Scribleriana Roy S. Wolper Click for larger view View full resolution I want to thank our loyal subscribers and our new ones (for trying us); the institutions that support us; our contributing editors who unselfishly volunteer for assignments to help us out; our book reviewers from all over the world (and publishers who supply the books for review); our cooperative advertisers; our assistant editors and proofreaders, who save us from ourselves; and our editors and the book review editor who routinely and, without complaint, take on drudgery—all of whom put up with our exhaustive and sometimes exhausting efforts to produce an accurate and useful journal. Specifically in this issue we acknowledge the generous assistance of Sophie Desmond (Longwood University) to Derek Taylor. And we thank Dickinson College for becoming a sponsor. Temple University Roy S. Wolper John Irwin Fischer, 1940–2015 (We thank James May for permission to print this edited version of his obituary notice.) John Irwin Fischer died from lung failure on May 15, 2015, at his home with his family beside him. After earning his B.A. from Ohio State and his doctorate from the University of Florida, John taught at LSU until his retirement in 2001, serving terms as both Chair and Director of Graduate Studies. The main focus of his research and publication was the poetry of Swift, beginning with his doctoral dissertation, “The Echoic Poetry of Jonathan Swift: Studies in its Meaning” (1968) and culminating with his fine monograph, On Swift’s Poetry (1978). In the 1980s he collaborated with other Swift scholars on several volumes: Contemporary Studies of Swift’s Poetry, co-edited with Donald C. Mell, Jr., and Swift and his Contexts, co-edited by Hermann J. Real and James Woolley (1989). Much of John’s later work involved the Swift Poems Project, an electronic archive compiled [End Page 147] and edited by John with A. C. Elias, Jr., James Woolley, and Stephen Karian. The bibliographical and textual information collected over the decades has assisted many, including Karian and Woolley, for their three-volume edition of Swift’s poems in the Cambridge Edition. In recent years he was preparing for the press an unpublished manuscript vocabulary of hard words that Swift prepared for Esther Johnson, a task bequeathed to John by A. C. Elias, Jr. The Scriblerian and other journals turned to John over the years to review many important books on the Scriblerian circle. One of his finest reviews is of Claude Rawson and F. P. Lock’s The Collected Poems of Thomas Parnell, published in MP in 1992, a review showing his persistent diligence and skill in both bibliographical analysis and textual criticism, and his careful attention to contemporary contexts. To this, I would like to add my own admiration for John, a lifetime supporter of the Scriblerian. I have appreciated his gracious prose for years and often sought his advice on my essays. He was a meticulous reader, and unfailingly his returned copy improved my work. Temple University Roy S. Wolper From Ian Higgins A new Australian and New Zealand Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies was established in 2014. ANZSECS is based at the University of Sydney. It supports the David Nichol Smith Seminar, which has been held every 3–4 years since 1966. To contact ANZSECS: anzsecs@gmail.com Papers from the DNS Seminar held in December 2014 are scheduled to be published in a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life. “Practically Nil”: E. M. Forster on Robinson Crusoe “The great novelists of the last century are seven in number. They begin with Daniel Defoe, who published Robinson Crusoe in 1719. Excellent as it is, it cannot be said to have had much influence on the works that immediately followed it. It is an isolated triumph of description which was to bear fruit in the next century in the long line of books of adventure that terminate with Treasure Island. Succeeding writers could learn from it no lesson in plot, for it is no more than a glorified diary, no lesson in character for the hero is quite impersonal, representing the effects of desert surroundings upon...