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  • First and Last
  • Janine Barchas
Samuel Richardson. Early Works: “Aesop’s Fables,” “Letters Written to and for Particular Friends,” and Other Works, ed. Alexander Pettit, vol. 1 of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Samuel Richardson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 2012). Pp. civ + 742. $160
Samuel Richardson. Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. Albert Rivero, vol. 2 of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Samuel Richardson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 2011). Pp. lxxxii + 581. 15 ills. $125
Samuel Richardson. Pamela in Her Exalted Condition, ed. Albert Rivero, vol. 3 of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Samuel Richardson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 2011). Pp. lxxxviii + 732. 16 illus. $135

Even if Samuel Richardson still cannot boast of an action figure or a Hollywood blockbuster, he can finally lay claim to a fully annotated, scholarly edition of his collected works. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Samuel Richardson (CEWSR), guided by Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor as general editors, is the first-ever annotated edition of this author’s complete output, including the “securely attributable minor works.” Although five substantial editions of Richardson’s so-called collected works were published between 1811 and 1931 (the last set alone added up to eighteen volumes), all of these efforts focused exclusively on his three major novels, with none receiving any textual apparatus or annotations. Since then, individual novels have been reedited and [End Page 118] smartly annotated in accessible paperback formats (for instance, Angus Ross’s Clarissa and Jocelyn Harris’s Grandison will continue to thrive in the classroom), but a landmark edition of Richardson’s complete works has never before been realized. Even Richardson’s substantial cache of correspondence is promised by Cambridge as forthcoming, with the first volumes of letters to George Cheyne, Thomas Edwards, and Aaron Hill released in February 2014. Richardsonians everywhere can herald a new dawn. But just as surely as CEWSR is a groundbreaking first of great magnitude for Richardson studies, it also signals the beginning of the end for print editions of this sort.

Judging by the first three volumes of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Samuel Richardson, which are impeccably edited by Alexander Pettit and Albert Rivero, this is the ultimate scholarly edition. Already a decade in the making and with many more volumes promised, this edition has everything that the equivalent effort for Jane Austen, as a reviewer in this same journal lamented, lacked. Built upon a bedrock of sound editorial principles (I quibble with one shortcut below), this edition shows evidence of eye-straining work with original texts and a thorough familiarity with the extensive scholarship on Richardson’s dual careers as author and printer. Fastidious to the extreme, and bibliographically fusty to the point of a mesmerizing editorial obsession over dates, advertisements, and word breaks, this edition is a tour de force of editorial consistency and transparency.

Precisely because this edition delivers in spades on editorial rigor and exactness, we might take a good hard look at whether this paper-only style of editorial reproduction is something we should stubbornly continue to demand. In the past, a modern scholarly print edition like this was the litmus test of canonicity. Yet, as Alexander Pettit observes in his introduction for the Early Works, “The idea of a critical edition as monumental now seems quaint” (xxxiv). By this, Pettit means that his Early Works volume firmly fixes decisions about attribution that scholars have come to understand as fluid. Pettit cautiously offers his selections of Richardson’s “first or least orderly steps along the road to canonisation” (xxxi) as an informed representation of the author’s likely early works—judged by the evidence available today. While Pettit is responsibly cautious about fixing Richardson’s oeuvre, I mean to point to still another aspect of the fixity of the modern print edition in our profession.

Textual stability has always been a curiously Richardsonian problem. The complexity of his own editorial interventions and revisions across the multiple editions of his novels, editions in which he reacted to prior readings with tweaks and additional text (forever adding, rarely subtracting), tend to make choices of copy-text the stuff of endless editorial debate. “Numerous versions exist of the...

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