Gissing Letters VI

BOOK REVIEWS successful fictions. For some of his most famous pieces he has only recorded the barest data of publication. For a young man who took Sir Walter Scott's historical novels as a reliable inspirational model for the historical romances that he himself would soon write, he seemed to pay little or no interest to the essays that Scott had written in order to define the guidelines by which he himself abided. We get much in the vein of "We are not trying to succeed, but trying to try," and numerous dithyrambic outbursts about "Art!"—but only the briefest of comments about intentions and a few scattered remarks about his sense of success or failure in pleasing the reader. He provides little in the way of thoughtful criticism of his own writings. (We would give much to have it.) A final comment on the high quality of the editing principles at work here. Yale University Press is to be congratulated on supplying a separate index for each of the volumes (instead of a cumulative index in the final volume of the series), and for Mehew's use of footnotes on the same page as the letter itself (instead of relegating them to the end of the letter or to the end of the volume). Mehew is candid about what he does not know, and helpful in cautioning the reader about dates that must remain conjectural. Occasionally a French passage goes untranslated despite Mehew's recognition that RLS's French left much to be desired (Latin and Greek are always translated); but this is a minor matter. The silent corrections must have been numerous since RLS's punctuation and spelling were notoriously erratic, a fact that RLS recognized and commented on more than once; but the editor's hand never seems intrusive on these scores. The annotations for previous editions of the letters—supplied more or less stingily (in comparison to the Booth-Mehew notes) by Sidney Colvin, Lloyd Osbourne, DeLancey Ferguson, and Marshall Waingrow—have been consulted, and in almost all cases expanded. This is, on all scores, the definitive edition, and it will never be superseded. Harold Orel University of Kansas Gissing Letters Vl The Collected Letters of George Gissing: Volume Six, 1895-1897. Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young, Pierre Coustillas, eds. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995. xlii + 404pp. $60.00 READERS LIKE ME will turn first to the photographs in this 363 ELT 38:3 1995 volume. In one they will see Gissing looking older than his 38 years and unusually relaxed, snapped by Harold Frederic at the open window of a train the day after they had dined with the Omar Khayyam Club in Surrey. Gissing has pushed his soft-brimmed hat back off his forehead and squints quizzically at the camera. Compare this image with three studio portraits reproduced here. In these, taken the previous year, he gazes away from the camera and looks solemn, suiting the purposes for which the photographs were taken—to be used in his publisher's catalogues and to be sold to admirers. New admirers with whom Gissing corresponds are also pictured here: E. L. Allhusen, a book collector, and Herbert Heaton Stürmer, a Gambridge -educated editor and author. That Gissing's own reputation as a writer does not cause him to neglect old acquaintances is illustrated by photographs of his schoolmaster, James Wood, whom he calls on during a holiday in Wales, and of the Polish-born physician Dr. Marie Zakrzewska and her companion Julia Sprague, who seek him out while on holiday in London some twenty years after befriending him during his exile in America. Sadly, these years bring no reunion with Eduard Bertz, comrade of his youthful poverty in London, but the editors reproduce two portraits he sends Gissing in 1896. Bertz's disappointments as a writer in his native Germany parallel those of Gissing's brother Algernon in Gloucestershire; but whereas Bertz has only himself to provide for, Algernon has a wife and children. His eldest son, born in 1895, is shown here. Finally, we see places mentioned in the letters: George Meredith's Surrey home at Box Hill, visited several times by Gissing...