The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney ed. by Joyce Hemlow, Althea Douglas, and Patricia Hawkins (review)

HUMANITIES 101 Apart from these rather arbitrary additions, offered in response to the preliminary status of Annals of English Verse, I have some final comments based on my experience in using the book. Inspite of its length a complete title list would be helpful, especially to readers interested in a particular genre. In the present list of anonymous works, for example, there are several titles beginning with 'The Triumph(s) of .. .' and ending with everything from affectation to dullness to Bute. It would be useful and interesting to see all such titles, anonymous and otherwise, grouped together. I was glad that William Combe was the anonymous poet of The English Dance of Death (1815), because the book therefore appeared in Jackson's index of anonymous works. Had I not known the date of publication I might otherwise have had trouble finding it, since Iassociate this work not with Combe (whose verses I had forgotten) but with Rowlandson. Occasionally the short-title listing causes confusion: both The Pleasures ofRetirement (1800) and The Pleasures ofOrnithology (1828) are listed in the index simply as The Pleasures, while Samuel Rogers's more famous poem gets its full title. In other cases too Jackson's short titles are not very helpful, though here I am no doubt finding fault not with Annals of English Verse itself but with its genre: the short-title catalogue. I have attempted here less a review in the usual sense than a user's report, in the hope that such an effort can suggest something of the usefulness and scholarship of Annals ofEnglish Verse, 1779-1835, and also something of the variety and fascination of the material it catalogues. I found the book engrossing, partly because of its juxtapositions of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Among the volumes of verse published in 1816, the year of Alastor and Christabel, are also An Easy Introduction to the Game of Chess and Fair! Fat! and Forty ... . Other years include poems on ballooning, medical innovation, life in high places, and almost every possible literary, religious, political, and personal opinion or obsession. When Jackson publishes his 'complete catalogue of the volumes of English verse published from 1770-1835' (p vii) the present Annals will be superseded. But in the mean time readers will be grateful for such a complete, scholarly, and even entertaining survey. (ANNE MCWHIR) Joyce Hemlow, Althea Douglas, and Patricia Hawkins, editors. The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney. Volumes XI and XU Oarendon Press 1984. Volume XI, xxvii, 572; volume XII, vii, 530. $195.95 both volumes This majestic and magisterial edition of the wonderful letters and journals of Fanny Burney is one of the monuments of Canadian literary scholarship . It covers a period of almost fifty years, from 1791 to 1840, and it has been more than half that long in preparation, from Miss Hemlows Guggenheim Fellowship in 1951 through the publication of the first two volumes in 1972 and the last two volumes here presented in 1984. Pride of accomplishment belongs chiefly to ProfessorJoyce Hemlow and to McGill University, where the Burney Room is the centre of Burney study for scholars from around the world, but the primary financial support (after that of the editors and McGill University) was the Canada Council (latterly the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) and the Canadian Federation for the Humanities. The manuscripts themselves are, of course, chiefly in England and the United States, but the initiative, energy, organization, and funding have been primarily Canadian. This is an achievement of which all Canadians should be proud. In these last two volumes, the standards of meticulous and detailed scholarship are as impressive as in the past. Fanny Burney's financial affairs are traced through the records of her bank, the location of a miniature ofPrincess Sophia painted byJohn Linnell while Mme D'Arblay served as a chaperone is traced to the Royal Collections, and the unpublished records of the House of Lords are cited to explain references to 'the secret committee on the Queen's [adulterous] affairs' (p 124). Readers can confidently expect to find minute details about all the public and private affairs which appear in these manuscripts. Fanny Burney is...