Reminiscences by Thomas Carlyle (review)

200Victorian Review empire, slavery, and class in the light of texts drawn from a range of genres and written across the span of over a century. It is perhaps because of the admirable range of subject matter and the varieties of reading Ferguson offers within each chapter together with the contradictions she notes in the texts themselves, that there is a sense in which the book does not quite create the unity one seeks from it despite the useful conclusion which draws findings together. Less, in terms of range or focus, may have been more. Ferguson is at her best when she allows herself a few pages to follow a particular thread. Marginalized groups are a significant element of discussion, yet despite writers such as Trimmer writing for children, Ferguson does not examine a child-animal continuum or linked marginality or address readership. The book, however, is fresh in its approach and subject matter and readers interested in any conjunctions between animal advocacy, Englishness, women, nation, and empire will find much here that is valuable and stimulating. ADRIENNE E. GAVIN Canterbury Christ Church University College Works Cited Ferguson, Moira. "Breaking in Englishness: Black Beauty and the Politics of Gender, Race and Class." Women: A Cultural Review 5 (1994): 34-52. HoUindale, Peter (ed.). Black Beauty. By Anna SeweU. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Lansbury, Coral. The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1985. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. 1987. London: Penguin, 1990. Turner, E.S. All Heaven in a Rage. London: Michael Joseph, 1964. Turner, James. Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain and Humanity in the Victorian Mind. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1980. Thomas Carlyle. Reminiscences. K.J. Fielding and Ian Campbell (eds.). Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. xxx + 481. $15.95 US (paper). It is now almost one hundred and twenty years since the original publication of Thomas Carlyle's Reminiscences and high time that someone established the text. The Reminiscences were first published in 1881, a month after Thomas Carlyle's death, by his literary executor and Reviews201 the chief disciple of his later years, James Anthony Froude. In his preface, Froude cautioned the reader that the six essays he included were Mr. Carlyle's own handicraft, but without his touches, not edited by himself, not corrected by himself, perhaps most of it not intended for publication, and written down merely as an occupation for his own private satisfaction, (ix) Indeed, Carlyle's heirs soon had reason to wish that the material had remained unpublished, for they found the essays hurtful to many still alive and the editing grossly inadequate. To make matters worse, there was also a legal question. Carlyle's instructions regarding the treatment and ownership of the manuscript were not clear because what exactly Carlyle had privately said to Froude and Mary Carlyle (Carlyle's niece and amanuensis) had not been recorded or witnessed although all essays of reminiscence except "Jane Welsh Carlyle" had been bequeathed to Mary. After Froude finally returned the manuscripts to her, Mary Carlyle determined to find a new editor. She chose Charles Eliot Norton, a Harvard professor, who had already edited the Carlyle-Emerson letters. Norton's edition of the Reminiscences was published in 1887. While considerably more accurate than Froude's and while twice reprinted with minor additions and alterations, it still deviated in a great many small but significant ways from the original manuscript. Nonetheless, Norton's edition with the addition of two very short articles by Carlyle was the best that students have had available to them to date unless they were able to examine five of the original essays whose manuscripts have long been held by the National Library of Scotland. Now K.J. Fielding and Ian Campbell, having access to all the manuscripts in their role as editors of the Carlyles' Collected Letters (the Duke-Edinburgh edition), have produced a text considerably more accurate than Norton's and including eight essays of reminiscence. Published as a World Classics paperback by Oxford UP, the volume has the format peculiar to that series with the intent of appealing to as wide...