The Illustration of "Robinson Crusoe" 1719-1920 (review)

122 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:1 caught between his incompatible claims of an "unprecedented originality" and the "exemplary quality of die work, as if its sole function were to illustrate ... a law or truth already written down" (p. 229). The chapter on Fielding exposes the weaknesses in the exemplarity that his fiction seemingly supports, Fielding's "comic talent" often revealing the "singularity" of events that are presumably intended to support "public norms of right and justice" (p. 249). Lamb is particularly concerned with the interactions of Fielding 's fiction and his responsibilities to the law, taking as a central topic the interweaving of a chain of circumstances with larger principles as evidenced in the processes leading to the conviction and condemnation of criminals and the writing of exemplary novels. The outrage of the Jobs who are condemned unjustly is given the sobriquet of "the strangled sublime," which is defined as "the disorderly transport that spends itself in ignorance of prescription or precedent" (p. 252). Lamb's book is packed with subtle analyses and interesting explorations—South Sea voyages, ancient epitaphs, out-of-the-way narratives. I cannot imagine any reader coming away without having received new insight into familiar texts or witiiout having learned a good deal about less familiar ones. I also think that few readers will come away without having experienced considerable irritation. The writing sometimes appears to encircle a point rather than defining it, an approach leading to eloquence and also to obscurity. Sometimes the boundaries of conventional exposition are transgressed in apparent sympathy with the subject matter. But there is so much of interest here that the book will surely be welcomed by most serious readers. Its treatment of the rhetoric of suffering is, I think, capable of leading to fresh approaches in eighteenth and twentieth-century studies , concerned as we are about how to think about the unthinkable and to represent the unparalleled. Everett Zimmerman University of California, Santa Barbara David Blewett. The Illustration of "Robinson Crusoe" 1719-1920. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1995. In association with Oxford University Press. 235pp. $81.50. ISBN 0-901072-67-2. In his sonnet "Illustrated Books and Newspapers" (1846), quoted by David Blewett in the introduction to this fascinating study of the history of illustrating Robinson Crusoe, the elderly Wordsworth condemns the new "backward movement" towards publishing texts accompanied by illustrations: "Avaunt this vile abuse of pictured page!" (p. 16). Wordsworth would surely have deplored the fate of Robinson Crusoe, which has appeared in several hundred illustrated editions: beginning with its first appearance in 1719 and continuing to the present day. From this huge body of material, amounting to tens of thousands of illustrations, Blewett has selected about one hundred for close analysis—concluding, except for a brief epilogue, with an edition of 1920. Each of these illustrations, as important as the text in a work of this kind, is clearly reproduced and fully captioned. A valuable appendix listing the illustrated editions is likewise highly selective , confining itself to editions or translations in which the illustrations are of "historical or artistic interest" (p. 191). The number of illustrations in each edition (over a hundred in some cases) and the titles of the plates are not recorded, but artists and engravers are identified whenever possible, and much useful supplementary information is provided . (No such care, regrettably, has gone into the perfunctory index, apparently the REVIEWS 123 work of a misprogrammed computer, in which page references are often incorrect, and names are misspelled, omitted, or mistakenly duplicated.) Blewett's study provides neither a full bibliography of illustrated Robinson Crusoe editions—a task still to be accomplished—nor an exhaustive historical survey: instead it is distinguished by the quality ofits insights and the astuteness ofits readings of those artists who themselves provide readings of Defoe. Consider, for example, Blewett's fine analysis of illustrations by Stanley Berkeley, one of whose designs, used for the frontispiece of an 1891 edition, depicts a fearless Crusoe shooting a colossal rampant lion. Blewett shows how the "late Victorian fascination with big-game hunting" is here imposed on Defoe's text. Berkeley's depiction of Crusoe shooting a cannibal while astride a prone Friday, similarly, "reflects...