Prefaces, Postscripts and Related Writings (review)

REVIEWS 589 and Due Preparations for the Plague) figure in the Bibliography only as "probable " rather than as "certain" attributions. I found this unsettling; it would have been even more unsettling if they had been banished altogether, and it is precisely this sort of experience that is likely to provoke ire against Furbank and Owens. A crucial factor, then, in one's response to the Bibliography may be one's prior investment in a given work: this is bound to affect the reactions of more senior scholars, who by writing about a work as if it is Defoe's have committed themselves to its belonging in the canon, and are apt to become its partisans for this reason if for no other. The ultimate sorting out of such questions will probably owe more to the open-mindedness of our junior colleagues and graduate students than to the expertise (let alone the authoritativeness) of long-term Defoeans. Several other features of the Bibliography may prove useful: for instance, the synopsis of the contents of each work listed, and the three appendices that give brief historical sketches of Occasional Conformity, the Union with Scotland, and the Bangorian Controversy. G.A. Starr University of California, Berkeley Richardson's Published Commentary on "Clarissa" 1747-65. 3 vols. London : Pickering and Chatto, 1998. Volume 1, Prefaces, Postscripts and Related Writings. Introduction, Jocelyn Harris; ed. Thomas Keymer. xcv +336pp. ISBN 1-85196-461-4. In a chapter of The Boundaries of Fiction: History and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (1996) comparing Swift's Tale ofa Tub with Richardson's Clarissa, Everett Zimmerman points out the following delicious irony of literary history: "The proliferation of prefaces, dedications, notes and other addenda that Swift repudiates scornfully as evidence of the corruptions brought by the [printing] press ... are skillfully manipulated by Richardson for the advantage of his own reputation and what he thought of as the proper reception of his works" (p. 102). If Swift would have been aghast at Richardson's elaborate "modern" and printerly apparatus surrounding and infiltrating Clarissa, what would he have thought of the close-to-infinite regress of my current task—to provide a [reviewer's] commentary upon the [modern critical and editorial] commentary within the first of a three-volume set of [Richardson's] published commentary on Clarissa, itself one of the most self-reflexive works in the eighteenth-century canon? Chatto and Pickering have carried on the task of bringing out the Clarissa Project with this set, which also includes Letters and Passages Restored and the Moral and Instructive Sentiments. The structure of this first volume, dealing with all the prefaces, postscripts, and advertisements to Clarissa and several miscellaneous but related documents, 590 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 12.4 particularly echoes the recursive and ever-circling-back patterns of Clarissa itself: we have have a long, general introduction by Jocelyn Harris, followed by facsimiles of the documents she discusses, in chronological order of publication ( 1747— 65), each bearing a headnote by Tom Keymer that rehearses some of the same issues as the introduction. Two unpublished, ambiguous, but relevant documents are rightly placed in appendices, but other inclusions in the main text make the series' title, Richardson's Published Commentary, in some ways a misnomer: William Warburton's preface to volumes 3 and 4 of the first edition and Albrecht von Haller's review of Clarissa (despite having Richardson's annotations) are not written by the novelist, and neither the "Answer to the Letter of a Very Worthy Gentleman" nor "Meditations Collected from the Sacred Books" was published, but only printed and issued to a select few. Another aberration of a sort is that the preface to the 1751 edition of the novel is not included here, to avoid duplication, because it was a formal part of the Letters and Passages Restored, published separately by Richardson for owners of the first edition, and is therefore part of volume 2; although this is understandable, it slightly diminishes the usefulness of volume 1 as the modern reader must either acquire the eightvolume facsimile of Clarissa, with both preface and postscript included, or volume 2 of the Commentary, to survey the complete editorial apparatus of Clarissa. It is...