Reprints of 1890s Editions

ELT 38: 1 1995 Reprints of 1890s Editions R. K. R. Thornton and Ian SmaU, Editors. "Decadents, Symbolists, Anti-Decadents: Poetry of the 1890s" Michael Field. Sight and Song/Underneath the Bough. 125 pp/135 pp. John Davidson. In a Music Hall and Ballads and Songs 120 pp/130 pp. Fleet Street Eclogues/A Second Series of Fleet Street Echgues 104 pp/101 pp. $49.50 Each Francis Thompson. Poems. New York: Woodstock Books, 1993. 81 pp. $43.00 IN THE LATE 1970s and 1980s, two notable reprint series appeared featuring books associated with the 1890s: The WUde Nineties" (AMS Press), which contained such volumes as Rupert Croft-Cooke's Feasting with Panthers, Stanley Weintraub's Reggie: A Portrait of Reginald Turner, Richard Whittington-Egan's The Quest of the Golden Boy: The Life and Letters of Richard Le Gallienne, and the Oxford periodical The Spirit Lamp (earlier, AMS Press had offered a reprint of The Yellow Book, among other works). The series edited by Ian Fletcher and John Stokes, The Decadent Consciousness: A Hidden Archive of Late Victorian Literature," published by Garland Publishing, offered 42 "rare and important titles" pubUshed Ui 36 volumes, such as works by Henry Harland, Arthur Symons, George Moore, John Davidson, EUa D'Arcy, and George Egerton. (Such a disparate group, of course, inevitably raises the question whether the theme of the series—The Decadent Consciousness"—is an accurate description). The current series, eventually running to 27 volumes (many of them containing two 1890s titles) selected by R K. R. Thornton and Ian Small, avoids duplicating the Fletcher-Stokes series except for one volume that contains the two books of the Rhymers' Club (which wül soon be reviewed). The Woodstock volumes are in a slightly reduced size from the originals but attractively packaged, the dust jackets containing photographs, sketches, or designs from the original title pages (which are included Ui their original colors). The physical production of the volumes is especially impressive: the cloth cover, paper, and photo-offset texts Ui these reprints are aU of exceUent quality. Original publishers' advertisements are also included m three of the four volumes under review so that the period atmosphere is retained. (A printing peculiarity 116 BOOK REVIEWS that exists on dust j ackets and Ui preliminary matter is the use, Ui titles, of a capitalized first word but, thereafter, lower case Ui all words except proper nouns.) Thornton and SmaU provide a very brief introduction for each volume that contains biographical information with some discussion of the writer's work and reputation—designed, clearly, for the general reader. Also included is a select bibliography of primary works and a secondary bibliography of fewer than half a dozen items. A reprint series enables readers and libraries to obtain books that have been long out of print or that are now avaUable only Ui the rare book rooms of relatively few libraries. Not many libraries, one suspects, have Sight and Song (1892) or Underneath the Bough (1893) by Michael Field (400 copies of the former were originally printed; the latter title was limited to 150 copies, printed at the aunt and niece's own expense, their usual practice). Sight and Song is an engaging coUection of their poems on paintings, as though foUowing Pater's dictum: "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music." Indeed, the volume includes a Pateresque poem on La Gioconda as well as poems on Correggio's Saint Sebastmn and AntoneUo da Messina's Saint Sebastmn, the favorite martyred saint of fin-de-siècle Uranians, an inspiration particularly to WUde, who mentions him in The Grave of Keats" and adopted the name Ui exile. As Thornton and Small remark of Field: "... their significance has yet to be fuUy explored." John Davidson's In a Music Hall (1891) and Ballads and Songs (1894), bound together, contain many of the poet's best-known works: Ui the Ballads and Songs, "A BaUad of a Nun" and the poem that T. S. Eliot admired, Thirty Bob a Week" (indeed, Eliot said, "Davidson . . . impressed me deeply in my formative years between the ages of sixteen and twenty"). Davidson's failure to attract readers, a cause of...