Eighteenth-Century Fiction: A Full-Text Database of English Prose Fiction from 1700 to 1780 (review)

Reviews Eighteenth-Century Fiction: A Full-Text Database ofEnglish Prose Fiction from 1700 to 1780. Alexandria, Va.: Chadwyck-Healey, 1996. CDROM . US$4,400.00. ISBN 0-85964-323-9. Will wonders never cease! This single CD-ROM (with two diskettes to install the software to run it) enables the lucky user to view just about the entire range of significant British eighteenth-century novels by thirty different authors, moving (alphabetically) from Thomas Amory's The Life ofJohn Bunde to Horace Walpole's The Castle ofOtranto. The editorial board for this project, Judith Hawley , Tom Keymer, and John Mullan, have advised Chadwyck-Healey wisely, and their choice of texts and editions is everything that a student of the period and the genre could desire. The range of narratives available at the click of a mouse on this disk is complete and wonderfully comprehensive, including the fictional output of writers such as Defoe, Aubin, Richardson (the first and third editions of Clarissa), Mackenzie, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, as well as substantially complete reproductions of the primary (mostly first) eighteenthcentury editions of the works of Manley, Barker, Davys, Lennox, Haywood, Sarah Fielding, and Frances Sheridan. In addition, the CD contains important works by the Brookes, Frances and Henry, two versions of Gulliver's Travels , Johnson's Rasselas as well as Hawkesworth's Almoran and Hamet, the first edition of Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, the second edition of Reeve's The Old English Baron, the first edition of Evelina, and much more. A student would have to go to a first-rate research library simply to read all the titles gathered by modern technological wizardry on this CD-ROM, and some of them—Robert Paltock's weirdly interesting fantasy, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751), for example—would be hard to find even there. In addition to this comprehensive collection of fiction, the CD features excellent bibliographical information for all the texts, along with reproductions of EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 10, Number 1, October 1997 108 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 10:1 some illustrations, of title pages and tables of contents for all the works. Original page numbering is noted in the text, so that even though your monitor generally holds less than a book page of text, you know where you are and can cite eighteenth-century volume numbers (given running heads at the top of the screen) and pages. Chadwyck-Healey's keyboarding, I can report, seems flawless , and I found not a single typo as I browsed extensively in most of the titles. If you have a good, bright, and sharp monitor to go with your computer , the texts themselves are eminently readable, far more so than they are in book form, since the distracting (if lovable) particulars of eighteenth-century typography such as italics and capitalization (to say nothing of paper grown brown and worm-eaten with age) have been removed. Whether it is really possible to read a novel on a computer screen is, of course, quite another question, and I for one cannot imagine actually reading all the way through a novel by spending hours staring at my computer screen. But some of my colleagues swear that they have done it, and I believe it can be done at the cost of some eyestrain and discomfort. I can report that installing the software and running the CD-ROM with it are child's play. The software comes with the usual idiot-proof on-screen directions, allowing the user to click happily to enter the manifold riches of the CD. Even the manual that accompanies this CD is clear and readable, although just about superfluous in light of the menu-driven on-screen features of the software. To be sure, you will need two things to run this package. First, a great deal of money, since the price at the head of this review is not a misprint, and one assumes that only a millionaire enthusiast of eighteenth-century fiction or a well-funded library could afford this particular scholarly toy. It is possible to purchase an annual subscription to this Chadwyck-Healey database (and others), and if a library or a department...