PROFESSOR ROWLAND MCMASTER died in Edmonton, 20 July 2013. An erudite scholar and teacher Victorian literature, and a loyal colleague and friend, he made exceptional contributions scholarship on Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope, teaching, the Victorian Studies Association Western Canada, and both the Association Canadian University Teachers English (as it then was) and English Studies in Canada. Rowland was born on 5 December 1928 in Marrickville, a town modest, red brick bungalows not far from Sydney, Australia. When he was three months old the family immigrated Canada, settling in what is now Mississauga, where his career as our most attentive scholar was set in motion the day he found, in old trunk his uncle's, Life and Adventures Martin Chuzzlewit and A Tale Two Cities. Since I'm a very slow reader, he wrote, was still reading for my (Photographic Memory 3). At one point when he was a teenager, that doctorate seemed beyond imagining, for his father, during a period unemployment, moved the family northern Ontario where both McMaster men worked in a sawmill. Rowland felt, he later recollected, like David Copperfield in the blacking warehouse, as though all I had learned and hoped learn were slipping away from me forever (27). experience surely laid some the groundwork for the great empathy he later brought helping students faced with obstacles others' making. Fortunately, the exile from learning proved short. In 1949, with a bursary from University College, he enrolled in Honour English Language and Literature at the University Toronto. He graduated in 1953, standing first among all those in the program. He especially valued the rigor and structure the program's defined set courses, historically laid out, with emphasis on close study texts. When studying eighteenth-century literature, he recollected, he would in the same year also be reading eighteenth-century philosophy, ... history, etc. (Editorial Review 250). And he would be taking other honour subjects: two years honour philosophy, three years Latin, and four years French (251). The sense coherence and relation was immensely stimulating (250), he remembered, and stood in strong contrast the later freedom students to have the same diluted general miscellany (252). He was hooked (252). So hooked that he could recall with wry self-denigration that, in an exquisitely painful session where [F. E. L. Priestley] took a slovenly essay mine apart phrase by blundering phrase, I learned more about writing than at any other time in my education. So hooked that he could even praise Professor Priestley for the corrosiveness his remarks, understanding that it along with a perfectly friendly concern. It was in fact the sign concern (The Canadian Scholar 138). So hooked that he went on write ma thesis on Irony in Tennyson and then his doctoral thesis, Charles Dickens: A Study the Imagery and Structure His Novels. He did so against the academic consensus in the 1950s that was stuffy and against the tendency the time to treat [Dickens's imagery] as a tissue eccentricities. No one would treat the imagery a poem that way, he observed before stating his own large ambition: examine the imagery Dickens' total with the same particularity and the same eye for meaningful patterns and recurrences that one would bring the reading poetry. To do this I shall take the whole body Dickens' work as constituting a consistent, unified vision (Charles Dickens 2). And so Rowland McMaster began change the course studies. He read with extraordinary attention and erudition. Always focused firmly on imagery and structure in the novels, and moving out from there the high culture and the popular culture, the politics, the class system, the legal system, and the commerce Victorian England, and a lesser extent Europe, he showed us how integral Dickens's were horror and ghastliness (Dickens and the Horrific 52) and how much the novelist derived from his reading fairy tales and of uncommonly bad literature at early age (37). …