"Rasselas" and Other Tales (review)

172 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 4:2 and see Fielding in action as a magistrate that we begin to get a larger sense of the man and his life, that we come to understand his writings, his beliefs, and his actions as a product of his own life and struggles. Ira Königsberg University of Michigan Samuel Johnson. "Rasselas" and Other Tales. Ed. Gwin J. KoIb (The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume XVI). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. lxx + 290pp. US$40.00. ISBN 0-300-04451-8. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson is not die longest-lived or the slowest of scholarly projects (die Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi has been in existence far longer), but, in the almost forty years since the original editorial team announced its intentions in the early 1950s, only diirteen volumes have appeared, of which Gwin J. Kolb's edition of Johnson's most popular single writing, Rasselas, with his two allegorical tales, "The Vision of Theodore, die Hermit of Teneriffe" and "The Fountain," is die most recent. Since at least eight more volumes will be necessary to include just die writings which comprised the last complete edition of Johnson's works, Pickering's collection (Oxford, 1825), we will have to wait at least anoüier decade to see die edition dirough. Kolb's edition has been in preparation for several decades; indeed, as one can determine from the text itself, it has been complete since the late 1970s. Kolb's notes and commentary clearly date from no later than the 1970s (he has added just two notes which refer to works published in the 1980s). We even learn, somewhat startlingly, that the edition has been in preparation for so long that KoIb has already published large portions of his excellent introductions and commentary as essays in journals and Festschriften. (KoIb does not point out that the versions of those essays included in his edition are actually truncated; for die fullest expression of his knowledge on Rasselas, we have to consult other sources.) The text of Rasselas, as KoIb points out (pp. lxvii-lx), presents no difficulties, so this edition records almost no textual variants, fewer even than those which the Oxford English Novels edition (London, 1971) of Geoffrey Tillotson and Brian Jenkins prints. Thus the strength of the Yale edition must be its introduction and notes. Without doubt Kolb's introduction is die best anyone has ever written for an edition of Rasselas. There have been many editions, so his achievement is substantial. To be fair, Kolb's editorial format has prevented him from dealing at length with die hundreds of scholia about Johnson's novel; the long delay of his editorial committee in publishing his volume further means mat he has been unable to allude to the substantial body of scholarship on Johnson and Rasselas diat has appeared since 1980. Nor does the Yale Edition's print rubric permit an editor to include a bibliography of secondary materials, abridging the volume's usefulness for scholars and students seeking a definitive guide to Rasselas. A paperback reprint of the volume, if the publisher should consider it, would tiierefore have to be augmented with more scholarly apparatus in order to make it useful to its major constituency. REVIEWS 173 The annotation to Johnson's text also presents problems, if only by virtue of the fact that it is far more copious than anything in any previous volume of the Yale Edition , where die level of annotation has ranged from fairly generous, as in die Prayers and Meditations and Poems, to sparse, as in tile four volumes of Johnson's periodical essays. However rich Kolb's annotation is, it will disappoint readers who seek variorum commentary on well-known passages, for KoIb seems to have followed the rule that no footnote can refer to more than one secondary comment. So for die "streaks of the tulip" passage in chapter 10, a much glossed allusion, KoIb mentionsjust a single article; for the rest of the "Dissertation on Poetry," perhaps die most glossed chapter in the novel, he mentions only one further essay. For the chapter on the astronomer's...