London Edition Research Articles

Packing them in

Mike Hale reports from the London edition of Specsavers' MiniPac 2024 conferences

Pricing and Competition in Early London Editions of Robinson Crusoe, 1719–1747

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From the Editor

From the Editor Dominic Rainsford Whether David Copperfield was the hero of his own life is a matter for inexhaustible debate–for him and the rest of us. He is now, however, the hero of his own issue of Dickens Quarterly. This has happened, like so many things in life, quite by chance. In other words, this is an "unofficial" special issue. While Bleak House has been, for some time, the most written-about Dickens novel, it is very good to see that Dickens's "favourite child" also continues to attract strong interest, resulting in essays of the caliber of those included here, all of which, I think, have something new and important to say about the novel. Like almost all of Dickens's writing, Copperfield has the paradoxical merit of being both sweet and disturbing, as we can see in the two pictorial interpretations of David meeting Betsey Trotwood shown below: the first by Phiz, in a delicately tinted version; the second by the obscure Danish modernist and Aunt Betsey-obsessive, Christian Kongstad Petersen.1 [End Page 5] Click for larger view View full resolution "I make myself known to my aunt". Frontispiece by Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz") to David Copperfield, London Edition, Caxton Publishing Company, undated, c. 1900. [End Page 6] Click for larger view View full resolution Christian Kongstad Petersen (1862–1940), David Copperfield opsøger sin tante, Miss Betsey Trotwood i Dover (David Copperfield Seeks out his Aunt, Miss Betsey Trotwood, in Dover), pen and ink, scraped paper, 421 x 313 mm, 1925 and 1927; The Royal Collection of Graphic Art, National Gallery of Denmark, KKS1992-156. [End Page 7] Dominic Rainsford Aarhus University Footnotes 1. For many more reproductions of Kongstad Petersen's Dickens-inspired art, see my article on him in Dickens Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 4 (2017). Copyright © 2023 The Dickens Society

Роман Натаниэля Готорна «The Scarlet Letter» в творческом сознании И. С. Тургенева: от чтения к интерпретации

The paper addresses the problem of Ivan Turgenev’s perception of the literary work of Nathaniel Hawthorne. For the Russian writer, the turn of the 1840s and the 1850s was a time of crisis of artistic manner. During a period of intense creative reflection, the writer came across Hawthorne’s novel “The Scarlet Letter” with its blend of romantic and realistic traits of the characters. It was the London edition (1852), its pages still bearing nail and pencil marks revealing a sensitive perception and understanding of the romantic world of puritan Boston and the ways of its artistic recreation. The Russian writer discovers the image of Esther and the pictures of nature intended to reveal her character. In addition, Turgenev acquires the author’s complex allegory embracing the images of Pearl and the letter “A.” The marks on the pages of The Scarlet Letter trace a creative perception of the novel manifested when Turgenev worked on “Rudin” (1856). The pages of Turgenev’s first novel provide a picture of Russian reality, with important questions about the social and spiritual life of society being addressed. This prioritization reflects the impact of “The Scarlet Letter”. “Rudin” echoes Hawthorne’s novel, both in the general framing of the moral and philosophical issues and the specificity of the main characters.

To be or not to be is not a matter of compromise

To be or not to be is not a matter of compromise

Rumbold,Valerie. Swift in Print: Published Texts in Dublin and London, 1691– 1765

Rumbold,Valerie. <i>Swift in Print: Published Texts in Dublin and London, 1691– 1765</i>

Scribleriana Transferred: Portraits, Manuscripts, and Books, 2020–2022.

Scribleriana Transferred: Portraits, Manuscripts, and Books, 2020–2022.

E. B. Neill and Moby-Dick

The brief, but positive notice of Moby-Dick or The Whale, as the London edition was titled, that appeared in the 20 October 1851 issue of the Morning Herald has long been considered the book’s earliest review, but the weekly Liverpool Albion published a review of The Whale the same day. It forms part of that week’s instalment of ‘Metropolitan Gossip’, the regular column by London correspondent E. B. Neill. Published anonymously, ‘Metropolitan Gossip’ was the best-loved feature of the Albion, the part, according to newspaper historian James Grant, ‘to which its readers invariably turned on opening the paper’.1 Neill’s glowing review of The Whale reflects his fine literary sensibilities. The book’s eponymous whale, Neill wrote, is ‘the most fascinating of leviathans, being the property of that nautical Prospero, Herman Melville, whose Typee, Omoo, Mardi, and especially Redburn, have rendered him so great a favourite in Liverpool that everything of his is there seized on with acclamation’. More than an allusion to The Tempest, the name ‘Prospero’ is a blason populaire that means a person who is capable of magic or who has the ability to influence the behaviour of others without their knowledge.2 Calling Melville a ‘nautical Prospero’, Neill offered high praise, implying that Melville wielded his pen like a magic wand. His prose casts a spell over his readers.

Los dibujos de John Gilbert para el Quijote. Modelo iconográfico para la decoración de las lozas de la Real Fábrica de Sargadelos

La Real Fábrica de Sargadelos (Cervo-Lugo), uno de los centros cerámicos de referencia en el panorama industrial del siglo XIX en España, introdujo en su tercera etapa (1845-1862) una nueva serie decorativa en la que el motivo principal reproducía, mediante la técnica de estampación, distintas escenas del Quijote. Considerada por muchos como una de las más interesantes de su producción, utilizaron como modelo iconográfico para su elaboración los dibujos que el pintor e ilustrador inglés John Gilbert (1817-1897) realizó para una edición londinense de la novela publicada por Charles Daly en 1842. Como ejemplo de esta variante se conservan en la actualidad un número de piezas que no supera las noventa entre colecciones particulares e instituciones públicas, destacando en el segundo caso el Museo de Pontevedra con diez ejemplares.

ТЕКСТ И ОБРАЗ: РАЗГОВОР НА РАЗНЫХ ЯЗЫКАХ (КНИЖНАЯ ГРАФИКА ОСКАРА ПЛЕТЧА В ГЕРМАНИИ, АНГЛИИ И РОССИИ)

In the second half of the 19th century, children’s picture books became a mass phenomenon in European book publishing practice. The development of printing technology, the formation of psychology as scientific knowledge, the improvement of methods of educational interaction between adults and children led to the appearance of children’s books not only for reading them aloud, but also for looking at pictures in them. However, the connections between the textual and visual narratives of books were not yet strong. Often, for economic reasons, the same illustrations were used in combination with different texts, and translations and reprints added discrepancies. In the article, this is illustrated by materials from the analysis of German, Russian, and English editions with drawings by Oscar Pletsch: Die Kinderstube (Hamburg, 1860), Gute Freundschaft (Berlin, 1865), Kleines Volk (Berlin, 1865), Allerlei Schnik-Schnak (Leipzig, 1866); Malen’kie Lyudi (St. Petersburg, 1869), Tesnaya Druzhba (St. Petersburg, 1869), Pervye Shagi Zhizni (St. Petersburg, 187?), Yolka (St. Petersburg, 1874); Child- Land (London, 1873). The plots Pletsch created are compared with the texts in three languages. As a result of the analysis, significant differences between the texts and the visual range of the editions were revealed. The article identifies the options of transforming meanings and interpreting drawings, reveals the tendency of their use for didactic purposes. The album Gute Freundschaft (initially containing only short captions to the drawings) acquired detailed poetic texts—monologues or dialogues of depicted children—in the Russian translation. The English publisher “scattered” the visual series: in Child-Land, the same drawings were placed randomly and mixed with other illustrations without observing any logic. The London edition contained prosaic texts, many of which did not coincide in meaning with the storyline of the original. The author (translator) sometimes interpreted the images “taken out of context” in a neutral way and sometimes added other (including sharply negative) characteristics to children’s postures, gestures, and movements. In a number of cases, the texts emotionally “loaded” the images in a completely different way than the artist conceived: a gesture of greeting turned into a threat, expectation turned into boredom, and so on. It should be stressed that the Russian publisher Mauritius Wolf treated the German originals more carefully than his English colleagues from S.W. Partridge &amp; C°. The analysis of publications and the comparison of their verbal and visual plots allowed identifying the nature of the interrelation of text and image as a “conversation in different languages”. The reason for the “discord” could be translation problems, general changes in the functional tasks of the publication (for example, towards a didactic purpose), the mismatch of cultural codes in the system of different European languages, and technical difficulties in printing. All this led to the emergence of new senses and meanings—sometimes unexpected, but always important, interesting and never accidental.

An Empire of Print: The New York Publishing Trade in the Early American Republic by Steven Carl Smith

Reviewed by: An Empire of Print: The New York Publishing Trade in the Early American Republic by Steven Carl Smith Ronald J. Zboray Smith, Steven Carl – An Empire of Print: The New York Publishing Trade in the Early American Republic. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. Pp. 244. A nation-centered histoire du livre has never really found a foothold in the United States to the degree it has elsewhere, particularly in France, the UK, and, in its own peculiar way, Germany. Among the many possible reasons for this is that book historians of the US have difficulty finding an institutional home, whether [End Page 445] in departments of English or history, or schools of communication, information science, and journalism. Because all these potential support sites are mostly interested in topics other than past print cultures, it is unsurprising that historians of the US book must paint with a very wide brush and, due to a relative lack of prior and ongoing detailed bibliographic work, a very sparse pallet. Many generalizations based on sketchy evidence consequently have been advanced and, for lack of interest in questioning them, allowed to stand uncontested. One of these is that the circulation of imprints in the early republic was not extensive enough to provide a culturally or politically binding force for the young nation. According to this view, any print-assisted cohesion would not occur until at least the 1830s and 1840s with the spread of industrialization and its attendant transportation networks that, as a corollary result, made New York the dominant print communications hub. Steven Carl Smith's An Empire of Print challenges this generalization with an enormous amount of evidence, much of it found in little-consulted manuscript sources of the type that would make many cultural historians blanch: business papers of forgotten figures like Samuel Loudon, William Gordon, and Evert Duyckinck. Smith effectively proves that New York bookmen—indeed, there is nary a "book-woman" in sight in these pages—had developed a considerable network in the years between the American Revolution's end and the final rail-based phase of the transportation revolution. It was these entrepreneurial efforts more than transportation innovations that made New York the nation's publishing capital, according to Smith, and they were in effect much earlier than previously supposed. Smith develops his argument through five chapter-length cases reflecting "government publishing, subscription publishing, the bookshop, the first national literary fair, and the wholesale book trade" (p. 5)—all understudied areas in this time and place. Most of the first chapter on bookseller, library proprietor, and newspaper publisher Samuel Loudon provides background on him, which, however fascinating for showing how he navigated revolutionary turbulence, elides government publishing until its concluding pages (pp. 34-43). Nevertheless, it is in this passage examining Loudon's service as New York State printer that Smith provides the clearest picture of the economics of government printing in this period to date. He can thus highlight the imbrication of printing and state politics in a way that qualifies Trish Loughran's recent attempt in her Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870 (2007) to diminish print's centralizing role in the early republic. Smith next turns to Revolutionary War historian William Gordon's subscription publishing initiatives amid his larger authorial marketing push. Once again, the discussion drifts from the main topic at first, but Smith comes through in mid-chapter with an innovative analysis of subscription lists for the London edition of the first volume of Gordon's antidemocratic History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States (1788). Smith's occupational rundown of the subscribers points to a largely male professional group of lawyers, ministers, physicians, and Members of Parliament (Britons [End Page 446] unsurprisingly dominate). Little in this anchors Gordon to New York, however, until Smith supports the subscription list findings by comparisons to data from the New York Society Library's charge records for the book, before concluding with a discussion of the dismal fate of a later American subscription edition marshaled by a trio of Gotham booksellers who floated a national marketing campaign. While the...

Kipling and the Rise of White-Jacket

The year after Herman Melville’s death G. P. Putnam’s Sons announced the release of a four-volume London edition of his selected works. His two best known books, Typee and Omoo, were released in time for Christmas 1892.1 Also dated 1892, the third and fourth titles of the set, White-Jacket and Moby-Dick, did not appear until March 1893. In a regular column devoted to notices of new editions, the Glasgow Herald observed that ‘for about a generation [Melville] had almost passed from the public mind’. Both White-Jacket and Moby-Dick, it continued, ‘are wholly unfamiliar to the great majority of readers of the present day, but with which they would do well to make acquaintance if only for the better appreciation of the peculiar genius of the author’.2 The most significant notice of the four-volume edition is J. St. Loe Strachey’s review in The Spectator. He found Moby-Dick ‘one of the best and most thrilling sea stories ever written’ but questioned Melville’s use of Sir Thomas Browne as a stylistic model. Strachey called White-Jacket ‘a marvellous description of life on a man-of-war’ but thought it too infused with the stylistic eccentricities of Thomas Carlyle. Regardless, Strachey considered White-Jacket ‘excellent reading, and full of the glory of the sea and the spirit of the Viking’.3

London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800–1850 by Joseph Rezek

Reviewed by: London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800–1850 by Joseph Rezek Melissa J. Homestead (bio) London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800–1850. By Joseph Rezek. ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 286. Cloth, $59.95.) Like Meredith McGill's American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (Philadephia, 2003) and Trish Loughran's The Republic in Print: Print Culture and U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York, 2007), London and the Making of Provincial Literature is ambitious in its scope and argument and fundamentally challenges our understanding of the nation as a category of analysis in American book history of the first half of the nineteenth century. Joseph Rezek offers a bracing reorientation of the literary market in the early nineteenth century, arguing that the United States shared with Scotland and Ireland a provincial orientation toward London as a center of English-language publishing. In The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA, 2004), Pascale Casonova uses Pierre Bourdieu's literary sociology to argue that Paris's dominance in the early twentieth century set an aesthetic program for modernism across the globe. Rezek, also relying on Bourdieu, similarly focuses on how an orientation toward London in the "Anglophone Atlantic" by Irish, Scottish, and American authors registered at the level of aesthetics; he also argues, however, that these authors embraced the market in a search for aesthetic prestige, rather than disavowing commercial success (13). Rezek's introduction situates the dilemma of the provincial author in relation to Enlightenment aesthetic theories and defines the "aesthetics of provinciality" as a "range of representational modes" that "vacillate [End Page 555] between national and universal conceptions of art" but ultimately "takes refuge in the belief that literature enjoys an exalted role in human affairs" (15). Chapter 1 synthesizes published scholarship on the history of the book in Ireland, Scotland, the United States, and England in order to recast these histories as a heretofore unrecognized "interconnected system" with London at its center (25). After this sweeping, rapid, and highly persuasive survey of half a century in fifteen pages, in Chapter 2 Rezek zooms in for a finely grained archival case study of the complex negotiations between Edinburgh, London, and American publishers over the circulation of Walter Scott's historical novels (a version of this chapter appeared in Early American Studies in 2013). Notably, as a literary historian Rezek close reads "the language of the book trade" as "an expressive form, a means of establishing credit in business negotiations, and a performative rhetoric of the marketplace" (41). His third chapter reads novels by Irish authors Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson in light of London's centripetal pull in the book trade, arguing that these authors' developing literary strategies (namely the marriage plot, travel narratives, and paratextual apparatuses) enabled them to "project an ideal relationship with English readers that downplays the otherwise vexed political intercourse between Ireland and England" (63). He turns in Chapter 4 to Washington Irving, first analyzing Irving's engagement with reprinted British texts during his two years editing the Analectic Magazine (1813–1815), and then analyzing how being taken up by London publisher John Murray for the second volume of his Sketch Book (1819–1820) spurred Irving to undertake a transformative revision of individual stories and to add and revise materials he had first written for the Analectic. The result, as Rezek argues through a fascinating close reading of revisions both large and small, is a version of the Sketch Book that differs fundamentally from Irving's initial nationalist conception in its "promot[ion of] Anglo-American literary fellowship" (102). In a somewhat disorienting move chronologically, Rezek's next chapter juxtaposes the London editions of James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers (1823) and Walter Scott's The Heart of the Midlothian (1818). Rezek locates in Scott's novel an allegory of its "relation to the marketplace" through the "pilgrimage from Edinburgh to London" by a central Scottish character; her journey doubled "the journey most copies of a Waverley novel took from Scott's Edinburgh printers to England for distribution" (116). Rezek finds Cooper's address to English...

A Deceptive Imprint: The First London Edition of Minell's Commentary on Horace

The first English-printed edition of Horace’s Poemata with commentary by Jan Minell (1625–1683) was published in London in 1676 in duodecimo format with the imprint ‘Londini, typis A.C. sumptibus Societatis’ (Wing H2779). At first glance it seems like a normal school edition of Horace’s Odes with nothing unusual about it. Closer investigation reveals that the natural assumption that ‘sumptibus Societatis’ refers to the Stationers’ Company is mistaken, and the book presents compositorial features which are unusual in London editions of the period. The article investigates this publication and suggests who the publishers were and why they concealed its true origins.

Taking Back the Ballad: Swinburne in the 1860s

Taking Back the Ballad:Swinburne in the 1860s Elizabeth Helsinger (bio) Despite its title, Algernon Charles Swinburne’s inaugural 1866 collection, Poems and Ballads, contains very few ballads. Some poems entitled “ballad” are in fact versions of continental lyric forms like the canzone (“A Ballad of Life”) or the ballade (“A Ballad of Burdens”). Indeed, the 1866 Poems and Ballads includes an astonishing number of different lyric forms: not only ballads, ballades, and canzoni, but songs, rondeaux, a carol, a lamentation, a litany, a hymn, and poems in sapphics and hendecasyllabics (after Sappho and Catullus, respectively). In his first collection, Swinburne was exploring a broad range of the forms that lyric poetry might take. In demonstrating through creative imitation his mastery of so many different lyric forms, Swinburne was doing something very much like Tennyson in his first major collection of 1830, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. Some of Swinburne’s and Tennyson’s best-known short, narrative, balladlike poems in their respective early volumes, though they differ markedly in their engagements with earlier ballad materials, both direct readers to continental models, even though both poets were intimately familiar with the old ballads collected, edited, and published in Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802). In the early 1860s, however, Swinburne edited a number of older ballad texts from Scotland and the north of England and composed some startlingly similar poems of his own. They included not only story-ballads but other songs arising from situations those stories suggested: a Northumbrian widow’s lament, a condemned Jacobite’s farewell, a song for a wake, and the last words or “neck-verse” for a border thief betrayed by his lover and about to be hanged. His verse caught with remarkable acuity the sound and the sense of older popular ballads from Northumbria and the border counties of Scotland that, if we believe Swinburne’s semi-autobiographical novel (also dating from the early 1860s), he had first encountered as a boy visiting his grandfather Swinburne’s Northumbrian estate, Capheaton.1 Swinburne’s balladry in these years, I argue, sets itself against the lyricizing and balladizing practices of both editors and popular poets in the ballad revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, insisting instead on returning poetry to the harsh landscapes of feeling [End Page 477] and forceful rhythms he found in the old songs of England’s North. In this, one might say, he was closer to creative poet-editors and emulators like James Macpherson, Thomas Chatterton, or John Clare.2 Swinburne’s imitations depended not only on what he may have heard, but also on his more recent study of ballad and song texts in the British Museum. The projected ballad edition on which he was working in 1861 was intended, he wrote, “to contain all the best northern poems.”3 For each edited ballad, Swinburne seems to have studied multiple different versions earlier published by ballad scholars from Bishop Thomas Percy (1765) to Scott and his successors in the nineteenth century, especially William Jamieson (1806), William Motherwell (1827), George R. Kinlock (1827), Peter Buchan (1828), and, most recently, the American scholar of early English literature Frances James Child, the second edition of whose initial collection of English and Scottish ballads, in eight small volumes, had just been published in London.4 Unlike his larger and better-known later collection of 1882–1898, Child’s initial publication was part of a series intended to cover the whole history of English poetry; by including ballads and songs he extended that history from literary to popular traditions. Like many but not all of his predecessors (and like Swinburne), in this first effort Child, who did not at first confine himself strictly to narrative ballads, focused on words, not music, and relied primarily on printed sources.5 Swinburne used the 1861 London edition of Child, but he did not follow all of Child’s scholarly practices, still less his aesthetic and political preferences. Where Child collected ballads from all over England and Scotland, Swinburne concentrated on the region just south of the border with Scotland, where Swinburnes had lived since the Middle Ages. And where Child, unlike earlier editors, printed multiple versions, Swinburne...

Southey, Coleridge and Islam

In 1744, Mahomet the Impostor opened at the Theatre Drury Lane. The published text of the play, it is acted at the Theatre Royal, was a free adaptation for the London stage of Voltaire's Mahomet le prophete, presented by the Comedie Francaise at Paris in 1742--and banned after three performances. Bristol Library has a copy of the English version, though the date of accession is uncertain, and neither poet seems to have borrowed it. But Bristol's Theatre Royal staged two performances of Mahomet in July 1766, with the nine characters all dress'd in new Turkish Habits (Smith's Theatre scrapbooks, 2, part 1: 61, 68). The Bristol theatre revived Mahomet for several performances in 1783 (Barker, Theatre Royal Bristol, 53), when Southey (still barely nine) was a Bristol schoolboy, and when his Bath aunt had a large collection of theatrical playbills (Speck 10). In December, 1797, Coleridge signed out a volume of the French 1782 edition of Rousseau's works (Borrowings, 3), but by then Southey's religious views already owed more to Rousseau than to Voltaire. In July, 1793, Southey dismisses Voltaire as an atheist, while Rousseau's Savoyard Curate is the of rational Xtianity (CLRS 1: 54; omitted in NL 1: 27-30). Within days, Southey tells Grosvenor Bedford that, as a law-maker, he would build a temple to the One Universal God, my national creed should he God is one--Christ is the saviour of Mankind (CLRS 1: 55; NL 1: 31; omitted in LG 424; SL 1: 77). The English translation by George Sale had appeared in 1734, and a French translation (le Coran avec la Vie de Mahomet) in 1786. The French edition appears in the sale catalogue of Southey's library (RSLC item 738), and his own copies of Sale's translation are the Bath edition of 1795, and the London edition of 1801 (RSLC items 1573-4). …

"The Idiots" in The Savoy: Decadence and the Celtic Fringe

"The Idiots" in The Savoy:Decadence and the Celtic Fringe William Atkinson (bio) "The Idiots" was Conrad's first published story. Written in the spring of 1896, it appeared in October of the same year in a short-lived magazine called The Savoy. Students of Conrad probably know "The Idiots" as one of five stories in a collection called Tales of Unrest, published in 1898. This paper will concentrate on the story's original site of publication, arguing that when we read "The Idiots" as part of The Savoy, themes and continuities from that publication illuminate facets of the story that we might otherwise overlook.1 Conrad wrote "The Idiots" while on his honeymoon in Brittany; the title refers to a family of local children whom he had encountered in the area around Île-Grande, where he and Jessie were staying. Conrad asked T. Fisher Unwin to place the story for him, but Unwin had difficulty finding a magazine to take it. Eventually, through Edward Garnett, the story found its way to The Savoy. But Conrad was not entirely pleased to be in such a magazine, one now best known as the epitome of nineties decadence. "Decadence" will link the various parts of my account and explain both why Conrad was uncomfortable with The Savoy and why its editor was drawn to Conrad's work. The Breton location of "The Idiots" is paralleled by similarly baleful Celtic settings in stories and essays in the eight numbers of The Savoy.2 The Celtic world was decaying and yet at the same time undergoing a cultural revival. This paper will discuss "The Idiots" in the light of the complex and contradictory discourse of Celticism. I In 1896, Conrad wrote two other short stories in addition to "The Idiots—"An Outpost of Progress" and "The Lagoon." He needed to sell them, and magazines were the market for short stories. But Conrad was suspicious of magazines. Anxious to develop a reputation as a serious novelist, he was well aware of the difference between wide popularity and recognition from a discerning [End Page 113] few. Magazines catered to popular tastes, so they did little for a writer's prestige. But Conrad did make distinctions among them. When he wrote to Unwin telling him about a request from The Cornhill for stories, he commented, "I think this Cornhill is not a bad mag. to appear in" (CL 1: 286). A bad magazine was one like Pearson's, which asked him for something the following year. He turned it down: "I think it ["The Return"] is much too good to be thrown away where the right people won't see it" (CL 1: 405, original emphasis). Conrad's concern was to establish his literary standing, and the right people were those whose good opinion would help establish it. Such people did not read Pearson's. But they might well read The Cornhill and probably would look at Cosmopolis, another journal that interested Conrad. It began publication in January 1896, and although its editor turned down "The Idiots," he accepted "An Outpost of Progress." Conrad First tells us that "Cosmopolis: An International Review offered itself as a forum for European culture and international understanding in a time of escalating nationalism and militarism." The magazine included sections in English, French, and German, appearing with different covers in London, Paris, and Berlin; the London edition was published by Fisher Unwin. It ran only until November 1898, but during that short period "attracted an extraordinary array of contributors" (Cosmopolis). Apparently, the right people did see "An Outpost of Progress"; Conrad observes with satisfaction that "The Sat[urday] Review notices my story in the Cosmo[polis] with great discrimination" (CL 1: 363). The Cornhill published "The Lagoon" in January 1897. Conrad had every reason to be happy to be in The Cornhill. Michael Ashley describes it as "the premier literary magazine of the High Victorian period, dominating the scene between 1860 and the 1890s" (250). Almost all the leading British writers of the period had shown their work there during the magazine's first twenty years. But by the early 1880s, circulation had dropped from 110,000 to 12,000. James Payn...

A King Translated: The Writings of King James VI &amp; I and their Interpretation in the Low Countries, 1593–1603. By Astrid Stilma. St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. ix + 332 pp. $134.95 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)A King Translated: The Writings of King James VI & I and their Interpretation in the Low Countries, 1593-1603 . By Astrid Stilma . St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Farnham : Ashgate , 2012. ix + 332 pp. $134.95 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesJames Stuart--James VI of Scotland and I of England--was a prolific author. Beginning while still in his teens, James wrote on a variety of topics, ranging from religion to rulership to the evils of tobacco. Most modern scholarly analysis of James' writings begins with the assumption that these texts constituted a deliberate performance of a carefully wrought public persona, and Astrid Stilma's erudite new monograph does not depart from this basic supposition. Stilma's main emphasis, however, is not on James' own textual self-construction, but rather on how a particular interpretive community--in this case, Dutch Protestants--printed, sold, bought, read and (13) these texts in order to serve their own particular political and religious agendas.Stilma examines Dutch translations of James' works (translated between 1593 and 1603 from London editions) and finds that Dutch Protestants used James' ideas to create and maintain a protestant identity for themselves, and to convince themselves that James would continue Elizabeth's support of the protestant Low Countries' fight against Roman Catholic Spain. When James ascended to the English throne, he may have meant to present himself as Rex Pacificus , but the political and religious anxieties of those who translated and disseminated James' writings into Dutch shaped him into an ultra-Protestant knight in shining armour (16). This is not to say that the translators deliberately misrepresented James' ideas; Stilma establishes that overt manipulation was rare, with translators and publishers relying more on prefaces and other paratextual material to frame James' words to their and their audiences' liking.The first chapter of A King Translated introduces readers to the Dutch translators and publishers, while the second chapter offers background and context concerning the art and science of translation in early modern Europe. The remaining four chapters focus on particular texts. In chapter 3, Stilma looks at The Battle of Lepanto, James' epic poem recounting a 1571 naval victory over the Turkish fleet by a confederation of Christian navies. Much has been written about whether or not James implicitly sanctioned Roman Catholicism with his celebration of Don John, the undeniably Catholic leader of the Christians. Stilma does not think so, and argues that in approaching the poem as a Protestant allegory, Abraham Van der Myl's 1593 translation preserved the spirit and intention of the original piece when it made a case for the inevitability of protestant ascendency.Perhaps James' most well-known work is Basilikon Doron . Written as a letter to James' eldest son, Basilikon Doron was published in Scotland in 1599. …

Susan Matoff, Conflicted Life. William Jerdan, 1782-1869. London Editor, Author and Critic

Susan Matoff, Conflicted Life. William Jerdan, 1782-1869. London Editor, Author and Critic

Conflicted Life: William Jerdan, 1782–18617. London Editor, Author and Critic by Susan Matoff

Susan Matoff. Conflicted Life: William Jerdan, 1782-1869. London Editor, Author and Critic. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2011. Pp. 659. 65 [pounds sterling] William Jerdan is largely forgotten today. If is known, it is mainly lover of Letitia Landon with whom had three children, Cynthia Lawford demonstrated some years ago. But in her prodigiously detailed and impressively well-researched study, Susan MatofF argues convincingly that, especially long-serving editor of Literary Gazette, he was vital facilitator and promoter of aspirants literature and many other cultural endeavours. MatofF observes in her useful Epilogue that Jerdan's multifarious writings are used in studies on art, crime, antiquarianism, photography, electricity, gas lighting and animals. As literary figure, seems at times like much less talented version of Leigh Hunt, with whom shared financial incompetence, extraordinary industry, belief in diffusion of ideas, and wish promote work of others. Hunt and Jerdan had falling-out, in fact, after Literary Gazette trashed Charles Lamb's Album Verses in slashing review that MatofF agrees may have been written by Landon. Hunt's Tatler amused itself with rhyming abuse, arguing that previous lampoon conferred an / Honour unmerited on jerdan, / Saying his intellect was small; / 'Twas thought that had none at all. Jerdan dunce enjoyed brief vogue, but played other roles in his long and busy life. He had way of being present at occasion and event. He detained assassin of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval in 1812, a feat not too heroic, MatofF comments with judicious dryness that is welcome feature of book, as by this time Bellingham was sitting quietly on bench, offering no resistance. He befriended many writers, including Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Dickens, reprinting (without permission) latter's story of Sam Weller from first installment of The Pickwick Papers, but helping young novelist by advising him to develop Sam Weller's character 'largely--to utmost.' Later would bring work of Hans Christian Andersen attention of his readers, and effected meeting between Andersen and Dickens. He helped found Royal Society of Literature, throwing himself with gusto into scheme intended help indigent writers. More generally, product of Scottish Enlightenment culture (he grew up and was schooled in Kelso), welcomed into George Canning's circle, networking, dining, and toasting, Jerdan dealt with and hovered round great, bad, and good of literary London for many decades. His career involved Micawber-like risings and fallings, minor triumphs and considerable adversities, huge amounts of work, quarrels with rival periodical editors and owners, financial disaster, and running of three separate families. Apart from his three children with Landon, had six children who survived infancy with his wife Frances Jerdan, and a large family with another woman, Mary Maxwell, with whom began an affair in 1830s. Matoff allows facts accumulate towards characterization rather than writes with much overt display of inward feeling for her subject. This procedure leads uniformity of tone and cautiousness, in places, but it also means that her readers are in possession of evidence they need arrive at judgments. Hers is not book that dazzles with novelist-like perceptions, but it possesses historian's less flamboyant virtues of care for detail and patient accuracy. Tall, angular and convivial, Jerdan comes across diffusely energetic point of near self-cancellation, likeable, slightly banal, warm-hearted, capable of impressiveness. In first volume of his Autobiography (1852) writes, Matoff notes, about the difficulty of writing about 'Self,' and if this makes him sound, for faintly absurd moment, like proto-deconstructive post-Romantic, truth seems be more that Jerdan's inner core was his outer shell, or, put it more generously, with Madame Merle in mind, from Henry James's The Portrait of Lady, the whole envelope of [his] circumstances. …