The Correspondence of Dr John Arbuthnot, ed. by Angus Ross

126 something I had not yet seen or imagined. Ms. Wall reveals the hidden lives and mechanics of objects in the eighteenth-century novel, showing readers that Defoe’s things are objects of pleasure, not just description or exchange, or that objects in eighteenth-century novels tend not to exist until the moment a character calls them into narrative action. The Prose of Things should become standard reading for those interested in the history of the novel, the rhetoric of description, and the tropes of ekphrasis. It is beautifully researched, its insights are keen, and its prose round and satisfying. G. Gabrielle Starr New York University BOOKS BRIEFLY NOTED* The Correspondence of Dr John Arbuthnot , ed. Angus Ross. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006. Pp. 547. £128. Arguably, of all the Scriblerians, Arbuthnot has been least well-served by modern scholarship. We have benefited from scholarly editions of the collected works of Swift, Pope, and Gay for many years, and the University of Delaware Press published Claude Rawson and F. P. Lock’s edition of The Collected Poems of Thomas Parnell in 1989. In contrast , although a scholarly edition of Arbuthnot ’s ‘‘John Bull’’ pamphlets by Alan W. Bowers and Robert A. Erickson appeared under a Clarendon Press imprint in 1976 as Law is a Bottomless Pit, the most recent edition of his works, G. A. Aitken’s Life and Works of John Arbuthnot, dates from 1892. A proper scholarly edition of Arbuthnot’s Correspondence ‘‘edited and annotated according to historicist principles’’ is therefore particularly welcome. The volume is divided into three. Part I consists of a ‘‘Textual Note,’’ a ‘‘Note on the Name ‘Arbuthnot’’’—which explains that although Arbuthnot spelled *Unsigned reviews are by the editors. his name ‘‘Arbuthnott,’’ it consistently appeared as ‘‘Arbuthnot’’ in his printed works, and that it was pronounced either Arbuthnot or Arbuthnot—a ‘‘Table of Letters,’’ and an important ‘‘Biographical Introduction’’ devoted to the correspondence , in which Mr. Ross adds what he modestly describes as a ‘‘fair amount of new information’’ to what is known about Arbuthnot’s life. Most of this new information derives from the large number of unpublished letters in this edition. Out of the 200 letters collected in Part II—98 from Arbuthnot, 102 to Arbuthnot—exactly half are printed for the first time. The biggest single haul consists of 55 letters from James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, copied from the letter-book preserved in the Stowe MSS in the Huntington Library . Noting that his previous biographers , Aitken and L. M. Beattie, do not even mention Chandos’s name, Mr. Ross understandably describes the letters as ‘‘invaluable for the new light they throw on the life of Arbuthnot.’’ ‘‘For the years 1731 and 1732, they are so frequent that they give a good weekly picture of Arbuthnot’s agency in some of the Duke’s projects.’’ I suspect that, for most readers, the 127 prime attraction of Mr. Ross’s edition is that it gathers the correspondence, including Arbuthnot’s letters to and from Swift and Pope, in one place for the first time. While these can of course be found in Sherburn’s and Williams’s and Woolley’s editions of Pope’s and Swift’s Correspondence, respectively, a different perspective on these letters opens up when they are read in the context of Arbuthnot ’s other correspondence. Readers of the Scriblerian will also want to read what Mr. Ross has to say in the sections on ‘‘The Arbuthnot-Swift Letters’’ and ‘‘The Arbuthnot-Pope Letters’’ in Part III, a ‘‘Dissertation’’ in which, in six chapters, he not only explains the rationale behind his edition, but considers the letters as ‘‘Literary Documents’’ and discusses the ideas expressed in them in detail. J. A. Downie Goldsmiths College, London The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding, ed. C. J. Rawson. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2007. Pp. xv ⫹ 202. $85; $29.99 (paper). This Companion includes an Introduction and Mr. Rawson’s essay, ‘‘Fielding’s Style,’’ plus eleven ‘‘specially -commissioned’’ pieces on Fielding ’s life, his theatrical career, his individual prose fictions, his periodical journalism, his relations with female authority , his social pamphlets, and his critical reputation. The Companion is satisfyingly complete and remarkably uniform. None...