Wordsworth’s Bibliographers

Abstract

Review Essay: Wordsworth’s Bibliographers Mark Lafayette Reed. A Bibliography of William Wordsworth: 1787-1930. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2013. cxxvi+1238. $295. W ordsworth bibliography has remained in a curiously unsatisfactory state. Most of the earliest attempts, compiled in the late 19th century, were appendages to collective editions of Wordsworth’s poetry, and these are woefully lacking in the kind of bibliographical detail that booksellers, collectors, and scholars alike depend on.1 Twentieth-century bibliographies of Wordsworth are, on the whole, less unsatisfactory. Wise, Broughton, Patton, Healey, and Metzdorf offer fuller bibliographical de­ scriptions, Healey especially, but in each case the bibliographers compiled catalogues of particular collections—the Ashley Library, the Cornell Wordsworth collection, the Amherst Wordsworth collection, and the Tin­ ker Collection at Yale (Reed xi—xii).2 They were not attempting a comi . The earliest bibliography, “a Bibliography of the successive editions of the Poems which were published in Wordsworth’s lifetime,” was prepared by William Knight for the newly-formed Wordsworth Society in 1882. It was published as “Bibliography ofthe Poems of Wordsworth,” The Transactions oj the Wordsworth Society 1 (1882): 5—16, and contains no physical description, except for the occasional “4to.” or “8vo.” J. R. Tutin’s bibliography was appended to The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. John Morley (Lon­ don and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1888), 897-912 (Reed, 692). Ernest Dowden also included a bibliography in his seven-volume edition of The Poetical Works of William Words­ worth (London: George Bell & Sons, 1892), 7:306—28 (Reed, 782—83). A more comprehen­ sive bibliography was included in William Knight’s The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 8 vols. (London and New York: Macmillan & Co., 1896). It can be found in 8:327-432 (Reed, 829-31). 2. Leslie Nathan Broughton, The Wordsworth Collection Formed by Cynthia Morgan St.John and Given to Cornell University by Victor Emanuel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1931). George Harris Healey, The Cornell Wordsworth Collection: A Catalogue ofBooks and Manuscripts Presented to the University by Mr Victor Emanuel Cornell 1919 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, J957)- Cornelius Patton, The Amherst Wordsworth Collection: A Descriptive Bibliography (Amherst, MA, 1936). Robert F. Metzdorf, The Tinker Library: A Bibliographical Catalogue of the Books and Manuscripts collected by Chauncey Brewster Tinker, Sterling Professor ofEnglish Litera­ ture, Emeritus and Keeper of Rare Books in the Yale University Library (New Haven: Yale Uni­ versity Press, 1959). Thomas J. Wise, A Bibliography of the Writings in Prose and Verse of Wil­ liam Wordsworth (London: privately printed, 1916); Two Lake Poets: a Catalogue of Printed SiR, 53 (Fall 2014) 457 458 BRUCE E. GRAVER prehensive bibliographical study ofWordsworth’s separate printed publica­ tions. To an Americanist, this would seem an almost incomprehensible situation: Americanists have the extraordinary Bibliography ofAmerican Liter­ ature to depend on, as well as fine individual bibliographies for most major American writers. But for scholars trying to study Wordsworth’s publica­ tion and reception history, both in his lifetime and especially in the years after his death, and for collectors and book-dealers trying to determine the rarity and value ofparticular books, there has been no single work to guide them. With the publication of Mark Lafayette Reed’s magnificent new Bibliog­ raphy of William Wordsworth 1787-1930, all that has changed. Over a career of some 50 years, Reed has not been a 250-page-monograph kind of a scholar; instead, he has always published in twos—two volume sets, every two decades. His two-volume Wordsworth Chronology, published in 1967 and 1975, totals 1050 pages; his two-volume edition of the 13-Book Prelude, published in 1991 and the centerpiece of the Cornell Wordsworth, con­ tains over 2350 pages; his two volume Bibliography, the crown upon his life­ time’s efforts, weighs in at something over half that, a mere 1238 pages, not counting the 125 pages of introduction and preliminaries. It is, and will re­ main, a foundational work for Wordsworth scholarship. No one, not even its reviewers, will read it straight through, cover to cover to cover to cover. But anyone serious about how Wordsworth presented himself to the public, or interested in how later publishers and editors...