Professor Keen, until recently W. M. Keck Foundation Presidential Chair and Professor of English at Scripps College (the women's college of the Claremont Colleges), was a very early contributor to the Victorian Web. Getting to know about George's passing from VICTORIA, Professor Keen thanked its founder and moderator Patrick Leary for recalling him with "such warmth," and continued with these words, reprinted here with her kind permission:
eorge was my teacher, adviser, and senior thesis advisor at Brown. My first course in Victorian literature was his seminar on Victorian Fantasy and Realism — George MacDonald v. Trollope — and on whose roster do we put Charles Dickens? Hint: not Team Realism.
"The Wind and the Swallows" — Frank C. Papé's illustration for
MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind
(Blackie's 1911 edition).
In later life of course I called him George, but he was always Professor Landow in my head. (Brown had that faux modest convention of labeling the professors Mr. Landow, but if anybody embodied the Professor, it was George!) He was funny, sweet, supportive, and challenging. Others have conveyed his natty dress. He also had the most beautiful calligraphic handwriting. Paper comments delivered in that artistic hand were memorable — an early draft of my senior thesis on Doris Lessing's Memoirs of a Survivor he judged abysmal, inquiring whether it had been written by a changeling.
My best college teachers were those for whom the syllabus was just a starting point for a conversation that would leap generic, national, and disciplinary boundaries. George exemplified the kind of teaching that starts with question-pursuing, and goes out to get what learning needs regardless of departmental boundaries. I worked for him on the very start of what became the Victorian Web, making hyperlinks and testing the creations of the software design wizards of the IRIS Intermedia project in the early 1980s. I owe to George the conviction that it's ok to march to your own drummer and the awareness that cross-disciplinary traverses work out better if you read, read, read before you set out.
I'm really sad that he has slipped away, but if anybody could hitch a ride at the back of the north wind out of this world, it'd be George.
Created 30 July 2023