I suspect many members of the three major academic organisations on the Victorian period – the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA), the British Association of Victorian Studies (BAVS) and the Australasian Victorian Studies Association (AVSA) – made the pilgrimage to Casa Guidi after a joint conference in Venice in June 2013. I had arranged to meet my friend Jennifer McDonell, a Browning scholar, to spend an afternoon there and at the so-called English Cemetery. But a series of incidents intervened: Jennifer, brave enough to make her way to Florence by car, got into an accident, and I was without a phone. I arrived promptly at three, the museum's opening time, and spent most of the afternoon waiting for Jennifer. Because only a handful of rooms are open to the public, visitors are unlikely to stay for hours. Jennifer's calamity, however, was my providence. After viewing each room, I decided to sit and wait.

Casa Guidi was the last site associated with this project I visited. In 2008 Logan Browning, publisher and executive editor of SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, arranged for an acquaintance to take me to the Athenaeum Club while I was doing research in London. I shared a meal with Robert Parker and several other club members in the main dining room before we ascended to the drawing room for conversation. On other London visits, I explored Leadenhall Street, where India House once stood, and walked from the Gloucester Road underground station, as John Morley would have done, to find his residences at Elm Park Gardens. Without historical markers to indicate Morley's homes, now renumbered, I was not entirely sure of their locations. On another occasion Jennifer and I, having successfully met in London, wandered through Maida Vale and Kensington searching for Browning's residences at no. 19 Warwick Crescent and no. 29 De Vere Gardens.

I undertook the expeditions after studying these places in textual and visual form. My work in local reading rooms, public records offices, archives and libraries was motivated by epistemological aspirations. I wanted to understand how the institutional and domestic spaces Mill, Arnold, Morley and Browning inhabited inflected their thinking.