Swinburne

The articles, essays, and notes on Swinburne in 1999 form a well-balanced group in several ways; they include invaluable bibliographical resources, a useful new edition of the two volumes most studied, one overview of Swinburne's religious attitudes, close analyses of the poetry, a psychoanalytical approach to the novels, studies of Swinburne's influence, and discussion of Swinburne's theories on art and art interpretation. Last year I published here a separate review of Yopie Prins's Victorian Sappho (Princeton Univ. Press, 1999), which contains a provocative chapter on Swinburne's Sapphic poems (see VP 37 [1999]: 441-447, especially pp. 442-443), and in the Year's Work section on Swinburne I also covered the chapter "Swinburne and the Gods," in A. N. Wilson's God's Funeral (Norton, 1999), and my own "Proserpine and Pessimism: Goddesses of Death, Life, and Language from Swinburne to Wharton" (MP 96 [1999]: 312-346). I shall therefore say no more here about any of these works; as 1999 has turned into an uncommonly rich year for Swinburne studies, I shall have enough to do.

An especially important new resource for Swinburneans is T.A.J. Burnett's two-volume compilation, The British Library Catalogue of the Ashley Manuscripts (British Library, 1999). These manuscripts were originally assembled by the infamous T. J. Wise, of whom Burnett justly remarks: "Wise's greatest contribution to bibliography lay not in the bibliographies which he compiled himself, but in compelling other bibliographers to develop new techniques with which to unmask his misdeeds" (p. ix). Wise's own catalog is consequently untrustworthy, and it also fails to include a good deal of material that was in his collection; Burnett's includes this and provides detailed information on each work. While the collection includes much non-Swinburnean material, the index listing for manuscripts of poems and letters by Swinburne alone takes up twenty-seven pages (pp. 618-644). The descriptions of his drafts for various poems should be studied with care by anyone planning research into Swinburne's methods of composition; so far only a few articles (such as Hollander's, reviewed here below) have examined this topic, and there is a cornucopia of material at the British Library waiting for Swinburneans. Burnett has also included among the plates a draft of portions of "Dolores" (Plate VIII) which shows how very hard the poet worked on this exuberantly transgressive text.

On a broader scale, the new Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999) includes a highly expanded and invaluable entry on Swinburne by Terry L. Meyers. This twenty-page entry (more than twice as long as the Swinburne entry in the 1969 CBEL) is an impressive work of scholarship in itself, containing lists of major collections of Swinburne manuscripts; bibliographies and reference works (with a cautionary note on Wise); collections and selections of the poems and other works; editions (with another cautionary note on Wise); contributions to collaborative works, from Mary Gordon's children's novel The Children of the Chapel to various versions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; letters; introductions which Swinburne penned for works by other authors; attributed works; obituaries on Swinburne himself; criticism (relevant to Swinburne manuscript studies and biographical data); and biographies. The section on attributed works is particularly useful, with exact information about who made the attribution (in most cases) and which works are spurious. Terry Meyers has asked me to correct here an error which appears both in the new CBEL and in his earlier article, "Two Poems by Swinburne: 'Milton' and On the Effect of Wagner's Music" (VP 31 [1993]: 203-209): as Meyers has lately explained in "Swinburne on Wagner's Music: A Misattribution" (VP 37: 551), the French poem quoted on page 208 of the earlier article, and listed in column 831 of CBEL as "On the Effect of Wagner's Music," is a tribute to Hugo rather than Wagner, and is in fact a draft of the dedicatory poem in Bothwell...