Victorian Biography Checklist

book reviews gallery in, say, 1891 would have confronted the browser with an astonishing mix of writers and artists, some just beginning their lives and careers, others nearing the end, but all quite alive and active, contending for the public's attention. The individual items themselves are fascinating, offering up such sweetmeats as a self-caricature of Max Beerbohm dozing over a book of Virginia Woolf's; there is also a copy of Joseph Conrad's first book, Almayer's Folly (1895), inscribed to John Galsworthy. As the title of the exhibit suggests, a number of the items displayed were connected to their creators' mothers. A copy of Richard Le Gallienne's The Quest of the Golden Girl (1896), for example, is lovingly inscribed "To the Dear Mother of AU my Books..." and chockablock full of newspaper cuttings attesting to her son's success. Did Mama Gallienne ever read the book, one wonders? And if she did, did she ever discuss its implications with her new daughter-in-law? One knows that Whistler and Wilde had mothers, of course, but Swinburne? The conventional mind strains to imagine Swinburne at high tea, making small talk, and asking his mother for just one more muffin, a bit more butter and jam. And yet, there's the evidence—a book inscribed to "Jane H. Swinburne from her affectionate son Algernon Ch. Swinburne." Fortunately, the book contains nothing more scandalous than Swinburne's "A Word for the Navy," a poem which we can only hope pleased and reassured the admiral's wife. "Mothers and Others" is at least the fifth exhibit that Lasner has mounted in the past seven or eight years, each liberally salted with items from his private collection, and each accompanied by an attractive and informative catalogue. The private collector is frequently accused of hiding his treasures from prying eyes. Mark Samuels Lasner is kind enough to share his good fortune, and he deserves to be commended. Clinton Krauss ------------------ Montpelier, Vermont Victorian Biography Checklist Peter Bell, comp. Victorian Biography: A Checklist of Contemporary Biographies of British Men and Women Dying Between 1851 and 1901. Edinburgh: Peter Bell Bookseller. 1993. ν + 194 pp. £30.00 AS PROFESSOR H. C. G. MATHEW, editor-in-chief of the New Dictionary of National Biography, notes in the introduction to this work, "Late Victorian biographical research is a complex business and its 523 ELT 39:4 1996 bibliography is not a simple matter." This remains the case, even though such research has been made easier by the publication of Who's Who and Dod's Parliamentary Companion (both established before 1850); Debrett 's Peerage, the biographical assessments in the Dictionary of National Biography (beginning in 1885 and including about 12,000 entries on persons who died during the nineteenth century in the complete DNB project during 1901); and Frederic Boase's Modern English Biography (1892-1921, 6 vols.) which covers the lives of those who died between 1860 and 1900 and is the only biographical dictionary of its time with a useful analytical index. Peter Bell's efforts in locating and listing British biographies, autobiographies , and memoirs certainly facilitates biographical research on a vast array of the great and the "far from great" nineteenth-century individuals. In this respect, Bell has attempted to complement William Mathew's British Autobiographies: A Bibliography (1955) and British Diaries: An Annotated Bibliography of British Diaries Written Between 1442 and 1942 (1950), and John Burnett's The Autobiography of the Working classes: A Bibliography, Vol. 1:1700-1900 (1987). However, in addition to excluding items listed in these works, Bell has excluded published "funeral sermons" and "memoirs prefixing a volume of sermons , verse, plays, novels, and essays" from his compilation. His major purpose has been "to examine wherever possible all titles and to include only material which, however minor, will be of some use to nineteenth century scholars." Only persons who died between the Great Exhibition in London (1851) and the death of Queen Victoria (1901) are included; those already renowned before 1851 and expiring after 1901 (e.g., Florence Nightingale [1820-1910] and the Duke of Cambridge [1819-1904] are rigorously excluded. A unique feature of Bell's omnivorous bibliography is...