Patrick Leary has kindly allowed us to reprint the farewell to George that he originally posted on VICTORIA, the online discussion group for Victorian Studies that Patrick started in 1993. See also Patrick's fine and wide-ranging resource (highly recommended for all Victorianists), VictorianResearch.org.
have only just learned that Professor George Landow died at the end of May. He was 82. George first told me of his illness a couple of years ago and although he had defied the odds I've long been dreading this news. I'd like to say a few words about him.
At Brown in the early 1970s I signed up for a class in Victorian poetry. Not sure why; as a history major I hadn't been too keen on taking literature courses. But for whatever reason there I was on the first morning, and in walks this thirtysomething professor looking immaculate in a three-piece suit, with gorgeous necktie, sporting a neatly trimmed beard. At a time when the typical young prof was shaggy-maned and rumpled in faded denim, here was a man who appeared bespoke from head to toe. His bearing as he spoke to us was equally formal, another departure from laid-back Seventies classroom style. I wasn't quite sure what to make of him. But what I made of George Landow didn't matter. What mattered was what he made of me.
He taught me to love Tennyson.
We covered other poets, of course — my memories of first encounters with Hopkins and Swinburne are especially vivid--and those tattered paperbacks are still on my shelves today, still dipped into appreciatively. But it was Tennyson who won my heart forever. George took us through In Memoriam stanza by stanza, and the cumulative effect was mesmerizing. I now know that he was in the middle of an immersion in Biblical tropes that would result in his 1980 study, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows, but all I knew at the time was that his readings unpacked before our eyes a hidden world of allusion that I would never have suspected lurked behind these seemingly spare stanzas. He had a wonderful ear, too, and taught us to be still and listen to what astonishing effects Tennyson could accomplish with meter and rhythm. I wound up memorizing reams of the stuff, just for the sheer pleasure of being able to enjoy it without always needing the book handy.
The author in his study.
Only in later years, when I found myself turning to Tennyson for comfort during difficult or sorrowful times, did I come to realize what a stupendous gift that class had given me. And how much I owed the man who had taught it. How do you thank someone for something like that? I didn't know, but was determined to seize the first opportunity to try. And sure enough, almost 25 years ago, in London, I wound up on a conference panel with none other than George Landow, still looking both natty and formidable. Afterward I introduced myself and stammered out my thanks. Of course he didn't remember me--I never expected him to, I'd been just one of the nameless rabble, not even an English major--but he seemed pleased, and that was enough.
After that we kept in touch. He joined this list and we ran into each other now and then, and corresponded about this and that. He was justly proud of The Victorian Web (victorianweb.org), a pioneering site that grew out of his early experiments with hypertext, experiments that had long preceded the existence of the Web. He wisely incorporated this resource as a 501(3)c nonprofit, with a dedicated team under the leadership of Jacqueline Banerjee and Diane Josefowicz that will carry the work forward. George's family has requested, in lieu of flowers, donations to the Victorian Web Foundation (link).
Goodbye, George. Thanks again, always.
Created 17 November 2023