YES,3I, 200I YES,3I, 200I 26I 26I own predicament as a marriedwoman who is non-existent in law. Other interesting contributions include Linda Peterson's reassessment of the relationship between BarrettBrowning and Letitia Landon, Cheryl Walkers'sdiscussion of the increasingly popular critical concern with violence in women's poetry, and Isobel Armstrong'sthoughtful if rather over-compressed essay theorizing codes of affect and politics in nineteenth-centurywomen's poetry. While many of the other pieces are useful, providing introductions to forgotten or less well-known figures such as Adelaide Proctor, Laurence Hope, Emily Pfeiffer,and the Indian poets Toru Dutt and SarojiniNaidu, I would have welcomed more extensive treatmentof questions of value, aesthetics, and pleasure. Personally,I find Stuart Curran'sassertion that the question 'Is it any good?' 'is not an aesthetic but an ideological question [... ] predicated on a gendered aesthetic code whose integers are arbitrarilyrestrictedto a nostalgic reification of male experience' (Enlightenment, p. I47) annoyingly reductive. Again, some of these issues seem bound up with the question of literary tradition. Kathleen Hickok stipulatesthat several of Emily Pfeiffer'spoems should be read alongside Pre-Raphaelitepoems by D. G. Rossetti and Morris,but many of the passagesshe quotes seem derivativeof poems by Keats, Coleridge, Rossetti, and Morrisand appearthin by comparison. Finally I have to say that both books are disfiguredby a disturbingnumber of misprintsand minor errors.This does seem unacceptablein such expensive books. QUEEN MARY AND WESTFIELD COLLEGE, LONDON CATHERINE MAXWELL TheNineteenth-Century HistoryofEnglishStudies. Ed. By ALANBACON.(The Nineteenth Century) Aldershot, Brookfield, VT, and Singapore: Ashgate. 1998. x+ 32I pp. ?45Providence andLove.Studies in Wordsworth, Channing, Myers,George Eliot,andRuskin.By JOHNBEER. Oxford: Clarendon Press. I998. xv + 335 PP. ?45. What is English Literature, and how did the English come to study it? At a time when names asillustriousasMaryShelleyand ElizabethGaskellhavebeen removed from the list of recommended authors for the National Curriculum,and when the newly appointed Poet Laureate, himself an academic, has stated his aim as investigating'whatit means to be English',these questionsimpressthemselvesonce again. There are few better ways of considering them than by reading through the foundation documents of our discipline:the manifestos, submissions,and brickbats of the century which gave the subject birth. Alan Bacon's meticulously edited volume enables us to do this by bringingtogether lectures, committee proceedings, and letters spanning one hundred years. English, we are reminded, was conceived as a decent, bracing disciplinefor middle-classboys, and more especially girls,and an alternative to upper-class Classics. It was to constitute an education of the sensibility (much as the philologists might carp), a way for students of this social echelon to situate themselves in relation to country and Empire. Despite these outmoded and (even then) divisivepurposes, it is instructiveto note the prescience of the debate. In 1887 William Morriswrote to ThePallMall Gazette to oppose the setting up of a Merton Professorshipin English at Oxford. 'The result',he warned, 'would be merely vague talk about literature, which would teach nothing. Each succeeding professor would strive to outdo his predecessor in "originality" on subjectswhereon nothing remainsto be said. Hyper-refinementand paradoxwould be the order of the day, and the younger studentswould be confused by the literary polemics which would be sure to flourisharound such a Chair' (p. 275). Are bells, by any chance, ringing? own predicament as a marriedwoman who is non-existent in law. Other interesting contributions include Linda Peterson's reassessment of the relationship between BarrettBrowning and Letitia Landon, Cheryl Walkers'sdiscussion of the increasingly popular critical concern with violence in women's poetry, and Isobel Armstrong'sthoughtful if rather over-compressed essay theorizing codes of affect and politics in nineteenth-centurywomen's poetry. While many of the other pieces are useful, providing introductions to forgotten or less well-known figures such as Adelaide Proctor, Laurence Hope, Emily Pfeiffer,and the Indian poets Toru Dutt and SarojiniNaidu, I would have welcomed more extensive treatmentof questions of value, aesthetics, and pleasure. Personally,I find Stuart Curran'sassertion that the question 'Is it any good?' 'is not an aesthetic but an ideological question [... ] predicated on a gendered aesthetic code whose integers are arbitrarilyrestrictedto a nostalgic reification of male experience' (Enlightenment, p. I47) annoyingly reductive. Again, some of...