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ELT: VOLUME 34:1, 1991 While both Chesterton and Lewis "felt the riddle of the earth" and Lewis could be "surprised by Joy," the final ecstatic expression may have to remain a riddle and the combination a paradox. The entire coUection wül repay the serious attention of any reader sufficiently interested in the Hterary context of either Chesterton or Lewis. J. Randolph Cox St. Olaf College A PHOTOGRAPHIC RECORD Charles Viney Sherlock Holmes in London: A Photographic Record of Conan Doyle's Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. 240 pp. $24.95 IN HIS TALES of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle not only created the best-known character in EngHsh fiction, but also, as Charles Viney asserts in his introduction, a "portrait of a huge, fog-bound, romantic and sinister city at the apogee of its imperial greatness [which] remains, to this day, extremely convincing and atmospheric." In Sherlock Holmes in London, Viney matches brief passages that mention specific locales for the Holmes stories with over 200 photographs, printed in sepia, taken between 1879 and 1914 in London and its environs. The captions to each photo identify place, then give a key-reference to the late Victorian street maps of London reproduced at the end of the book. Often additional information is given, such as when a buflding was buüt and when demoUshed, who was the architect, and any Hterary, artistic or historical associations affiliated with a buUding. Even when Doyle used a fictitious name, Viney is sometimes able to identify an actual location, for Doyle's descriptions are reaHstic. When the text is matched with the photos, it becomes obvious that Doyle, as he wrote, visuaHzed in his own mind the exact London locations that Holmes and Watson visited in the course of their adventures. The photographs in this coUection are mostly of buüdings, houses and streets; a few are of parks and train stations. The majority are from the 1890s, with a scattering from earHer and later years. The variety in the pictures of buüdings and houses is fascinating, documenting both architectural achievement and architectural eccentricity, often reflecting opulence and magnificence, occasionaUy depicting poverty and decay. The buildings tend to overshadow the human figures and only a few people 100 Book Reviews have distinguishable features and clothing. But the photos show another facet of a world that no longer exists, a world of streets crowded with carts, wagons, omnibuses, hansom cabs, coaches—aU drawn by horses. Though written for and of special interest to the Sherlock Holmes enthusiast, Sherlock Holmes in London is also a fine photographic record of late-Victorian and Edwardian London during almost exactly the period covered by ELT. Edward S. Lauterbach Purdue University Essays on Hardy Lance St. John Butler, ed. Alternative Hardy. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989. xxi + 229 pp. $39.95 ALTERNATIVE HARDY is a patchy coUection of essays, the surface of which is primarily concerned with displaying wide-ranging contemporaneity of critical or ideological approach, and the subtext of which is that things are very much as they were. All trades have their particularized technical vocabulary, which has grown up over time to enable rapid or precise communication of ideas amongst practitioners of the trade; such a vocabulary also comes often to serve the guild-like function of excluding outsiders, non-initiates. This volume is an excellent sample of how swift and fuU is the perpetual growth in the business of accounting for texts of a wide range of subtrades , each with its own particularized vocabulary which aUows initiates to express complex ideas to each other with economy and accuracy, but which also carries the side-effect of excluding those who have not served an apprenticeship in the appropriate sub-trade. Evidence in this volume is provided most vividly in "Hardy's Alternatives in The Woodlanders, Chapter 39" by Henri Quéré and Janie Sénéchal. I have nothing useful to say about this essay because it is unreadable, being written in a language often resembling English, but with its own syntax, vocabulary and sign-system. There are two further French contributors to the volume, and two more who teach or have taught at...

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