Laurence Sterne. The Letters. Part I: 1739–1764; Part 2: 1765–1768, ed. by Melvyn New, Peter de Voogd (review)

209 sentiments. It is probable that such descriptions draw on the new sense psychology of Locke, Hartley, Hume, and Adam Smith, but, as he notes, Yorick easily juxtaposes that vocabulary with a very precise affirmation of having a soul. In doing so, he is not ‘‘challenging the absolute categorical divisions on which civic humanism is founded,’’ divisions that exist only in the mind of modern analysts, but rather absorbing, as all writers do, the idioms of his age into his moral and aesthetic thinking. WOLLOCH, NATHANIEL. ‘‘The Turkish Spy and Eighteenth-Century British Theriophily,’’ Eighteenth-Century Thought, 4 (Fall 2009), 67–85. Mr. Wolloch, despite reservations, confirms the standard eighteenth-century view of a ‘‘rising sensitivity to animal suffering.’’ His chief piece of evidence is a journalistic seven-volume set of letters known as The Turkish Spy, a collection of pseudo letters written in French by a so-called Islamic ‘‘spy’’ (Mahmut) purporting to reveal the secret politics of Europe between 1684–1694. It was put into English in 1691–1694 by an anonymous Grub-Street philosopher, who was under the influence of the new Enlightenment thinking: ‘‘animals themselves possessed some levels of feeling and rationality, and were therefore entitled to at least a modicum of moral consideration.’’ The anti-theriophily opposition like Descartes and La Mettrie argued that animals possess no reason; they acted mechanically. Johnson thought they were motivated by instinct. A ‘‘committed’’ theriophile, Pope satirized cruelty to animals. Theriophily wins especially in The Turkish Spy, as the Turkish letter writer reveals his vegetarian beliefs and practice . Was there a significant change in human attitudes toward animals at the end of the eighteenth century? Mr. Wolloch sees improvement in the responses to animal suffering. He admits that new forms of animal abuse appeared , but public baiting declined, and most important, there emerged a recognition of pain and suffering. In this magisterial treatment of the topic, it is clear where Mr. Wolloch stands. Arthur J. Weitzman Northeastern University BOOK REVIEWS LAURENCE STERNE. The Letters. Part I: 1739–1764; Part 2: 1765–1768, ed. Melvyn New and Peter de Voogd. Gainesville: Florida, 2009 Vols. VII and VIII. Pp. 464; 416. $75 (each vol.). After more than forty years as an eminent literary scholar and the principal founder of the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, Mr. New, together with his colleague Mr. de Voogd, has provided us with yet another meticulously annotated and carefully presented clean text of this author’s writings that is likely to remain the standard for future generations. In the Introduction, the editors point out that until about 1995 they had not foreseen the necessity of a new edition to replace the fine edition of Sterne’s letters by 210 L. P. Curtis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935). But the discovery of twenty-seven new letters not in Curtis and another nine letters regarding Sterne to be included in an Appendix, as well as the emergence of manuscripts not previously available, prompted the editors to change their minds. In addition, the important biographical research by Arthur H. Cash (Laurence Sterne: The Early and Middle Years [1975] and Laurence Sterne: The Later Years [1986]), besides the new edition of Sterne’s other works, warranted fresh approaches to the letters: ‘‘As with literary criticism in general , the questions we ask of a text will necessarily change over time, and it is rarely if ever a question of totally replacing previous editorial work, but rather of asking (and trying to answer) those questions of most interest to one’s own generation.’’ One biographical method that the editors added to Cash’s work is the use of subscription lists in trying to identify persons referred to in Sterne’s life and writings. Then, too, revisiting the textual problems in each letter sometimes resulted in collating substantive differences between extant versions. Some dozen Sterne manuscripts that reappeared in the twentieth century have obviated Curtis’s texts that were derived solely from transcriptions or printed versions. Finally, as an historian, Curtis occasionally annotated Sterne’s letters in ways no longer relevant to present readers. But whenever the original notes suffice the editors were scrupulous to retain their predecessor’s work intact...