Reviews

Keith Hanley, An Annotated Critical Bibliography of William Wordsworth. London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995. ISBN: 0-13-355348-5. Price: £65.00 (hardback)[Record]

  • Ruth Mead

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  • Ruth Mead
    University College London

This excellent bibliography is arranged in four sections: Editions and manuscripts [E], Aids to research [A], Biographies and memoirs [B], and Criticism [C] , within which each item is numbered. These sections are subdivided for our further convenience, and several head-notes act as pointers for cross-referencing within the volume, or seeking information elsewhere. The entries are indexed, three times over, under the headings, 'Works by Wordsworth', 'Subjects and Persons', and 'Authors and Editors'. Where necessary, a single work is separately detailed in two sections: John E. Jordan's De Quincey to Wordsworth (Berkeley, 1962), for instance, rightly appears in the 'letters' section of E , and also in Biographies . Hanley draws our attention to related bibliographical projects in progress at the time of publication: Paul Betz's account of the holdings at Grasmere library, and Mark L. Reed's bibliography of Wordsworth's writings. This measure places the book in its precise moment amid the onward flow of Wordsworth scholarship (Hanley's critical listings go up to 1993), and should defend it from the possible confusions caused by inevitable supersession in specialist areas. Meticulously organized, this bibliography is extremely easy to use, and will be an invaluable tool for students of Wordsworth, at all levels, for many years. The section on twentieth-century criticism is by far the longest, with 651 entries, divided into Collections and surveys, Full-length studies, and Articles and chapters , each arranged chronologically. Hanley explains his methods of selection in 'Advice to the reader', and, since he cannot be exhaustive, he is generous in the detail of his entries, often listing the poems on which a work focuses, as well as indicating its theoretical orientation. Value-judgements are not too frequent, and are therefore meaningful: Hartman's Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814 (New Haven & London, 1964) is "easily the most influential post-war account of W" (C124), whilst Alan Liu's Wordsworth: the Sense of History (Stanford, 1989) is "monumental and challenging" (C201). Adverse criticism is extremely rare. Objectionable omissions - and Hanley points out that, in this section, "the mesh" necessarily "grows finer" (p. xi) - are few. Every Wordsworth scholar who chooses may quibble. One of Douglass H. Thomson's essays on the fascinating 'Nutting' off-cuts is included: '"Sport of Transmutations": The Evolution of Wordsworth's "To Lycoris"' (C584), but its companion piece, Thomson's earlier 'Wordsworth's Lucy of "Nutting" in Studies in Romanticism 18 (1979), is not. In Biographies and memoirs we find F. E. Halliday's popular biography Wordsworth and his World (London, 1970) - included, perhaps, on account of its many interesting illustrations - but not Hunter Davies' much longer William Wordsworth (London, 1980), with its intriguing description of Wordsworth's deficient sense of smell: 'You miss a lot of lush sensations when your olfactory organs are not working' (p. 317). The most serious omission that I have noticed is that of Jonathan Bate's Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford, 1986), which has one chapter on Wordsworth's knowledge of, and comments about, Shakespeare, and another on the imaginative presence of Shakespeare in Wordsworth's poetry, and ought to be in section C2.3, where Edwin Stein's Wordsworth's Art of Allusion (University Park, 1988), entry C194, is accidentally reproduced as C605. Viviana Comensoli's article on 'The Literary Analogues of Wordsworth's "Goody Blake and Harry Gill"' (C198) has slipped into the full-length studies section. The essays in Peter Manning's Reading Romantics: Texts and Contexts (New York, 1990) are described briefly as C644, and much more fully (though with an incorrect subtitle) as C206. Perhaps the double entry was intentional (the work is a collection of essays, but with so much Wordsworth that it counts as a 'full-length study'); but, …