To my astonishment, I find myself not “old,” not as we all feel at least for moments during middle age, but really old: eighty-seven-years-plus as I write this piece. It won't be finished until I am eighty-eight! That hard-to-swallow fact is what allows me this rather self-indulgent retrospective on a Victorianist career that has spanned several generations of criticism and scholarship. Perhaps, I dare to think, a look back at the arc of that career might be of interest to someone beside myself, moving as it does from the time—around Christmas 1958, when I began writing on a portable electric typewriter a dissertation on George Eliot and determinism—to this moment, when writing a dissertation on a single author seems rather risky and professionally unhelpful, especially if one tries to do it on a typewriter.