Through the Reading Glass: Women, Books, and Sex in the French Enlightenment (review)

Epistle to Mr. Ellys the Painter” using traditional bibliographical methods based upon historical evidence and literary style. William McCarthy asks, “What Did Anna Barbauld Do to Samuel Richardson’s Correspondence?” As Barbauld’s biographer he answers through his careful examination and interpretation of the Forster MSS and the Dyce Letters at the Victoria and Albert Museum, separating out Barbauld’s markings from those of Richardson, his copyists, and the editorial interventions of Richard Phillips, the owner of the manuscripts and the publisher of the correspondence (and his compositors). McCarthy also posits the former existence of additional copies of some correspondence, edited by Richardson, many of which provide conflations of letters previously attributed to Barbauld. Marcus Walsh lauds Edward Capell’s editorial practices on the works of Shakespeare in “Form and Function in the English Eighteenth-Century Literary Edition: The Case of Edward Capell,” discussing the formatting of Capell’s editions of Shakespeare in relation to Capell’s editorial strategies. R. Carter Hailey sketches more Shakespearean editorial history with his ‘This Instance Will Not Do’: George Steevens, Shakespeare, and the Revision(s) of Johnson’s Dictionary.” Hailey argues that Steevens “played a much more active role in the revision of the Dictionary than has hitherto been suspected,” exhaustively supporting his assertion that Steevens continued working on the Dictionary well after Johnson’s death (245). Pamela Clemit and David Wools provide attribution for “Two New Pamphlets by William Godwin: A Case of Computer-Assisted Authorship Attribution.” They ascribe The Law of Parliament in the Present Situation of Great Britain Considered(1788) and Reflexions on the Consequences of His Majesty’s Recovery from His Late Indisposition. In a Letter to the People of England (1789) to Godwin, using both stylistic and computer-assisted textual analysis. The authors chose not to use the cusum technique lauded earlier in this volume by Farringdon, using instead multiple programs familiar to Wools, a forensic linguist. The volume is rounded out with David Chandler’s “A Bibliographical History of Thomas Howes’ Critical Observations (1776–1807) and His Dispute with Joseph Priestley,” Andrew M. Stauffer’s “The First Publication of Byron’s ‘To the Po,’” and Roger Osborne’s “Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes: The Serials and First Editions,” along with Arthur Sherbo’s “Unrecorded Writings by G. K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, Padraic Colum, Mary Colum, T. S. Eliot, George Bernard Shaw, and William Butler Yeats.” This volume of Studies in Bibliography provides a good entry point into the ongoing argument about the future of textual criticism for historical materials by highlighting its history and practice thus far.