The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. In which are included, Memoirs of a Lady of Quality by Tobias Smollett (review)

Third billing among the editors listed on the title page of this, the final volume in the Georgia edition of the works of Tobias Smollett, is given to the late O M Brack, Jr., but his spirit looms large over this particular volume and the Smollett project as a whole. Fittingly, the Georgia Peregrine Pickle is dedicated in part to Brack's memory, and there is an affecting description of his work on the textual collation during his final "illness and treatments for illness, remissions, and the final recurrence of the disease" that took his life while the text was being prepared for the press. The edition is a collaborative one, Mr. Zomchick having taken on the work of annotation begun by Mr. Rousseau in that far-off era before word-processing and digitized, searchable texts; and Mr. Keithley having assisted with the textual editing. Indebtedness to Smollettians past and present is also justly recorded, among them Lewis M. Knapp, James L. Clifford, Paul-Gabriel Boucé, Robert Adams Day, Jerry Beasley, and Alexander Pettit.

The editors have made the sound decision to follow Clifford's 1964 Oxford World Classics Peregrine Pickle in using the first edition of the novel (1751) as the basis for their text. As Mr. Brack observes in his commentary, while editorial practice up to about the middle of the last century preferred the last lifetime or first posthumous edition of a given work, it would sacrifice Smollett "at his creative best" if the second or a subsequent edition were adopted. The first edition also reflects "the larger cultural contexts" of the novel's composition, specifically Smollett's bitter disappointment at the rejection of his play The Regicide and his resentment of "enemies real and imagined" in the literary world, including David Garrick, Henry Fielding, George Lyttelton, and Joseph Quin. The 1751 Peregrine Pickle is "an angry book written by an angry young man whose sense of injured merit drove him to describe his world as he felt it"—and it is stronger and more interesting for that raw anger than the later, safer editions, which excised much of the vituperation. There is, in any event, a good account in the introduction to the Georgia volume of the second-edition revisions and Smollett's later softening of attitudes toward his literary foes. The reader can also use the "Historical Collation" to see how Smollett dealt in 1758 with the criticism that he had gone too far in 1751. The textual apparatus in the Georgia Pickle appears to be impeccable, its underlying policy sensible. (One might question, however, the silent emendation of all instances of "goal"—a frequent variant in the eighteenth century—to "gaol," which may impose a modern consistency otherwise absent in the original.)

A very attractive feature of the Georgia Pickle is its choice of illustrations. There are four frontispieces after drawings by Henry Fuseli for the fourth (and first illustrated) edition of 1769, the only illustrations by the artist for a work of fiction. More interesting still are drawings by Thomas Rowlandson, now at William & Mary, for an edition said to have been published in 1796 but which the Georgia editors have been unable to trace. The annotations to the text go considerably beyond those of the Clifford edition in providing meanings for words, especially the nautical terms which abound, and in identifying allusions, historical personages, and events.

The introductory material, by Messrs. Zomchick and Rousseau, provides a useful account of the composition and publication of the novel, and an even-handed account of the questions and controversies that have surrounded ("bedeviled" might be a better word) the authorship of its two long interpolated tales, the "Memoirs of a Lady of Quality" (about Viscountess Vane) and the material about Daniel MacKercher and James Annesley...