Editor’s Note

Setting all sail and stoking all steam, the Rocket that is volume 52 of the Victorians Institute Journal promises to navigate readers through articles on drama, fiction, opera, and poetry of the 1840s through the 1910s, with an additional port of call at the pedagogy of the later British literature survey.The year’s two Digital Deliverables, The Carlyle Letters Online and Books and Borrowing, both weigh anchor in nineteenth-century Scotland. The former tracks the long voyage, uncertain path to digitization, and ultimately safe berth and preservation of perhaps the most consulted set of letters in the period. The latter maps the currents of bibliographic circulation represented by 160 digitized ledgers from eighteen different Scottish libraries between 1780 and 1840.The Texts section features a recently rediscovered manuscript written aboard the actual HMS Rocket and commemorating that ship’s 1874 crossing of the equator, with the ceremonial forms of nineteenth-century naval ritual transmitted via a purposefully naïve narrator who preserves both the wonder and the ridiculousness of welcoming the god of the oceans aboard a composite gunship.Finally, eight reviews of recent books chart a course from Gothic ephemera through periodical travel, Dickensian drama, environmental interdependence, fin-de-siècle literary forms, and even animated adaptation. Welcome aboard!