Previous articleNext article FreeFrom the EditorCharles W. MahoneyCharles W. Mahoney Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis issue of The Wordsworth Circle celebrates the life and achievements of Marilyn Gaull, the journal’s incomparable founding editor, who directed and shaped the journal for fifty years. Marilyn not only had the brilliant idea to found the journal in 1970, but presided over its inauguration, development, and international success, ever widening the circle of its contributors and readers, and ultimately secured its future when she brought TWC to the University of Chicago Press in 2018, thus perpetuating “the great narrative begun in 1970: a journal of record to reflect and record all the concepts and practices a global community of scholars considers to be Romantic studies” (TWC 50.1).As recorded in the opening number of the journal,The Wordsworth Circle was first conceived during some moments of heady conversation in the riotous spring of 1968. Aware that there was no publication devoted specifically to the first generation Romantic writers and that there had been for some time a revival of interest in these writers, we proposed a quarterly newsletter which would represent and focus that interest, providing a means of communication for colleagues interested in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Southey, minor poets and popular writers, encompassing an international, annotated bibliography of relevant articles, books and doctoral dissertations, as well as reviews and some major re-evaluations of the field. (TWC 1.1)The journal that modestly began as a “newsletter” in 1970 quickly expanded its scope as well as its ambitions. In 1972, it was publishing the proceedings of what was then known as the “Wordsworth Rydal Mount Summer School” (also founded in 1970 and later to become the international “Wordsworth Summer Conference”) and sponsoring a Charles Lamb essay competition as well as another for “Coleridge Bicentenary Essays.” And it was also in 1972 that the journal debuted its new, now signature, cover design, though announced at the time as “not supposed to be significant or permanent, merely a refreshing alternative to the picture of your editor reading The Prelude to some assorted peasants and the wrong ends of two cows” (TWC 3.1). In the 1973 summer issue, TWC published its first annual review (thereafter assembled and edited for many years by Paul Magnuson), announcing its aim “to provide an efficient and inexpensive bibliographic tool which will describe and assess the contributions to Romantic studies over the preceding year,” all the while striving “to emphasize the shape, direction, and range of these studies, to try to locate the prevailing interests of the entire scholarly community rather than the substance or unique pre-occupations of any individual writer” (TWC 4.3). It was characteristic of Marilyn to foreground the interests of “scholarly community” and to evaluate the contributions of individual writers in the larger context of the field—not strictly her Wordsworth “circle,” per se, but the ever-expanding circumference of Romantic studies. The annual review issue (now the fourth, or fall, issue in each volume year) remains the indispensable guide to scholarship in the field, with reviews not only of monographs, but also of scholarly editions, biographies, and edited collections. Since 2021, the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association, in coordination with TWC, has conferred the Marilyn Gaull Book Award in recognition of the book that “best represents the spirit of wide-ranging inquiry, critical acumen, and enduring influence on the field that Marilyn Gaull always championed.”Integral to Marilyn’s ambitions for the journal was her sense of its expansiveness, a “wide-ranging inquiry” so capacious as to be nothing short of encompassing. Her goal from the outset (as she wrote in her 2006 retrospect, “Abundant Recompense”) was “to create a sense of community, to fulfill the legacy about which Wordsworth was specific” (TWC 37.3 [2006]: 98). The Poet, as Wordsworth explains in the 1802 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, in a passage to which Marilyn returned time and again, is the rock of defence for human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs: in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed; the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. (Prose Works 1.141)As Wordsworth continues, “the objects of the Poet’s thoughts are every where,” including the “remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist”—or, for that matter, the alchemist (a favorite metaphor of Marilyn’s for Joseph Johnson [see “Joseph Johnson: Literary Alchemist” and “Joseph Johnson: Webmaster”], which Clifford Siskin applies in turn to Marilyn’s own work [see “How to Make a Circle” in the current issue]). As Marilyn understood it, the annual Wordsworth Summer Conference was “an alchemy of personality, poetry, place, and time, of scholars, students, critics, teachers, lawyers, doctors, architects, poets, actors, artists, even a mathematician” (TWC 37.3 [2006]: 99). There was nothing, and no one, that her Wordsworthian circle couldn’t accommodate.In addition to interlinking the summer conference and the journal so symbiotically, Marilyn was instrumental in having the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association (WCA) recognized by the Modern Language Association as an allied organization in 1974, since which time the proceedings of the Association’s annual MLA sessions have regularly appeared in TWC. (For the history of this professionally and intellectually vital affiliation between the WCA and the MLA, see James C. McKusick’s appendix in this issue.) Over the course of her editorship, she regularly commemorated the lives and careers of notable figures in Romantic studies, as well as significant anniversaries in Wordsworth’s own life and career (such as the special 2014 bicentenary celebration of The Excursion in TWC 45.2 and the 2020 bicentenary readings of The River Duddon volume in TWC 51.1).Marilyn was renowned not only for her generosity as an editor but also for her exacting standards—not to mention particular and highly personal dicta with regard to editorial policy and “house style” in TWC. One of these was her impatience when it came to nonbibliographic endnotes. As she urged contributors early on, “eliminate all notes which are merely ornaments, exhibitions, asides, elaborations, anecdotes, courtesies, qualifications, displays, defenses, digressions, directives or furtive attacks on one’s colleagues,” reserving her particular animus for (1) the directive note, “specifically the peremptory ‘See so and so,’ or the insinuating ‘Cf. such and such,’ or the seductive ‘For further information go here and there,’” and (2) the nondirective note, “opening ‘Although Professor Know-it-all has persuasively argued this and that … ’” (TWC 3.2 [1972]: 95). As committed as was the founding editor of The Wordsworth Circle to expanding the circle of its contributors and readers, she had no time for jargon, the pathos of indeterminate agency, or indulgent, long-winded endnotes.As editor of The Wordsworth Circle, Marilyn was committed to a “conception of literary study and publication as a long conversation which people entered, participated in, responding to one another” (“Cave of Urizen,” 64). She steadfastly inveighed against the “misuse of journals for credentials (to which they are not suited) instead of communications (which is what they are suited for)” (66), given that she envisioned her role first and foremost as that of a “mediator” (or alchemist) whose goals, from 1970 through 2019, were “to create a journal to improve communications among scholars interested in British Romantic literature, to create a community, to establish a record of activity in the field, to define standards of excellence in research and publication, to identify issues, techniques, and problems that colleagues in the field chose to address” (60). She did all this and more, in editing 200 issues of an internationally read and respected journal that, as she succinctly put it, “provides a history of the field even as it helps to shape it” (60).This issue of The Wordsworth Circle, “In Honor of Marilyn Gaull,” includes personal tributes from friends, colleagues, and students; scholarly tributes from Romanticists whose own work she influenced; the final article she accepted for publication in TWC; and two appendices outlining her achievements beyond The Wordsworth Circle, under the headings of the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association and her own scholarship.In addition to celebrating the achievements and legacy of Marilyn Gaull in this issue, we are pleased to note that Celeste Langan has been awarded the Keats-Shelley Association Essay Prize for 2021, for her article “Repetition Run Riot: Refrains, Slogans, and Graffiti” (TWC 52.2 [2021]: 287–307), which Richard Sha and the award committee praised in the following terms:Who knew a refrain could be so profound? In Celeste Langan’s capacious hands, double entry bookkeeping cannot keep up with the ways in which the phrasal repetition surrounding Peterloo shades into history, and lyric becomes event as forms of possibility gather in the gaps between speech and act to alter our sense of the present and its burdens. At once elegant and profound, the drumbeat of refrain reveals an entire galaxy of possibility from lyric through hashtag and historical repetition to excitable utterance, an utterance whose very repetition denies any one-to-one relation between history and context. And it is Langan’s critical ability to see possibility where others have seen only prose that allows meanings and openings to convene around the refrain, engendering new ways of imagining form’s claims to history, history’s reliance upon form, along with the aporias of history that excitable speech papers over.Our congratulations to Celeste Langan, for her award-winning contribution to TWC’s 2021 special issue, “Lyric Elements.”Finally, we are thrilled to announce the winner of the inaugural Marilyn Gaull Book Award for 2021, Andrew Stauffer’s Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), reviewed by Tom Mole in TWC 52.4 (2021): 524–27. The review committee commended Stauffer’s award-winning study as follows:Andrew Stauffer’s Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library reaches out beyond academic readers to the librarians and budget-holders who are often the unacknowledged legislators of our discipline. His work makes a compelling case for the continuing social relevance of reading Romantic poetry—in its widest sense—as an “embodied mode of attentiveness” (to borrow Rita Felski’s term). The judges thought that Marilyn Gaull would have loved the book’s enthusiasm, boldness, scope, and its keen sense of what might work in the classroom to nurture the love of Romantic literature that we all want to uphold and defend against the relentless presentism of contemporary culture. By immersing twenty-first century researchers and students in the reading experiences of nineteenth-century readers, Book Traces creates a new understanding of the value of the Romantic tradition—not just as another form of curated culture—but as a vital way of kindling empathy across and within different communities of readers. By standing up for the preservation of print collections with passion, intellect, and urgency, Andrew Stauffer has initiated a new chapter in Romantic Studies, connecting the affective power of Romantic poetry in the future with its material past. The depth of scholarship and freshness of his argument is impressive as well as a joy to read, from start to finish. For the inaugural award of this prize, we felt that there was no more significant achievement than a forthright defence of the foundation of our discipline.The Wordsworth Circle joins the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association in congratulating Andrew Stauffer on his vital, timely, and award-winning contribution to Romantic studies. (For details regarding the 2022 award, please see the announcement in this issue.)In the summer 2022 issue (53.3), The Wordsworth Circle will publish work presented during the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association’s (virtual) sessions at the 2022 meeting of the Modern Language Association, “Romanticism and Data” and “Romantic Epistemologies.” At the 2023 meeting of MLA (San Francisco), the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association will be sponsoring a session under the heading of “Romanticism and Sexuality”; the call for papers appears above.—CWMWorks CitedGaull, Marilyn. “From the Cave of Urizen: An Editor Observed.” Journal of Information Ethics, vol. 6, no. 1, 1997, pp. 59–68.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar———. “Joseph Johnson: Literary Alchemist.” European Romantic Review, vol. 10, no. 3, 1999, pp. 265–78.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar———. “Joseph Johnson: Webmaster.” The Wordsworth Circle, vol. 40, nos. 2–3, 2009, pp. 107–10.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarWordsworth, William. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols., ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. Clarendon P, 1974.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 53, Number 1Winter 2022In Honor of Marilyn Gaull Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/719155 Views: 691 © 2022 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.