Christina Rossetti: A Descriptive Bibliography (review)

This book both impresses and depresses. Maura Ives, currently Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University, has evidently given many years to the study of Christina Rossetti and has spent a good part of that time examining the books and ephemera published under Rossetti’s name and recording bibliographical data. The book in hand consists of five main sections, preceded by a generally well-written and thoughtful introduction and succeeded by three useful indices. The five sections provide descriptions of ‘Books and Separate Works’ (Section A, occupying nearly half the book), ‘Appearances in Books’ (Section B), ‘Appearances in Periodicals’ (Section C), ‘Hymnals and Poems Set to Music’ (Section D) and ‘Translations, Printed Ephemera, and Rossettiana’ (Section E). There is also a sixteen-page, colour-plate section in the middle of the volume.

What immediately impresses about the bibliography are the levels of research, transcription, and structural thought that have been undertaken. The author has considered very carefully the best manner in which to present her data and, no doubt after many experiments and restructurings, has come up with excellent formulae for the entries in all sections (and especially in the important and lengthy Section A). She has transcribed title-pages, poem titles, and running titles, and has recorded paginary and collation formulae, contents, and descriptions of bindings with an eye for detail and considerable effort. The book quickly depresses the reader, however, as it becomes evident that the results of all this scholarly effort have been presented in a most unpolished, imprecise, and inconsistent manner. This is all the more unfortunate, given the wonderfully good intentions and immense hard work that shine through the tattered curtain of the text.

What has gone wrong? Many of the book’s problems would have been evident to the author on a careful reading and could have been corrected at proof, so that one suspects a failure at the proof-reading stage. There are a great many cases of incompleteness (in almost all the contents’ lists, for example, which omit mention of many pages whose contents might be inferred, and on p. 52 where ‘blank’ is rendered only as ‘b’) suggestive of an authorial intention to expand and perfect the text later. Many transcriptions are inaccurate, especially where small capitals are concerned, again suggestive of a typographical refinement that the author intended to add, or at least correct, after the book had been typeset. Collation and paginary formulae are similarly imperfect, and the noble structure that the author proposes in her introduction has not been adhered to throughout. Spacing, capitalization, and punctuation are chaotic, and the author has failed to sustain her rule of preceding each element of the ‘Contents’ with a semicolon and succeeding each page number with a colon.

Ives has adopted two very sensible conventions: firstly that quotations in single inverted commas are quasi-facsimile, while those in double inverted commas are textual only; and secondly that inferred pagination is underlined, while page numbers that cannot be inferred or form separate unnumbered sequences are given within square brackets. The latter convention has gone awry repeatedly, however, and many numerals that should be underlined are not, and vice versa. The format of dates is variable (on p. 40 dates are presented in three different ways within a few lines) and bibliographical terminology is inexact; the author speaks of ‘woodcut engravings’ (p. 34), ‘engraved title’ (p. 36), and ‘woodcuts’ (p. 44) when all should correctly have been called wood-engravings, repeatedly refers to leaves as pages (especially where cancellation is concerned), and has considerable trouble distinguishing between impressions and issues (she also uses ‘alternate’ when she means alternative and says ‘harkened back’ (p. 2), solecisms that a Professor of English would surely pick up when proof-reading). Among references between entries very few cite item numbers, and there are no references at all to the colour plates, suggesting that the author intended to add these later but did not have...