Scott & British Publishing

ELT 43 : 3 2000 There is, too, the problem of Ford Madox Ford's Joseph Conrad, A Personal Remembrance. Whatever one makes of impressionism, it is difficult to comprehend this book. Is it supposed to help the critic to consider it a novel, not a biography, as Bender sometimes does? If we are interested in Conrad, does it help us to read Ford's impressions of their collaborations —when we can see that some of them are factually wrong, and we are left worrying in the dark about the others? (Not that one can subscribe to Bender's belief that Jessie Conrad's attack on Ford's book accounts in no small measure for the decline in Ford's literary stock: who paid that much attention to her views after Ford's death in 1939?) And Brontë serves mainly (or merely?) as a context for the discussion of Rhys's "prequel" to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea. That novel, according to Bender, renders an impression in the reader's mind which undoes , so to speak, the previous impression or perception the reader had oÃ- Jane Eyre since the central characters—especially Rochester—are depicted so differently (yet accurately to history). Why this rearrangement of the reader's impression (if in fact it exists) is different from that achieved by new criticism is not so easily grasped. Has not Achebel's reading of "Heart of Darkness" changed Conrad's story just as much for many readers—though by no means all There are, additionally, minor quibbles to register. Bender uses his and Garland's concordances when quoting from the novels, rather than standard texts. Still, for a necessary and helpful discussion of impressionism and a corrective to a good bit of loose talk, this scholarly analysis is welcome. Bender much more cogently than Ford himself "suggests ... that the idea of 'literary impressionism' offers a coherent explanation rooted in the thought of Locke, Hume, Conte, Zola, Flaubert, Bergson, Cezanne, and Seurat for the augmented power Rhys creates in her revision , her revisioning of Jane Eyre." But even more the book does away with passive readings of novels and offers a coherent revisioning of the concept of impressionism as it, impressionism, produces in the reader "an authentic involvement in experiencing the work." Bruce Harkness __________________ Kent State University Scott & British Publishing John R. Turner. The Walter Scott Publishing Company: A Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. xxii + 626 pp. $100.00 354 BOOK REVIEWS THIS EXTENSIVE RECORD of books issued from 1882 to 1927 by the Walter Scott Publishing Company is a significant addition to the annals of British publishing. Over the years there has been considerable research done on the growth of various publishers in both England and the United States, with histories of several firms written, but almost without exception these do not include bibliographical details of the books issued by them. The present volume is in many ways a pioneering effort to provide such a record of a vast number of publications as it details the majority of the volumes produced by a single company. Previous to the appearance of this study by John B. Turner, little of either a historical or bibliographical nature has been written about the Scott firm, one of the most prolific British publishing companies of the late nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries, nor about Walter Scott (1826-1910), the man who headed it. Oddly enough he was not primarily interested in books and had little formal education, but by his own efforts had become a successful builder and contractor, becoming almost by accident an important publisher. In his concise introduction Turner explains that Scott's contracting firm had constructed a new factory for the Tyne Publishing Company, successor to Adam and Company of Newcastle-on-Tyne, and when the new firm expanded too rapidly , sinking into debt and facing bankruptcy, Scott as mortgagee took over the business. Knowing little or nothing of publishing he appointed a dynamic Scotsman, David Gordon, as manager and under the latter's skillful guidance the business was revitalized and flourished. In addition to continuing to offer the Tyne titles, various series of reprints of popular classics...