Gulliver’s Travels and Other Writings, Complete Text with Introduction, Historical Context Critical Essays by Jonathan Swift (review)

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 Cavaliers , we have this: ‘‘All calm and silent is the grove, / Whose shading boughs resist the day; / Here thou mayst blush and talk of love, / While only winds, unheeding , stay, / That will not bear the sound away: / While I with solemn awful joy / All my attentive faculties employ .’’ Bonnecorse’s work is at best a clever idea slightly executed; Behn’s translation of it is not worth reprinting. Finally, the edition of The Rape of the Lock invaluably includes Pope’s very humorous ‘‘Key’’ (1715) and the two-canto 1712 version of the poem. Mr. Ackroyd’s notes are useful if somewhat mundane, but above all the edition of the three texts reminds us of three valuable lessons about Pope. First, while his writings need annotation to make them fully accessible to the modern reader, Pope’s power, wit, and elegance shine through without editorial assistance. Second, Pope had an almost unerring ear (and brain) for improving his own work; far from diminishing the Rape by expanding it (the usual, if paradoxical, outcome of authors reworking themselves), the 1714 version, when put in this close proximity to the 1712 version, is, if not pure alchemy , at least the conversion of silver into gold. Third, while Pope is not quite the genius in prose satire that Swift is, he is nonetheless very good indeed. If the political satire centering on the Barrier Treaty has lost its bite after 290 years, the parody of bad reading is as fresh as ever. In our age of signature, for example , could even the most avid Derridean outdo this: ‘‘Steel did the labours of the gods destroy, / And striked to dust the imperial towers of Troy. . . . Here he most impudently attributes the demolition of Dunkirk . . . to the frequent instigations of his friend Mr. Steele—a very artful pun to conceal his wicked lampoonery’’? And who will not admire this brilliant unraveling of the hegemonic imperialistic tendencies of the Roman Catholic Church in Pope’s tainted hands: ‘‘Ariel himself shall be the guard of Shock. So St Anthony presides over hogs, etc.’’? Of the four titles reviewed, clearly this is the one most happily conceived and of most use to Scriblerians. Melvyn New University of Florida JONATHAN SWIFT. Gulliver’s Travels and Other Writings, Complete Text with Introduction , Historical Context Critical Essays, ed. Clement Hawes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Pp. 448. $9.95. The past decade has seen at least five 304 new editions of Gulliver’s Travels, beginning with Christopher Fox’s useful edition for Bedford/St. Martin’s in 1995. That was followed by Paul Turner’s Oxford Classics edition in 1998, Albert Rivero ’s Norton Critical edition in 2002, Robert De Maria’s 2003 Penguin edition, and now another New Riverside Edition, edited by Mr. Hawes. Of these, De Maria and Mr. Hawes may be said to have reached a new plateau in understanding Swiftian satire, one not previously achieved in any of the important Swiftian monographs mentioned in their select bibliographies. DeMaria’s brilliant and elegant Introduction to his edition (reprinting the 1726 text) offers a particularly judicious encouragement for undergraduate and general audiences to read Swift. He modestly...