Samuel Butler: A Harvest of New Letters

42 REVIEWS 1. Samuel Butler: A Harvest of New Letters THE FAMILY LETTERS OF SAMUEL BUTLER. Selected, Edited, and Introduced by Arnold Silver. Stanford; Stanford U P, 1962. $6.00. THE CORRESPONDENCE OF SAMUEL BUTLER WITH HIS SISTER MAY. Edited with an lntroductlor by Daniel F. Howard. Berkeley: University of California P, 1962. $6.50. These two collections of letters, published only about a month apart, very neatly compliment each other. Silver prints thirteen letters which also appear in Howard's collection. However, since Mr. Howard prints 153 letters between Butler and his sister, the slight overlapping between the two collections does no harm to the value of Howard's volume, while it helps fill out the years from about 1881 to 1886 In Silver's volume. The editing in both volumes seems to me to be Intelligent and accurate. Both editors have adopted the Keynes and Hill procedure of adding punctuation only to clarify, thus avoiding a sense of formality and stiffness which Butler's sparsely punctuated letters do not have. Silver concentrates on Butler's relationship with his father and uses the Canon's death as the terminal date for letters included in this collection (Silver's first letter is dated 1841, the last 1886; the letters in Howard's edition are from 1855 to 1902). With Keynes and Hill's LETTERS BETOEEN SAMUEL BUTLER AND MISS E. M. A. SAVAGE, I87I-I885, the two newest collections are superior to most earlier volumes which include letters because they are here given complete; nothing is suppressed; dates are meticulously indicated; selection is not designed to flatter or diminish Butler's stature. Silver's book is not only more carefully and more objectively edited than Mrs. R. S. Garnett's SAMUEL BUTLER AND HIS FAMILY RELATIONS (I926), which made use of the family letters, but of the 190 letters printed in this volume about two-thirds had never appeared in any form before and many of the remainder are now given in full for the first time. Further, except for selections printed in Jones* MEMOIR, few of the 153 letters in Daniel Howard's edition have ever been printed before. The letters in both volumes are fundamental materials for any future biography that may be written and they provide material that should encourage some revisions in the readings given some of Butler's works, especially THE VJAY OF ALL FLESH. The introductions by the editors suggest some new views of Butler's work, personality, and family relationships that may gain wider acceptance now that these two collections are readily available. What is now needed is a completely new and much fuller edition of the NOTEBOOKS than has yet appeared, even when all the patches by a variety of editors are put together. Since Daniel Howard has done considerable preparatory work in this area, one hopes that it will be possible for him to bring out a really scholarly edition of the NOTEBOOKS in the not too distant future. Until We have this edition and until still more of the extant letters have been published, the biographical and critical work of Festing Jones, Clara Stiliman, A. T. Bartholomew, Sir Geoffrey Keynes, Brian Hill, Joseph Jones (THE CRADLE OF EREWHON)3 Philip Henderson, P, N. Furbank, and of others together must still provide the patchwork out of which each serious student may make his own balanced study of Butler. 43 The bulk of the material for the really first-rate balanced study of Butler is now in print and much of the remaining unpublished important material is accessible to responsible scholars. The great work of synthesis, however, has not yet been written. One hopes that many fine Butler scholars we now have in American and England may be challenged. Purdue University H. E. Gerber 2. THE READERS' GUIDE TO KIPLING'S WORK. Edited by Roger Lancelyn Green and Brigadier Alec Mason, and Prepared for Mr. R. E. Harbord. . . . Privately printed in a limited edition of 100 copies. Canterbury, Kent, England: Messrs Glbbs & Sons Ltd., 1961. Part One. $15.00. This is the first part of the projected six sections of this major Kipling work. [For details on the origin and development ot this...