Simon J James was a prolific scholar and a pioneer of Victorian and Edwardian studies. He passed away on 11 June 2025 and this issue is dedicated to his memory. Simon wrote on H. G. Wells, George Gissing, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, George Du Maurier, and Sherlock Holmes. His monograph, Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity and the End of Culture (Oxford University Press, 2012), remains the finest and most comprehensive study of Wells’s aesthetics to date. He also edited seven issues of The Wellsian between 2009 and 2015, Wells titles in the Penguin Classics and Oxford World's Classics imprints, a critical edition of Gissing’s Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, and he was working on an edition of Professor Challenger narratives for Edinburgh University Press. This special issue invites articles that engage substantially with any aspect of Simon's scholarship and/or editorship. They may present the author's own literary readings, but they should build upon Simon's work in a meaningful way. 

500 word abstracts due by 30 November 2025 

Full essays of 5,000 words due by 31 May 2026

Please submit your abstracts at: Hadas Elber-Aviram (helberav@nd.edu), Tom Ue (ue_tom@hotmail.com), and Matthew Leggatt (Matthew.Leggatt@winchester.ac.uk)