Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century

This annual review of English studies is for the year 2000, a number which may mean something but probably does not. I often think the same thing about my official field, nineteenth-century British literature, and after producing what I view as this monumental annual review of the field, I have still no positive certainties to reach as to the redeeming social value of my and so many others' professional publishing endeavors. I can only say that, while I was surprised at how many traditional kinds of English literary studies are still being written and published (somehow I thought most of them had just gone away, or that you really could not talk any more about the public sociopolitical context of a particular era in nineteenth-century Britain without considering, say, gender), I did find many appealing books, and many of them on subjects I never knew I could care about. I hope that is true for other readers as well.

Editions/letters

Among a continuing plethora of new editions of texts still in print or just gone out of print or of combinations of texts mostly in print, there are some editions this year which do stand out. The Johns Hopkins University Press has come out with the first volume of what will almost certainly be the standard in Shelley scholarship, The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, volume 1, beautifully edited by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. What is so special about this edition, as we can see in this volume of Shelley's early writing, is that it presents the poems in their historical context, which turns out to mean so much more than the phrase usually does. We see not only the traditional drafts and revisions but also thorough discussions of publication histories, origins, influences, and receptions by Shelley's contemporaries. It is more than a reader hopes for in editorial scholarship. Nearing the end of its monumental efforts, the Cornell Wordsworth series marches on, with yet another carefully researched and edited volume, this of William's Last Poems, 1821-1850, which, as the editor, Jared Curtis, explains, does not mean all the last poems but those that do not fit into categories contained in other volumes. Another new volume in a familiar series is Victor A. Neufeldt's fine edition of The Works of Patrick Branwell Brontë, volume 3, 1837-1848, continuing to remind us of how much this overlooked Brontë had produced. Yet another ongoing effort committed to offering a complete canon of the best-edited texts is the Thackeray project, and its latest entry is The Luck of Barry Lyndon: A Romance of the Last Century, edited by Edgar F. Harden and including an excellent historical introduction. And finally, as part of the Thomas Carlyle series, there is Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three Books, with introduction and notes by Rodger L. Tarr and text established by Mark Engel and Tarr. This edition is particularly notable for its use of all extant versions to establish a definitive text. It even has the Modern Language Association's seal as "An Approved Edition," happily reminding me of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

Thankfully, there are several new editions that are not part of a series on a famous nineteenth-century man. A new edition of works that have been hard to find is Gore on Stage: The Plays of Catherine Gore, edited by John Franceschina and offering an impressive range of Gore's work. Ian Haywood has edited the second of a three-volume edition on Chartist Fiction, this one offering two works that have previously been published only in their initial appearances in Chartist newspapers, Thomas Doubleday's The Political Pilgrim's Progress and Thomas Martin Wheeler's Sunshine and Shadow. The most unusual or specialized edition is the five-volume edition of Parodies of the Romantic Age: The Anti-Jacobin, edited...