and Edward Burne-Jones's plan for a tapestry illustrating Chaucer's Legend of Good Women (with Medea taking an unexpected turn in Ruskin's rather perverse reading of her mentoring possibilities for girls) and the recruitment of girls at the Winnington Hall school to embroider the tapestry. Ruskin's The Ethics of the Dust [End Page 105] then positioned these girls as interlocutors and conversationalists in discussions of Chaucer and his medieval "good women" as role models. Elizabeth Howard more directly takes up poetry recitation in social gatherings and entertainments in "'The Mournful Echo': Intimacy in American Recitations and Periodical Reprinting of 'Mother and Poet,' 1861–1879" but she demonstrates that Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem-as-event traveled from Britain to the United States, finding a new form of social cohesion among audiences receiving the poem and turning it to new purposes related to grief and mourning during the Civil War. All these examples share features of the salon but manifest markedly different features. What latitude, then, do you see in what we understand as a salon? PW: Yes, salons in Victorian Britain were indeed effervescent in all respects, Linda! Let's start with a definition of a salon in its strictest form, and then consider how it blurred into other types of socializing in Victorian Britain. At this time, a salon could mean a room or a polite, semiprivate assembly of friends, family, and new acquaintances who gathered to talk vivaciously about the most recent happenings. Besides providing an opportunity to form and strengthen associations through polite discourse, the salon event was also cultural; its activities often included a dedicated listening to poetic recitation and, increasingly, to music. Perhaps we might say that Lankewish addresses the conversational aspect, Howard focuses on the recitation, and McCormack thinks about both, including how the discursive dimension merged into the epistolary and how, for Eliot, poems and fiction-writing could come together. Salons emerged from the worlds of visual arts and music, too, as Mary Arseneau reveals in "The Victorian Salon and Pre-Raphaelite Melopoetics"—a topic to which I'll return. A salon usually occurred in the host's home at a designated time and day of the week, when friends had a standing invitation...