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  • John Betjeman: A Bibliography
  • Kevin J. Gardner
John Betjeman: A Bibliography. By William S. Peterson. (The Soho Bibliographies.) Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2006. xxii + 542 pp. £100. ISBN 0 19 818403 4.

Amassing a bibliography of the writings of John Betjeman is an Everest-scaling feat. As the accomplished bibliographer William S. Peterson shows in this new volume, Betjeman was among the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, maintaining a 'furious pace of literary activity' his entire life, while neglecting to maintain accurate and consistent records of his writings (p. xiii). Betjeman's poetry, a complete and scholarly edition of which has never been undertaken, is vastly overshadowed by his output in journalism and the even more transitory media of radio and television broadcasting. Peterson confesses that even after his twenty years' commitment to the project, built upon the groundbreaking work initiated by the collector Duncan Andrews, the bibliographer Margaret Stapleton (Sir John Betjeman: A Bibliography of Writings by and about him (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1974)), and the compilers Peter Gammond and John Heald (Sir John Betjeman, 1906–1984: A Checklist of Writings by and about him (Guildford: The Betjeman Society, 2002)), a complete and definitive bibliography may never be possible. Nevertheless, this work is impressively thorough and makes a significant contribution to the future of Betjeman scholarship. [End Page 349]

In this first systematic description of Betjeman's primary material, Peterson provides complete bibliographical descriptions of all of Betjeman's books and ephemera (Sections A and AA), his contributions to books and editorships (B and D), as well as musical settings, dramatic adaptations, and recordings (H and I). Peterson's descriptions and enumerations of Betjeman's work in journalism (C), radio (J), and television (K) are exceedingly substantial, containing more than 2,000 citations of periodical publications, more than 350 radio talks, and more than 200 television appearances and films; however, Peterson makes it clear that much has been lost owing to the ephemeral nature of recording scripts and the arcane filing system of the BBC's sound archives. Additional sections of the bibliography enumerate and describe translations (E), lectures (F), interviews (G) (though these are limited, selected for their informative or entertainment value), doubtful attributions (L), unfinished books (M), and unidentified prose (P), as well as some representative works about Betjeman (O). For readers most interested in Betjeman as a poet, there is a substantial section of 'Notes on the Poems' (N), describing every known poem and fragment. A surprisingly large number of Betjeman's published poems have not been reprinted in his Collected Poems (London: John Murray, 2006), and an even larger body of unpublished work remains hidden away in libraries, archives, and private collections in North America and the United Kingdom.

This bibliography is an astonishing record of Betjeman's career as a writer. Peterson's detailed description of the history of the production and reception of each of his books is particularly fascinating. Since the aesthetics of a book was as important to Betjeman as its contents, Peterson goes to great lengths in his descriptions to attend to matters of typography and other issues of design, reproducing some of the more interesting dust wrappers and title-pages. Moreover, Peterson's bibliographical records reveal the frenzied nature of Betjeman's literary life and the seriousness of his professional commitments with even greater force than either of the recent biographers have done (Bevis Hillier, John Betjeman: The Biography (London: John Murray, 2006); A. N. Wilson, Betjeman (London: Hutchinson, 2006)). This points to the primary strength of Peterson's bibliography, which, in its avoidance of technical language and esoteric terminology, is its usefulness to scholars, critics, and students. This bibliography may assist the collector of Betjemaniana, but it is clearly designed to further the serious scholarly attention that Betjeman is just beginning to receive. Future biographers, editors, and critics will have many more texts to consult now as a result of Peterson's magisterial compilation.

No bibliographer's task is ever done, and as Peterson astutely remarks, 'the obstacles to completeness in Betjeman's case are staggering' (p. xiv). This is not simply because he worked so extensively in ephemeral media but also because publication...

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