Professor Poston originally posted this on the online discussion group, VICTORIA, and has kindly allowed us to reprint it here.
first met George when he was a senior in the Princeton English department, and I was a first-year graduate student there. (Perhaps this makes me the oldest person to write on him in this list!) He sat in on E.D.H. (Dudley) Johnson's Victorian seminar; he may have audited the course (if that was possible), but I do recall his giving a report there: enthusiastic and engaging. He was headed for medical school, but he repented, and after a year's absence, he reappeared at Princeton as a doctoral student in his own right. The rest is, as they say, history.
I had several closer relationships at Princeton, but over the succeeding years he and I really drew nearer through E-mail correspondence, especially once he began developing the Victorian Web. This was an act of pure love on his part; and if I compare it to a love of offspring, I would not be exaggerating, because as a family man George was wonderfully attuned to the role. I still remember a Christmas letter with a picture of George over a model train set, wearing a brakeman's hat for a joint railroading venture with his grandson. The way in which he prepared for giving the Web over to new hands was itself a kind of parental act which I think guarantees the Web's continuing quality and usefulness.
Albion Station on George's model railroad (a miniature world almost as dear to his heart as the Victorian Web!).
Of course, in saying this, I do not mean to slight the features of George's career evidenced in his work on such figures as Ruskin and Holman Hunt that led ultimately to a joint appointment in English and art history during his career at Brown. He was truly a Victorian studies scholar, and his intellectual gifts were matched with technical and executive skills of the highest order. But it is as a sympathetic personality that I especially remember him. He approached his own death with equanimity and even good humor. In the last E-mail I received from, him (12 February 2023), he wrote, "I'm still alive, somewhat to the surprise of my oncologists, though with each set of chemotherapy infusions I encounter a new medical disaster, this time very painful gout from which I'm largely recovered though still limping about with a cane."
In saying goodbye to George, my own cane — and walker — at hand, I say it to a wonderful colleague and a gallant human being.
Created 23 November 2023