G. Robert Stange, Tufts literature professor

One September evening in 1937, several freshmen gathered in Harvard Yard to choose the night's adventure.

"I heard this guy behind me say there was a great movie at the Exeter Theater," said Leo Marx, professor of American culture emeritus at MIT. The voice belonged to G. Robert Stange; the movie was "The Spanish Earth," a Spanish Civil War documentary narrated by Ernest Hemingway.

"It was typical of him that he had just arrived and he knew where the good movie was," Marx said. "He was a very mature student, and all his tastes were formed. He knew all about T.S. Eliot and James Joyce before he got to Harvard, which in those days was fairly rare."

Dr. Stange bloomed early as an intellectual and helped spur academic interest in England's eminent Victorian novelists, say colleagues. A former professor at Tufts University, Dr. Stange died of a heart ailment last Friday while vacationing on Sanibel Island, Fla. He was 87 and had lived in Boston and in Chilmark on Martha's Vineyard.

"He was an old-school intellectual, in that he believed learning, and knowledge, was really at the center of understanding the world," said his son Eric of Arlington. "He knew so much about so many different fields that it was just kind of awe inspiring and intimidating, too."

Born in Chicago, George Robert Stange was more than a decade younger than his two sisters. Disdaining his first name, he reduced it to an initial. His politics already tilted significantly to the left by the time he graduated from the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago and went to Harvard. He contemplated joining the battle against fascism in Spain, but was too young. During college he went with a friend in search of Leon Trotsky, the exiled Bolshevik revolutionary.

"He told me that when he was in Mexico City in 1940, he and a friend went to call on Trotsky," his son said, "but Trotsky was taking a nap at the time."

By the time they tried to visit again, Trotsky had been assassinated.

At Harvard, from which he graduated in 1941, Dr. Stange was awarded the Bowdoin Prize for essays and was part of a clique that gathered around literary critic F.O. Matthiessen. He served in the US Navy during World War II, then returned to Harvard, receiving a doctorate in history and literature.

Dr. Stange taught literature from 1949 to 1985, beginning with a post at Bennington College and moving in 1952 to the University of Minnesota. While there, Dr. Stange's essays, along with the efforts of a handful of other scholars, spawned academic interest in Victorian novelists such as Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot.

"When I went to graduate school, the novelists on the whole, and especially Dickens, were really out of favor," said Gerhard Joseph, a former student of Dr. Stange in Minnesota who is now an English professor at Lehman College and the City University of New York. "He was one of the people, at least in my mind, who was in the forefront of the revival of interest in Dickens and Trollope and Eliot, but especially Dickens."

For graduate students, Dr. Stange's enthusiasm for teaching Victorian poetry and prose had an influence that extended long past the last lecture. He helped many former students get teaching jobs and keep developing their intellects.

"I'm still using ideas and texts that he put me onto back in 1957," said George Levine, professor emeritus of Victorian literature at Rutgers University and a former student of Dr. Stange. "It's 50 years that I've been using things that Bob taught."

Dr. Stange, he said, "was an enormously cultivated and widely read man, in fact, much more widely read and learned than the number of things he published would suggest. When you spoke with him, you just knew there was a whole world of learning back there."

To this day, Levine said, he uses as a reference "Victorian Poetry and Poetics," a critical anthology Dr. Stange coedited in 1959 that was a popular college text.

In 1967, Dr. Stange went to Tufts University, where he had been recruited to chair the English department. He led the department for five years and stayed at Tufts until retiring in 1985.

Since then he had continued to write, though rarely for publication. In conversation with peers, former students, or family members, he had lost little of his intellectual edge.

"He had very strong opinions on everything," Joseph said, chuckling. "One tended to have arguments. They were always friendly arguments, but they were arguments nonetheless. It was a little bit intimidating at times. When you're arguing with a mentor, there's always a sense of speaking with your graduate adviser."

"He was a combination of radical and elitist in a way that is out of style now, perhaps," Marx said. "He belonged to a kind of gentlemanly left that one associates more with England than with America."

Still, Dr. Stange "wasn't averse to pop culture," his son said. "He watched TV, and I was surprised once to learn that he had eaten at McDonald's."

In addition to his son, Dr. Stange, who did not want a public memorial service, leaves his wife of 43 years, Alida Butler; two daughters, Maren of Brooklyn, N.Y., and Margit of Berkeley, Calif.; two granddaughters; and a grandson.