214 claim that Steele’s Letter to a Member ‘‘gains particular force in its absolutely [sic] sincerity.’’ Steele’s genius at manufacturing sincerity goes unexplored. Chapter Six examines the political resonances of Steele’s experience as manager at Drury Lane. Though Lord Clare, later Duke of Newcastle, supported Steele’s parliamentary run and helped him get knighted, he became infuriated when Steele refused to reform the stage and eventually expelled him from his management position. For Mr. Knight, the Newcastle-Steele tensions concern the question of whether the government serves as moral censor or whether the free-market determines what gets staged. However true these contrasts, more can be said about their place in eighteenth-century political theater. A final chapter documents paradoxes in Steele’s behavior: he condemned the Jacobite rebellion but urged clemency once the rebels were brought to trial. He warned against the South-Sea Company’s refinancing scheme, but when the bubble burst, he again urged clemency. That some part of him urgently needed to think well of himself goes unexplored—as does his gift for branding good humor as a chief Whig virtue. Stylistic and typographic infelicities abound. Pickering & Chatto prides itself on producing beautiful books, as the hand sewn binding of this book testifies. Yet there is little point to high standards of material production if editors fail to edit the printed text adequately. This manuscript would have been enriched (and usefully reduced) by revision; changes in narrative purpose or in interpretation need to be synchronized and the many repetitions should have been eliminated. We are told that ‘‘Tatler no. 191 turns specifically to the character of Harley, here figured as Polypragmon.’’ After reviewing alternate interpretations, the author returns to the topic, claiming that Polypragmon ‘‘may be Harley, or he may, as Steele claimed, be a general type (of which Harley may be an instance).’’ Similarly, one page after reading that Lincoln’s Inn Fields ‘‘became, reluctantly and by default, a Tory house,’’ we read again that ‘‘[s]omewhat reluctantly, Lincoln’s Inn Fields became a Tory house.’’ And after reading that Steele’s ‘‘wife had separated from him for several years and died soon after returning,’’ we find on the following page that ‘‘his wife was away in Wales for most of the remaining years of their marriage and died soon after her return.’’ The contest between Newcastle and Steele is recounted on both 168–169 and 187–195. For a 241-page volume, twenty-seven typographical or stylistic errors are too many. This failure of oversight should cause a publishing house to review its editing practices. Anna Battigelli SUNY Plattsburgh JONATHAN SWIFT. English Political Writings 1711–1714[:] The Conduct of the Allies and Other Works, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar and Ian Gadd. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2008. Pp. xxx ⫹ 546. £79; $138.99. We are extremely fortunate that the first volume of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift to appear in print was edited by Messrs. Goldgar and Gadd. The late Mr. Goldgar was a hugely competent and experienced editor who, among other things, contributed the second and third volumes of the Miscellanies, as well as The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register-Office to The 215 Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding. Perhaps equally significant was his first book—a version of his doctoral dissertation supervised by Louis A. Landa— The Curse of Party: Swift’s Relations with Addison and Steele (1961). In this sense, as Mr. Goldgar himself observed in his Acknowledgments, he was ‘‘returning to [his] beginnings,’’ and we reap the scholarly benefit of the wealth of information to be found in his concise but admirably accurate Introduction and his succinct and erudite notes. One of the great strengths of The Cambridge Edition, judging from this first volume, is likely to be the annotations because, apart from scanty Textual Notes, the Blackwell edition of The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, edited by Herbert Davis, was unannotated, with contextual information offered only in the Introductions to each individual volume. I remember speaking to Mr. Goldgar at length about his editorial assignments at the entrance to the Rare Books Room in the British Library...