Letter

Abstract

99 CHILD’S PLAY In Newsweek, January 21, 2008, Jon Scieszka, the first ‘‘children’s literature laureate ’’ ever so designated, and the author of ‘‘Stinky Cheese Man,’’ and ‘‘The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs,’’ listed his ‘‘five most important books.’’ Number Two on the list was Tristram Shandy, about which he writes, ‘‘My own book ‘Stinky Cheese Man’ owes a ton to this quixotic, convoluted narrative.’’ Number Three on the list was Thomas Pynchon ’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Numbers One, Four, and Five were books for children. FROM THE SHANDEAN In volume 17 (2006) of the Shandean, are several brief notes of interest. Accepting the challenge thrown out by an overly skeptical critic that no one has ever seen a drawing on the blank page provided by Sterne in volume VI of Tristram Shandy, David A. Brewer notes a copy in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand, where a reader accepted Sterne’s invitation to draw the Widow Wadman; and, in a second note, Brigette Friant-Kessler locates a second drawing in the BL (shelfmark 1509/3513). Both illustrations are reproduced—one a very faint caricature, the other, a ‘‘rather poorly executed pencil drawing of a female subject but with strikingly masculine features .’’ As Mr. Brewer notes, the exception (s) in this case may amply prove the rule. Also in this issue are 95 lines from an epic adaptation of Tristram Shandy by Irving Washington, of Forest City, Iowa, submitted to a local poetry journal, the Grub Street Grackle, a week before the author’s death on April 1, 2006. This information is gathered from prefatory remarks submitted by Amos Hunt, the journal’s editor—the Shandean gives no hint of the probability that Mr. Hunt is to Irving Washington as Sterne is to Tristram Shandy (April 1!). At any rate, the poem is said to run to 20,000 lines and will be made available (serially, we assume) at grubstreetgrackle.com. A brief sample here will suffice, a passage based on Obadiah’s ‘‘eight knots’’ securing Dr. Slop’s bag of obstetrical instruments: . . . And is there not in this an allegory fitted to the case? For Laurence Sterne had nothing else in mind in his derangement of chronology but preservation of the human right to be amused. The number of the knots may also signify, for 8 is shaped as knotted rope, and also, on its side, is the sign of the eternal length of time for which Sterne doomed the fullness of his tale to suffer, prisoned in its tortured form. LETTER To the Editors: In a letter to the Scriblerian (40, Nos. 1 & 2, Autumn 2007–Spring 2008) about textual problems in The Political History of the Devil (1726), Irving N. Rothman—one of the two editors of this work in the Stoke Newington Daniel Defoe Edition—criticises the edition in the Pickering & Chatto Works of Daniel Defoe, of which we are the General Editors, for adopting an emendation in the second edition (1727). The first edition reading of the passage in question refers to ‘‘one imperial Devil, Monarch or God of the whole clan of Hell.’’ In the second edition, ‘‘God’’ is changed to ‘‘King.’’ We are baffled by Rothman’s reproach, because in fact the Pickering & Chatto text edited by John Mullan (London, 2005) follows the first edition reading (see p. 46). Moreover, in his Textual Notes, Mullan cites this very passage as one in which the changed reading of the second edition ‘‘seems decidedly inferior, and unlikely to be authorial’’ (p. 325). W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank The Open University Irving Rothman replies: With regard to my statement in the Scriblerian (40, Nos. 1 & 2, Autumn 2007– 100 Spring 2008, 207), the paragraph in question should have read as follows: The editor must ocasionally use his judgment. The first edition speaks of ‘‘one imperial Devil, Monarch or God of the whole clan of Hell;’’ (Stoke Newington, p. 17; Pickering & Chatto, p. 46). The second edition diction changes ‘‘God’’ to ‘‘King,’’ which is a synonym of ‘‘Monarch’’ and simply repeats the term as a tautology. We think that Defoe was being ironic in his progression from the most undesirable personal to...