George Landow, 82

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – George Paul Landow, of Providence, slipped away peacefully at home on May 31, 2023, after a brave and aggressive two-and-a-half-year battle with metastatic sarcomatoid prostate cancer. Busy and productive well into his final weeks, in his final year he achieved 57 years of marriage and 78 years of friendship with Ruth and first-class brown belts in Shotokan karate with Ruth – and was also recognized as Master Model Railroader #737 by Little Rhody, his local NMRA division.

Born in White Plains, New York, to H. I. “Doc” and Lillian Landow, his earliest years were spent with relatives in the Bronx due to the untimely death of his mother and his father’s service in World War II. After the war, his father married Florence (Strasmich), and the family moved to Dover Plains when Prof. Landow was 10. At 14, he attended Wooster School, in Connecticut, and was matriculated at Princeton University as a pre-med at age 16.

Although he gained admission to medical school, he deferred entry in order take a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellowship in English Literature at Brandeis; there he earned his first MA in English. The following year, he earned his second master’s at the University of London and then returned to Princeton for his Ph.D. His dissertation on Ruskin became a prize-winning book. He authored multiple books and articles on Victorian literature and art, and computing in the humanities, and enjoyed seeing several works translated into Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean and Arabic. His academic honors included a graduate student Fulbright, two Guggenheims, two senior Fulbrights and a fellowship at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities.

He taught at Columbia, the University of Chicago, Brasenose College, Oxford and Brown University in English and Art History departments. He served Brown for three years as chairman of the faculty. From 2000 through 2002, he was the founding dean of the University Scholars Program at the National University of Singapore, after having been hired as a distinguished visiting professor.

While his children were young, he enjoyed photography, model making and coaching his children's’ baseball and soccer teams. After his retirement in 2012, he enjoyed spending time with his children and grandsons, watching Princeton lacrosse and sharing watching the Patriots with an old classmate of Ruth’s. He also did considerable world traveling while giving lectures before the pandemic. As Editor-in-Chief, he enormously expanded the world-renowned Victorian Web, establishing a foundation and editorial board to ensure it would continue without him.

He is survived by his wife, Ruth (Macktez); his daughter, Shoshana, of Barrington; and his son, Noah, of New York; his son-in-law. Ethan Stein. and daughter-in-law. CJ (Brody); his grandsons, Philip and Malcolm Stein; and sister, Marcia Silverstein, of Bangor, Maine.

Donations may be made to the 501(c)(3) Victorian Web Foundation at victorianweb.org.