Fielding's Library: An Annotated Catalogue (review)

376 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 10:3 Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra with a similar passage from Fielding's work, hoping to show how Fielding's account emphasizes Cleopatra's "ambition and skillful management" of Antony rather than her mysterious charms (p. 113). Though Bree's argument is sound, the supporting evidence is flawed. The passage from Fielding, as demonstrated in one of Bree's sources, is an almost word-for-word borrowing from Charles Fraser's translation of Plutarch. Far from a "deliberate deflation of Shakespeare" that demonstrates originality , the passage is an adaptation of Fraser that illustrates Fielding's debt to her principal source (p. 113). These shortcomings, however, are minor. Bree's study provides a significant contribution to Sarah Fielding scholarship and will be useful for students exploring her fiction. Christopher D. Johnson Francis Marion University Frederick G. Ribble and Anne G. Ribble. Fielding's Library: An Annotated Catalogue. Charlottesville: The Bibliographic Society of the University of Virginia, 1996. lxxv + 435pp. ISBN 1-883631-04-1. As Frederick and Anne Ribble remark at the outset of their study, Fielding often used books as an index to character, from Shamela's mixture of Methodism and erotica to Amelia's reading of the divines Isaac Barrow and Gilbert Burnet. Thanks to the Ribbles' efforts we can now turn the mirror back on Fielding himself. Their work presents an annotated, alphabetically arranged catalogue of the 664 lots (around 1,219 physical volumes) sold at auction from 10 to 13 February 1755 by Samuel Baker, founder of the firm later known as Sotheby's. The Ribbles' purpose is to identify the individual works in the sale catalogue, to suggest their nature and contents, and to determine their importance for Fielding by tracing his actual use of the volumes throughout his works. Each entry provides not only the original lot number, a transcription of the title-page, and information about the author and the work, but also Fielding's "references" to it, which they define as any explicit allusions or quotations or any other sign of his dependence on the work as a source of information. Despite the considerable size of the library list, it still represents only a portion of the books Fielding owned during his life; most of his own works are missing, as are others he clearly knew well (Cibber's Apology, Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa, for example). Since he was always short of money, he apparently sold off portions of his library from time to time. In describing his library the Ribbles mostly keep to the published sale catalogue, but they also include entries for books to which Fielding was a subscriber, for a few volumes which he demonstrably owned, and for some works "which were particularly the objects of Fielding's enthusiasm or exasperation but are missing from the REVIEWS 377 sale" (p. xv). The third category, they admit, is open to question, and in my view it could have been omitted, since unlike the rest of the catalogue it has no firm factual basis and thus only limited utility. It is in fact the usefulness of the Ribbles' work that should be highlighted, since so often bibliographical studies elicit in the uninitiated some scepticism on that point. Of several groups who can profit significantly from this volume the most obvious are indeed bibliographers or students of the book trade. Although not meant as a full descriptive bibliography, the Ribbles' catalogue (in addition to the entries themselves) includes other features useful to such readers: an analysis of the library by language and imprint; an index of printers, publishers, and booksellers; and an appendix on the later history of volumes in the sale. In the catalogue entries themselves the Ribbles have done a masterly job of setting out information in an understandable form, despite the difficulty they sometimes had in deciding exactly what books are involved, since the descriptions in the auction catalogue are abbreviated and sometimes bibliographically ambiguous. For other readers, however, a more significant advantage of the Ribbles' volume is that it can tell us much about Fielding himself, his biases, and his intellectual makeup. As Hugh Amory pointed out in an earlier study of Fielding...