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  • The Isle of Pines, 1668: Henry Neville's Uncertain Utopia
  • Daniel Carey
John Scheckter . The Isle of Pines, 1668: Henry Neville's Uncertain Utopia. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010. xvii + 222 pp. 55.00, ISBN 978-1-4094-3584-6.

The lure of Henry Neville's short but remarkable work of prose fiction, The Isle of Pines, has been considerable. Published initially as a nine-page pamphlet in June 1668, it presented as authentic the story of a shipwrecked English vessel that ran aground off an unknown island near Madagascar after setting sail in 1569. One man, George Pine (a bookkeeper on a voyage to establish a factory in India), and four women survived—his master's daughter, two serving women, and a "Negro female slave"—by escaping to the uninhabited island and establishing a settlement. The lengthy title page explained that [End Page 546] nearly a hundred years later the island had been rediscovered by a Dutch ship blown off course, whose crew was astonished to find ten or twelve thousand inhabitants "speaking good English." The narrative itself consisted of Pine's first-person account of how the survivors arrived, established themselves, and began to procreate (written in a statement ostensibly handed over to the Dutch by his descendants). The pamphlet was expanded by Neville twice over the course of a month with an elaborated frame narrative by a Dutch mariner providing details of the political events on the island after the death of Pine and the inheritance of power by his firstborn son and his grandson.

Over the past twenty-five years a steady stream of articles on The Isle of Pines has appeared, together with no fewer than eight editions with varying degrees of scholarly apparatus (including one in a special issue of Utopian Studies 17, no. 1 [2006]). Scheckter's is the first to provide what he calls a "Critical Text," accompanied by six interpretive chapters, a preface, and an introduction. The edition of The Isle of Pines (13-30) does not provide glosses of obscure terms or identification of references in the text, but it can be called a critical edition insofar as the author has done valuable work collating surviving copies, which contain a substantial number of variants. The collation is printed in an appendix, but the information it provides is difficult to square with the text. Entries in the collation appear first with a page number and then with what may (I cannot say with certainty) be indications of line numbers, yet the line numbers are not given in the margin of the text itself, making it tedious if not impossible to locate the variants in question. Mysteriously, two important items are disaggregated from the text: the title page, which, as indicated, provides crucial information on the plot and delivery of the narrative to Europe, is not printed at the start of the "Critical Text," although it is reproduced as an illustration (xiii); similarly, the four-panel woodcut frontispiece that accompanied Neville's third edition (the one on which this critical edition is based) is reproduced not in its original position but in a separate section of chapter 2 of this book (58) entitled "Pictures."

No textual note has been provided to explain the rationale for the copy text, although some of the criteria emerge in an ensuing discursive account of various matters (38-43). The absence of a formal note of this kind is surprising because the author is at pains elsewhere to emphasize the instability of the text and the very different reading experiences between the first, second, and third versions of it. Some of the terminology is also curious. Worthington Chauncey Ford's edition of 1920 for the Club of Odd Volumes is described as a "facsimile," but this is not the case. There are references to a German [End Page 547] translation identified as "Greflinger Ia" (48n, 49n), but the bibliography in appendix A, which lists a number of editions of The Isle of Pines, contains no corresponding entry (presumably this is the version that appeared in Georg Greflinger's newspaper Nordischen Mercurius). Twenty-four texts used for collation have been numbered in this appendix, and they correspond...

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