The Making of Many Companions

BOOK reviews impetus given by the late-eighteenth-century founding of the Royal Academy followed by the creation of a variety of art societies beginning with the Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1804), the growth in the number of etchers and engravers (print-selling shops were abundant), the introduction of lithography at the beginning of the century, the replacement of copper plates by the much longer lasting steel and steel-faced plates, the importance of the aquatint as employed by the artists creating prints for Rudolph Ackermann, the resurgence of the wood engraving, not only for large-scale dissemination (the ultimate example being the Illustrated London News) but also late in the century for private press and similar books, and the principles espoused by the Aesthetic Movement and the Arts and Crafts Movement. (A charming little mini-history is offered by Philip James's 1947 King Penguin English Book Illustration, 1800-1900.) And finally, two minor quibbles. The first is that unfortunately in his essay on maps and places in fiction, Simon Joyce fails to recognize, or at least inform the reader, that the map of the Jago area that appears in the novel conforms almost exactly to the area north of Old Nichol Street as shown in the 1888 Ordnance map. Old Nichol Street has become Old Jago Street, Boundary Street has become Edge Lane (Old Nichol and Boundary streets are still to be found in the upper right hand corner of the section of the 1993 Ordnance map reproduced on p. 140), Mead Street has become Honey Lane, etc. Second, one notes with surprise that Maxwell's Afterword, while commenting on some rather odd examples of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century illustrated books, does not mention the importance of the illustrations that appeared in the great private presses that followed in the wake of Morris's Kelmscott, in particular the Ashendene and the Dove, or that made up so significant a part of the hardbound 1890s periodicals such as the Yellow Book, the Dome, and the Quarto. WENDELL V. HARRIS ________________ Santa Fe, New Mexico The Making of Many Companions William Baker and Kenneth Womack, eds. A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. xii + 445 pp. $94.95 Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing, eds. A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Maiden MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002. xii + 513 pp. $124.95 419 ELT 46 : 4 2003 Deirdre David, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xx + 267 pp. Cloth $60.00 Paper $22.00 Herbert F. Tucker, ed. A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture. Maiden MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1999. xviii + 488 pp. Cloth $145.95 Paper $34.96 WILLIAM BAKER and Kenneth Womack's A Companion to the Victorian Novel (hereafter "Greenwood") and the volume of the same title edited by Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing ("Blackwell Novel") have now joined Herbert F. Tucker's A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (hereafter "Blackwell Culture") and Deirdre David 's The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel ("Cambridge") on the growing list of collected essays by various hands designed to support learning and teaching about Victorian fiction. All of the volumes have newly prepared entries from reputable (and sometimes overlapping ) scholars; all provide reasonably up-to-date bibliographies; and three concentrate explicitly on the novel. (Tucker's collection also covers poetry, drama, criticism, life writing, and the prose genre labeled "sage writing," and it uses significantly more space explaining historical, social , and cultural matters.) How, then, is one to decide which book to recommend to a baffled undergraduate, or assign for ancillary reading in a master's-level course, or suggest as a resource to doctoral students and faculty who want more (or newer) information for their teaching and research ? Of the two books published in 2002, the preface to Greenwood calls the volume an "introductory guide to the Victorian novel," especially in its "historical and cultural implications," and says the contributors represent "eclectic perspectives and different generations." Blackwell Novel promises to supply "contextual and critical information about the entire range of British fiction published during the Victorian period...