Annual Bibliography of Victorian Studies 1984 ed. by Brahma Chaudhuri, and: George Gissing: A Bibliographical Study by Michael Collie, and: The Waterloo Directory of Irish Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900 Phase II ed. by John S. North

Abstract

R E V IE W S Brahma Chaudhuri, ed., Annual Bibliography of Victorian Studies 1384 (Edmonton: L IT IR Database, 1986). xxii, 515. $65.00 (u.s.) Michael Collie, George Gissing: A Bibliographical Study (Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1985). xiv, 167. £28.00 John S. North, ed., The Waterloo Directory of Irish Newspapers and Peri­ odicals, 1800-igoo Phase I I (Waterloo: North Waterloo Academic Press, 1986). 838. $400.00 Each of these volumes has its distinct virtues. Michael Collie’s single-author bibliography, tracing a professional career and identifying the editions and issues of some thirty major texts, is detailed, lucid, and packed with evidence about the business of writing and publication. John S. North’s voluminous Waterloo Directory guides the reader through the obscure and bewilderingly incoherent mass of periodical literature with remarkable comprehensiveness and skilful cross-indexing. Brahma Chaudhuri’s 1984 volume of the L IT IR Victorian bibliography puts its 5,807 references to secondary studies of that year in reach of scholars with the minimum of delay, and with a systematic format that is quite user-friendly. But though their intentions differ, they each show clearly how biblio­ graphical studies — presenting evidence rather than theoretical constructs — will provide data for a variety of scholarly purposes. Students of Victorian literature, social history, economics, and science will find utility in each of these books. The Victorian temper cannot be defined in isolated segments — aesthetic, philosophical, historical — but must be seen as a universal experi­ ence. Gissing, who strove to catch “working-class aims and capacities” by involvement in the thought-processes of his characters through their daily pressures of living, had a career always balanced on the intersection of art and commerce. A typical Irish journal might have sections on religion, law, politics, poetry, and sport. The Parnellite ran competitions for jokes, the Kerry and Dexter Herd Book gave side-by-side lists of cows and members of E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x iv , i , March 1988 the Royal Dublin Society, the Bodleian Library' (where else?) has copies of the Annual Report of the Dublin Home for Starving Cats. Scholars in the 1980s write on matters such as the fusion of Darwinian biology and the poetic imagination. The L IT IR bibliography contains studies of the Scottish hosiery industry, Crewe as a railway town, and the pioneer years of Van­ couver, as well as on the high arts of belles-lettres. George Gissing: A Bibliographical Study, which amplifies his earlier check­ list for the University of Toronto Press, is the latest in Collie’s distinguished series of Gissing studies. Earlier scholars, such as Pierre Coustillas, had tended to read the novels as autobiography and documentary. Collie leads the generation of scholars who focus on Gissing’s craftsmanship and rhetorical skills. But, as his work shows, Gissing’s always uneasy relationships with pub­ lishers often made his work uneven, his texts far from error-free. Collie pleads well for more textual studies and scholarly editions. Detailed textual analysis of Victorian novels, though, is time-consuming, unglamorous, and (probably) unpublishable, so critics are likely to continue using at best doubtful reprints. A current widely circulated edition of a Gissing novel, for example, claims to “reproduce” the first edition text, though the editor thanks a colleague for “pointing out various errors in the text.” These are not identified, and indeed if they are corrected, then the first edition is not reproduced. Collie’s bibliography will remind us that we need to stay alert against such woolliness. The bibliography presents Gissing’s publishing career in full and scrupu­ lous detail; perhaps too much space is taken up with painstaking transcrip­ tion of modern texts (for example, the nineteen-line “ contents” section for Essays & Fiction, 1970), and more space might be given to comment on the various manuscripts which survive. Such statements as “without evident critical interest,” “with a fair number of corrections and deletions,” “equiva­ lent of some fifty manuscript pages” (when we have no clue to the number of words per page) tantalize rather than inform. While some studies of the manuscripts are referred...