The Father and Daughter with Dangers of Coquetry (review)

Broadview has earned the gratitude of scholars and teachers by supplying, at reasonable prices, paperback editions of many works long out print but now of critical and pedagogical interest. This volume offers Opie's first novel, Dangers of Coquetry (1790), her more important second novel, The Father and Daughter, A Tale in Prose (1801), a set of poems originally published with that novel, excerpts from contemporary reviews, and other background materials. Since The Father and Daughter is a story about a grieving father incarcerated in a lunatic asylum after his daughter has been seduced, both the editors' introduction to the volume and some of the background materials they print document Opie's personal fascination with madness and contemporary ideas about madness, including those of the famous doctors William Battie and William Cullen.

The editors usefully stress Opie's interest in music and the role of music in heightening sentimental affect. They quote the statement of Opie's Norwich friend Mrs Taylor about Opie as a performer of one of the songs printed in this volume, 'Song of an Indostan Girl': 'the expression of plaintive misery, and affectionate supplication, which she threw into it, we may safely affirm, has never been surpassed, and very seldom equaled.' Music for this song, as well as for 'A Mad Song' and 'The Orphan Boy,' is reproduced in photographic facsimile, enabling readers to attempt their own performances. Explanatory notes for The Father and Daughter helpfully identify an allusion to a contemporary parlour song as well as a quotation from the aria 'Tears such as tender fathers shed' from Handel's Deborah, sung in the garden of the madhouse by both Agnes, the daughter, and Fitzhenry, her father, who remembers it as a song his daughter used to sing to him, although he no longer recognizes Agnes as that daughter. Supplementary materials also include an English translation of excerpts from Paër's opera, Agnese de Fitz-Henry (1809), based on The Father and Daughter, a libretto by Luigi Buonavoglio, and reviews of English performances of this opera in 1817.

Although the editors offer copious and welcome information about the reception of Opie's texts, they do not provide sufficient information about their own textual critical methods or judgments. They do say that their edition of Dangers of Coquetry is based on the 1790 London edition, the only previous edition, and that their edition of The Father and Daughter is 'based on' the 1801 London first edition. They further say that they have retained original spellings and normalized only long-s and quotation marks. On the basis of these statements, a reader might conclude that the editors offer noncritical editions of the first edition texts of both novels.

However, that is not quite what they have done. I located a first edition of Dangers of Coquetry and a third edition of Fathers and Daughters and collated sections of both against this Broadview edition. From this, it appears that the Broadview editors have made numbers of minor emendations in their copy texts, most of them emendations that a good editor of a critical edition text would make. Yet they have produced texts that fall between the two stools of noncritical and critical editions. Thus, in Dangers of Coquetry their text follows the 1790 to print 'Parsiello,' despite the fact that they recognize that this is 'a typographical error' for 'Paisiello,' but then emends 'solicing' to 'solic[it]ing,' 'recal' to 'recall,' and 'preferred a prayer' to 'proferred a prayer.' Although I agree with the editors' decision not to modernize, it seems a foolish fetishization of the first-edition texts to reproduce readings which they are rightly convinced are errors.

Ideally, one would want a critical edition with at least a list of substantive emendations and a discussion of the relative textual authority of available editions. King and Pierce mention nine editions of The Father and Daughter between 1801 and 1825, with another in 1845, and comment that the novel...