Editors’ Note: Fifty Years of <i>Eighteenth-Century Life</i>

This past September was an important milestone for the journal that we nearly missed, simply because we didn't know about it. A few years ago, Debbie Graham wrote to us asking if we wanted her father's old issues of Eighteenth-Century Life. Her father was John B. Shipley, who taught eighteenth-century literature for the University of Illinois at Chicago, then located at the Navy Pier, for over thirty years. Every so often we receive a query from someone wondering if we could help him empty an office by taking over old copies of the journal for our records. In most cases, we politely decline; issues of Eighteenth-Century Life are available electronically back to the mid-1990s, and we have no need for additional musty volumes on our shelves. But Debbie's trove of back issues was special, in that her father had a complete run of Eighteenth-Century Life from its first decade, including the very first issue, appearing in September 1974. These 1970s issues are not available digitally, nor did we own them, so we welcomed having the set. We thank Debbie for her email and donation. Without her query, we'd never know that September 2024 was so important a date; Eighteenth-Century Life is just two years younger than The Price is Right, the longest running TV game show in history. That's something to be proud of. And now that we know that we should have celebrated our jubilee, it seems appropriate to take a moment, one year late, to reflect on the journal's past and future.When Eighteenth-Century Life first appeared in September 1974, the editors were Cynthia Sutherland, Professor of English Literature and Women's Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, and Jean E. Hunter, Professor of History at Duquesne University. The journal was published by the University of Pittsburgh Center for International Studies. Individual annual subscriptions were $3.50. Browsing those first few large-paper, brightly colored issues is a different experience than perusing the slick printed or electronic copy now in front of you. In the early days, Eighteenth-Century Life was printed in quarto, with the essays in two columns, much like the format of Wordsworth Circle until as recently as 2019. Appearing four times annually, Eighteenth-Century Life was a slim volume in its early days, in every way the “newsletter” that its first editors envisioned in their covering note to the inaugural 1974 issue. “Launching a new scholarly newsletter is a foolhardy endeavor,” Sutherland and Hunter confessed. As the two fools still keeping this endeavor going in 2025, we are amused by the 1974 origin story: the journal was “born one convivial evening . . . when two ‘enthusiasts.’ . . met to discuss common interests. . . . They drew up an announcement of an interdisciplinary newsletter, sent it off to bulletins in their respective fields, drank a toast, and waited on events.”At the start, Eighteenth-Century Life was closely associated with the East-Central chapter of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the journal was available to EC/ASECS members, first as part of their membership fee, later at a discounted rate, until 1987, when Johns Hopkins took over production. Two of the four essays in the first issue were papers given at the East-Central conference at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in the preceding year. By the time Robert P. Maccubbin, of William & Mary, took over the editorship in 1980, with David F. Morrill as managing editor, the journal had assumed the single-column octavo format and triannual publication that it retains today. Editing the journal until 2004, Maccubbin oversaw the transition of production to Duke University Press, as well as the handoff to the current editor and the relocation of the editorial operation to the University of Wyoming, Laramie, in 2005. Greece, to Rome, to England, to Pennsylvania, to Virginia, and then to Wyoming: this was probably not the geographical route that Renaissance theorists of translatio studii had in mind. And yet here we are.Many things about Eighteenth-Century Life differ today from 1974. The subscription price has increased, of course, although print plus electronic subscriptions are at a reasonable price of $27 for individuals (about the cost of a large pizza), with “electronic only” subscriptions at $23, and student subscriptions at $15. We no longer publish scholarly notes, conference reports, or lists of books received. Once almost entirely Americans, the authors publishing in Eighteenth-Century Life these days span the globe. The early issues also contain a good number of essays on American literature and American history, subjects that Eighteenth-Century Life has ceded to other journals. But for all the ways that the 2024 journal differs, the fundamental values and remit established in that September 1974 issue remain unchanged. Then, Sutherland and Hunter had declared, “Our subject is implicit in our title—the life of the eighteenth century—social life, political life, literary life, intellectual life; the life of the great and of the obscure; the life of the mind and the life of the body.” When Robert Maccubbin took over as editor in 1980, he repeated those words in his description of the journal's goals, but he added a new emphasis on the interdisciplinary, which remains an important feature of the journal today: “Eighteenth-Century Life is directed toward the interests of a variety of fields—history, literature, the performing and fine arts, philosophy, and the social sciences, and nontechnical science.”In 2000, to celebrate Maccubbin's twenty years at the helm of Eighteenth- Century Life, the journal ran a special Festshrift in Bob's honor, edited surreptitiously by Adam Potkay, who became associate editor of the journal in 2002. In that issue, Potkay quoted from a letter by one of the journal's referees and frequent contributors: Eighteenth-Century Life . . . has a consistent record of actually being interdisciplinary, . . . publishing articles on music that literary scholars find appealing, on art that sociologists read, on sociology that art historians read. It is also filled with surprises, articles on topics we didn't know existed, like unbuilt national monuments, the origins of syphilis, Cowper's rabbits, Goethe's botany, the possible connections between gin and gender, displays of anatomical specimens. . . . And there were the special issues, on the architecture of Versailles, on monstrosity, on the topology of food, not to mention the volume entitled Unauthorized Sexual Behavior, perhaps the only academic journal ever to be mailed out in a plain brown wrapper. Eighteenth-Century Life has become that rarity of academic journals: a journal many of us read rather than consult.The author of this fateful letter was Cedric Reverand, who, at the time, had no idea he would become the next editor. As his comments suggest, Eighteenth-Century Life was publishing “cultural studies” before anybody knew what cultural studies were, and it remains the journal you go to for readable, quirky essays on topics you didn't know existed. To the above list, we can add essays on performing insects, spectacular fireworks disasters, embalming practices, cross-dressing pirates, hot-air ballons, murder, orphanages, Methodism, pockets, tea-drinking, wigs, prison reform, suicide, cleaning up after the Great Fire, Scots on the Grand Tour, the Calico Crisis of 1719–21, the 1796 dog tax, the introduction of mirrors to the English stage, shipwrecks, bladder stones, climate, corpulency and reproductive health, the art of lying, and eighteenth-century Korean portraiture. We have, obviously, maintained the miscellany tradition, and thanks to improved printing technology, we have been able to enhance the overall look of the journal by including many illustrations, some of them in color (at no cost to the author)—we think we feature more illustrations than any other scholarly journal, which is partially a nod to the younger generation's enthusiasm for visual media.What's next? Where will we go during the next fifty years? The recent decline in the hiring of tenure-line specialists has led to decreased submissions to eighteenth-century journals everywhere. High teaching loads, fewer tenure-track jobs, reduced support for humanities research—we've heard all the reports. Indeed, many of our MA students who, in the past, would have gone on to PhD programs have been pursuing other career paths instead. There are just fewer people engaged in humanistic scholarship, and with the national emphasis on STEM over the humanities, this appears to be an ongoing problem. And yet there are people who want to publish good scholarship, and people who should be publishing good scholarship (not all of them academics, we might add, going back to the original editors’ description of themselves as “enthusiasts”). We've tried to address this drop in submissions by soliciting essays from scholars whose conference papers we think are promising (and this would primarily be younger scholars), and, in keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of Eighteenth-Century Life, we have continued to seek out essays in as many fields as possible. But there are constraints. We have been occasionally criticized for not publishing many essays on music or science. It doesn't occur to such critics that it's extremely difficult to publish essays on music and science if nobody submits essays on music and science. Apparently, scholars in those disciplines automatically look elsewhere (we hope they will consider Eighteenth-Century Life as a venue in the future).1Where Bob Maccubbin promised a special issue at least once every other year, we have been running at least one special issue each year, sometimes two—we currently have five in the planning stages. For instance, we've been running special issues devoted to selected papers from the David Nichol Smith Seminar, in partnership with the Australian and New Zealand Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ANZSECS), since the 6th such seminar in 1983. In fact, we were copyediting a DNS special issue (for the 17th seminar, in 2020) last year when we noticed the date of the first issue in the stack from Debbie. Eighteenth-Century Life under Maccubbin was known for its state-of-the-art review essays, including John Wilton-Ely's review of the Grand Tour (covering fourteen books). We have continued that with Janet Aikins Yount's review of Jane Austen scholarship (fourteen books) and Ashley Marshall's review of the state of modern Swift scholarship (five books). However, this becomes increasingly difficult, first, because you don't often get clusters of books on the same subject, and second, because, given that reviews don't really count toward tenure or promotion, few people can afford to devote the time and energy necessary to review a collection of books, especially since they would get only one publication for all their effort. But we'll see. We remain open to the possibility.Are we worried about the decline in English PhD's and in tenure-track jobs? Actually, when we were both finishing up our PhDs, decades apart, we were warned, on no uncertain terms, that the academic future for budding scholars trained in such an arcane specialty as ours was bleak. For newly minted PhD's in eighteenth-century studies, the academic job market was terrible twenty years ago, . . . and dreadful thirty years ago, . . . and horrible forty years ago. Yes, universal darkness has been burying all since at least 1743. And yet, here we are. And people are still doing good, interesting scholarship, . . . which we will continue to seek out and publish, we hope, for the next fifty years.