Here is a brief publication that may indeed be overlooked -- and I hope now will not at least by those who read anything I write in several places.
Kenneth Reeves, group moderator of the Inimitable-Boz [Dickens] group (now at groups.io) contacted me to tell me that Bob died. I had noticed -- as had some people on had also on Inimitable-Boz and perhaps Trollope&Peers (at groups.io) that Bob had not emailed for some time and about a month and a half ago I emailed him, and he never replied. Now he had periods where he didn't contribute for all sorts of reasons. But I knew he had been very ill, had had a rough operation of some sort and a hard road to recovery.
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Hail and Farewell
By ways remote and distant waters sped,
Brother, to thy sad grave-side am I come,
That I may give the last gifts to the dead,
And vainly parley with thine ashes dumb:
Since she who now bestows and now denies
Hath taken thee, hapless brother, from mine eyes.
But lo! these gifts, the heirlooms of past years,
Are made sad things to grace thy coffin shell,
Take them, all drenchèd with a brother’s tears,
And, brother, for all time, hail and farewell!
--Gaius Valerius Catullus (ca 85-ca 54 B.C.), translated by Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898)
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I will miss him. We exchanged countless emails over the years . In the email Kenneth sent me, there is line by Bob noting that he once asked me if it was okay that he had plagiarized a line of mine in one of my blog-reviews, this one on Lillian Nayder, The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 2011). He knew I wouldn't mind. I don't have a picture of him; I met him once in New York City, not far from where he lived and we had a huge lovely breakfast together. He was a genial older man in looks. We talked for a couple of hours. I recall that he told me I should not meet people face-to-face if I wanted to "make some sort of impression" -- I took that to mean I was very different in person for all that people thought I gave myself away (or seemed formidable) in my writing. I am working class in origins, with a New York City accent. Someone else told me "he should not have said that to you." I don't know. He was telling what he thought was the truth. Bob was a compassionate, intelligent, moral and good man. He so admired, nay loved Dickens; his way was to analyse Dickens's writing psychoanalytically.
Ellen