The Lover’s Watch, or The Art of Making Love by Aphra Behn, and: Incognita by William Congreve, and: Jonathan Wild the Great by Henry Fielding, and: The Rape of the Lock and A Key to the Lock by Alexander Pope (review)

302 uriate in ten to thirteen columns. In the case of the mock-heroic poems, of course, something has to be allowed for their more complex publication histories, which are carefully and clearly set out, and for the great quantity of critical interest they have attracted in recent years. Even in light of these factors, however, the disproportion between the coverage of the mock-epics and Pope’s other major works is probably untenable. It seems particularly odd for this critic, given that his latest book, Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts, is devoted to a study of Windsor-Forest. The Alexander Pope Encyclopedia, however, is an immense achievement, and one that offers a distillation of Mr. Rogers’s years of carefully acquired knowledge. Scholars and students will find in it the background material to appreciate more fully the richness and the resonance of Pope’s writing. Robin Dix University of Durham APHRA BEHN. The Lover’s Watch, or The Art of Making Love. London: Hesperus, 2004. Pp. 94. $13. WILLIAM CONGREVE. Incognita, foreword by Peter Ackroyd. London: Hesperus , 2003. Pp. x ⫹ 82. $13. HENRY FIELDING. Jonathan Wild the Great, foreword by Peter Ackroyd. London : Hesperus, 2004. Pp. ix ⫹ 189. $13.95. ALEXANDER POPE. The Rape of the Lock and A Key to the Lock, foreword by Peter Ackroyd. London: Hesperus, 2004. Pp. ix ⫹ 85. $13.95. Hesperus Press continues to produce handsome, sturdy paperback volumes, part of its design to make serious, if somewhat esoteric, literature available to serious, if somewhat esoteric, readers. Behn is offered without commentary, but Mr. Ackroyd’s three to five-page ‘‘Forewords ’’ in the other volumes suggest that we have not missed anything; Mr. Ackroyd seems intent on becoming the Harold Bloom of Britain, but perfunctory is the word that comes to mind. This is especially true of Jonathan Wild; the work is already available in far more informative textbook editions. Indeed, when one looks at the astonishing scholarly work of Bertrand A. Goldgar and Hugh Amory for the Wesleyan Fielding edition of the work (in volume 3 of Miscellanies ), one might shed a tear over Mr. Ackroyd’s cavalier ‘‘unscholarliness’’; there is something quite ironic in his invocation of ‘‘the Victorian littérateur Edmund Gosse’’ for a description of Congreve passing ‘‘through the literary life of his time as if in felt slippers, noiseless, unupbraiding, without personal adventures .’’ As a twenty-first century littérateur , Mr. Ackroyd passes through the scholarly ‘‘life of his time’’ in much the same fashion. Incognita is also available in a much better edition, edited by A. Norman Jeffares , although the cover design of the Hesperus edition is especially attractive. The extent of Mr. Ackroyd’s engagement with Congreve scholarship is suggested by this comment: ‘‘It also anticipates some of the elements in Congreve’s own drama, not least in . . . his invocation of ‘Providence’ in the most delicate and refined social situations. His is the theology of the drawing room—secrets will come out, and the wicked will eventually be unmasked.’’ Or again, ‘‘Congreve’s scepticism has also been regarded as an element in that vogue for experiment and experimental science that pervaded the 303 period. Such considerations must have a place in a proper reading . . . but only a purblind critic would place them very high.’’ For the littérateur, however, purblind critics cannot compete with grandiloquent certainties: ‘‘It is, in truth, a sophisticated social comedy of manners which prepares the way for the diverse talents of a Thackeray or a Sterne.’’Both authors did write after Congreve, but beyond that the claim seems empty of content . Behn’s The Lover’s Watch (1686) has no modern textbook reprint, but there ought not be any demand for it. This edition , without an editor’s name, has a few endnotes, the first of which is highly deceptive : ‘‘Behn’s The Lover’s Watch was based on La Montre (1666) by Balthazar de Bonnecorse (d. 1706).’’Most scholars would acknowledge that Behn simply translated Bonnecorse’s work, and find inexcusable , even for marketing purposes, the cover blurb that suggests her work is ‘‘interspersed with beautiful—and instructive —verses.’’ A half century after the love poems of Donne and the...