Introduction

 In this introduction to the edition of papers given on April 6, 2018 at Cergy-Pontoise University under the title of Community/Communities, it is particularly appropriate to evoke a specific application of the concept of community as this symposium marked the twenty-first anniversary of the collaboration between the Leeds Center for Victorian Studies and the University of Cergy-Pontoise. The origin of the precious collaboration was the SFEVE  annual conference (Société Française d'Études Victoriennes et Edouardiennes) hosted at Cergy-Pontoise in January 1997, organized by Danièle Kahn-Paycha, today professor at Paris Ouest-La Défense and Odile Boucher-Rivalain, today Emerita professor at Cergy-Pontoise. We had invited Rosemary Ashton, then Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at University College, who unfortunately was not in a position to accept our invitation. We then contacted Dr Martin Hewitt, today professor at Anglia Ruskin, Cambridge, the then director of LCVS, who honoured our symposium with his participation. The French SFEVE was a source of inspiration to him for the creation of a sister community which was inaugurated in September 2000 with the launch of BAVS, the British Association for Victorian Studies, at Hereford University , Hertfordshire, which a number of SFEVE members attended. Such was the start of our partnership, which was extended in 2013 to include Huddersfield and Hull Universities  under the name of NNCN, North European Nineteenth  century studies Network.

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