Studies in Scottish Literature Volume 25 | Issue 1 Article 16 1990 Book Reviews Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation (1990) "Book Reviews," Studies in Scottish Literature: Vol. 25: Iss. 1. Available at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol25/iss1/16 This Book Reviews is brought to you by the Scottish Literature Collections at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in Scottish Literature by an authorized editor of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 246 Book Reviews THE RODGER 1.. TARR COLLECTION OF THOMAS CARLYLE The Thomas Cooper Library of the University of South Carolina has purchased the Rodger 1.. Tarr Collection of Thomas Carlyle. The collection, built over a twenty-year pe­ riod by Tarr, forms the basis of his Thomas Carlyle: A Bibliog­ raphy, reviewed in this volume. The collection contains approximately 1,250 volumes, roughly 1,000 of which are primary editions of Carlyle's work. Among the printed materials are twenty-five presentation copies from Carlyle to, among others, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Woolner, his sisters Jean Carlyle and Mary Austin, William Allingham and Lady Baring. Presentation copies al­ ready in the University's collection include the first published edition of Sartor Resartus with a contemporary inscription to his wife Jane. Association copies include sixteen books from Carlyle's li­ brary, mostly signed, with bookplates, and various books pre­ sented to Carlyle. Other printed highlights include two copies of the extremely rare privately printed 1834 first published edi­ tion of Sartor Resartus containing a poem in Jane Carlyle's hand, signed and initialled by Carlyle. The collection contains twelve autograph letters, including one from Craigenputtock (of which very few are known), one to Robert Browning, and two lengthy letters on the composi­ tion of Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great. The collection also contains a fragment of The French Revolution (one of only seven known), and of Past and Present (one of a very few housed outside of the British Library and Yale University). The addition of the Rodger 1.. Tarr Collection to the Cooper Library forms part of an intensive program of building its Scottish literature collection, inaugurated by the acquisition through gift and purchase of the G. Ross Roy Collection of Robert Burns and Scottish Literature. The University welcomes scholars who wish to conduct re­ search on its holdings. Inquiries should be sent to the Head of Special Collections at the Cooper Library. Book Reviews Thomas Carlyle: A Descriptive Bibliography. Ed. Rodger L. Tare. Pitts­ burgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. 1989. xxi + 543 pp. A descriptive bibliography can be a tantalizing thing. It tells one vir­ tually everything about a book except what is most important and interesting-its literary content. Questions of what the book is about, of its artistry, of why and how it was written, its very reason for being a book are set aside. What we are given is (so to speak) the book's physical geogra­ phy, its anatomical measurements and specifications, the body without the souL If this seems a harsh view we may reflect that the body has its own importance. The descriptive bibliography is of course a work of reference with values of its own and provides services available nowhere else. One does not read it from cover to cover unless one is a reviewer. Its chief function, to establish the author's canon, to identify the first appearance in print of everything he wrote, is of particular interest to scholars and biog­ raphers, editors, librarians and literary historians, well as to book dealers and book collectors. It should contain all the ascertainable facts about the transmission of texts and the identity of the various editions. In enumer­ ating the editions and where possible the number of copies sold it will provide clues to the author's career and reputation. It is a family-tree of his life's work. 248 Book Reviews Professor Tarr's Thomas Carlyle: A Descriptive Bibliography is the twentieth in the Pittsburgh Series in Bibliography and follows the style and format of that admirable series with only minor changes adapted to his subject. He is thus limited to listing the published writings of Carlyle (and those of Jane), updating the canon and utilizing recent scholarship to cor­ rect earlier errors and supply omissions. Critical and biographical works are excluded, except for a selection of principal books about the Carlyles in an appendix. It appears, then, as a scrupulously detailed, painstakingly accurate listing and identifying of specified editions and their subsequent reprintings, with exhaustive information about pagination, the collational formula, and descriptions of the contents, the binding, typography, type of paper, etc., filling more than five hundred spacious pages. Of its seven sections the longest is the four-hundred page Section A in which all Carlyle's books and pamphlets in their first and later printings through 1880 are listed chronologically. Posthumous first editions and their reprintings are listed through 1987. Section B lists titles of books or pamphlets through 1986 in which formal writing by Carlyle, except letters, appears for the first time. Section C lists the first publication of material by Carlyle in journals and periodicals through 1988. Collected editions through 1880 are listed in Section D, in Section E a similar listing of such miscellaneous collections as anthologies, birthday books, and topical studies. Section F lists doubtful material that has been attributed to Car­ lyle and includes the source of the attribution. Finally, in Section G ap­ pears a valuable listing of Jane Welsh Carlyle's posthumously published writings, chronologically by books, then by material appearing in books, magazines and journals. Two appendices lis.t the unpublished or presum­ ably lost writings by Carlyle through 1834, and the selected list of books about the Carlyles. There is a good index. This arrangement, though generally clear, can present problems. It is not easy to see why Carlyle's early "Essay on Proportion" which Brewster printed in the Legendre Elements of Geometry (1822) is listed in Section A rather than in Section B. The Essay is not a book, pamphlet, or broadside but a Carlyle item which appears first in a book not by Carlyle, and only partly translated by him. Also, why are some editions which postdate 1880 included in Section A, like those of the Essay on Burns (pp. 164-5)? Professor Tarr is an experienced and competent bibliographer. He has devoted himself to completing much of the needed bibliographical work on Carlyle. Though not alone in the field he is currently the most ac­ tive. In 1974 he produced the valuable "Bibliography of Thomas Carlyle's Libraries at Chelsea and Ecclefechan." In 1976 he expanded an earlier work into the Thomas Carlyle: A Bibliography of English-Language Criti­ cism 1824-1974, and he has continued doing bibliographical as well as Book Reviews 249 critical work on Carlyle. The present volume is not his last, for he tells us in an important footnote (which could escape notice) that he is already compiling a supplemental volume in which he will list all editions in English and other languages from 1881 except for the posthumous first editions listed here. It will he asked by some what is the need for the present volume? As every Carlylean knows the job was done years ago by Isaac Watson Dyer who in his Bibliography o/Thomas Carlyle's Writings and Ana (1928) estab­ lished the Carlyle canon and in addition listed virtually all the then-known critical and biographical works on Carlyle. It was a remarkable work for the time, and still is. For over sixty years it has discouraged all attempts at a successor. As G. B. Tennyson has remarked it has stood as "a continuing reproach to scholarship that there has been no successor." Scholarly findings over the last sixty years, however, have put it sadly out of date. Also the work is marred by its strong anti-Froude, pro-Carlyle bias which colors his sometimes lengthy commentaries. Dyer corrected many of Froude's errors and included still-useful information about the publication and reception of Carlyle's works. But simple correction was not enough: Froude is subjected to broad sarcasm for attributing 'To a Swallow Building Under Our Eaves" to Jane instead of to Thomas. Dyer's other­ wise excellent work thus takes a partisan side in the onerous Carlyle­ Froude controversy and forfeits objectivity. After Froude's distortions and after the taint of Prussianism following World War I, Dyer felt impelled, like D. A. Wilson, to defend and vindicate Carlyle against all critics. Careful to avoid bias, Tarr has sought to make his work objective, ac­ curate, and complete. Instead of commentary there are brief notes. Dyer in his commentary on the Reminiscences devotes six pages to defending Carlyle's character against Froude's misrepresentations and quoting liber­ ally from the works of Carlyle's supporters to attack Froude's hasty publi­ cation and careless editing of the work. Here as elsewhere Dyer is fair enough, quoting defenders of Froude also, but the weight of his argument is in favor of Norton. Tarr avoids the controversy and readily agrees with Dyer that the Norton edition with its corrections (but also with its exci­ sions) constitutes a 1st edition superseding Froude's. Tarr remains rigor­ ously neutral. His notes supply only information that pertains directly to the work. Tarr's bibliographic descriptions follow what may be called state-of­ the-art procedures. Obviously he benefits from the work of such bibliog­ raphers as Fredson Bowers, Philip Gaskell, G.