Oxford Reader's Companion to Trollope ed. by R.C. Terry (review)

HUMANITIES 275 The section >Social Commentary on Industrialization= also provides a variety of excerpts that support Gaskell=s sympathetic account of the poverty of Manchester=s labourers. For instance, Foster includes Joseph Adshead=s report, Distress in Manchester. Evidence (Tabular and otherwise) of the State of the Labouring Classes in 1840B42, with its depiction of the squalor in which Manchester=s poor lived. Reading this report enables an assessment of Greg=s claims. Extracts from both Friedrich Engels and Charles Kingsley on Chartism provide differing views on means of obtaining social change. Further, the appendices offer background on a variety of topics in the novel such as prostitution, opium, the needle trade, and emigration. Reading through these various extracts provides a fuller understanding of the debate in the period over the condition of the poor and the issues Gaskell faced in writing the novel. The final section in the appendices contains other contemporary literary expressions of the social problems dealt with by Gaskell. Thomas Hood=s >Song of the Shirt= is an apt inclusion, as are excerpts from Hard Times, Felix Holt, and Shirley. One thing that might be helpful to students would be the inclusion in the bibliography of journal articles on Mary Barton. The bibliography only includes books, and much important work is found in articles, which are often more accessible to students because of their length. (HILDA HOLLIS) R.C. Terry, editor. Oxford Reader=s Companion to Trollope Oxford University Press 1999. xxiv, 624. US $65.00 For those who like B or need B this kind of book, this is the kind of book they=ll like. Generous in scope, sensibly arranged and easy of access, well edited and readable, it is a potential treasure trove. Any reader, whether an undergraduate or graduate student, a lecturer pressed for time, a critic checking the validity of a last-minute generalization but unwilling to read through the entire Barsetshire or Palliser series, and most of all the impassioned amateur who may never get enough of Trollope or about him, will find here a valuable resource. For one thing, among an abundance of diverse information, it offers very full accounts of the forty-seven novels, and certainly realizes the worthy if not altogether unquestionable aim of providing us with >the most extensive reference book devoted to Trollope,= an author, it may surprise the unaddicted, who has never really fallen out of fashion. The entries on >critical opinion of Trollope= B four covering the >contemporary= to >modern= periods and one dealing with the >postmodern= years since 1980 B are exemplary in their thoroughness and concision, and testify to a popularity that has withstood drastic shifts in cultural climate over almost a century and a half. The editor has taken the broadest possible view of his subject and task, addressing through the generally well co- 276 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 ordinated work of many expert contributors the ever-impressive range and diversity of Trollope=s life as prolific writer, man of many parts, and >seismograph of Victorian life.= Amplifying the focus on Trollope, there are also learned entries on such topics as the Church, the law, the press, women, America, and Judaism. Biographical entries for figures like Palmerston , Disraeli, Gladstone, and Bright provide not only information about them, but focus especially on how Trollope reconfigured them, enlisting them, thinly disguised, as secondary but weighty and resonant characters in his novels. In fact, better than any other approach, the integration in alphabetical order of >biographies=of Trollope=s characters with >biographies= of actual figures, of his imaginary geography with real places, of historical topics with fictional ones confirms for any reader ambling along with this >companion= a peculiar sense of parallel worlds. The frisson of delight we can experience in Barchester Towers as Bishop Proudie snuggles down in his study with the latest number of Little Dorrit is slight compared to the almost uncanny sensation of familiarity and strangeness as we turn, say, from the entry >Charles Dickens= B Trollope=s laudatory memorial article in Saint Pauls Magazine B back to the lengthier account under >Dickens, Charles= of his relations with his great rival, the mixed feelings that on other occasions he...