BOOK
REVIEWS
George
Justice, Editor
Gothic Editions
The Monk
By Matthew Gregory Lewis.
Edited by D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen
Scherf.
Broadview, 2003. 479 pages.
2 B/W illustrations. Paperback. $9.95.
Northanger Abbey (Second Edition)
By Jane Austen. Edited by Claire
Grogan.
Broadview, 2002. 280 pages.
9 B/W illustrations. Paperback. $7.95.
Reviewed by Erik Simpson.
When the oafish John Thorpe in Northanger
Abbey declares that “there has not been a tolerably decent
[novel] come out since Tom Jones,
except The Monk,” Austen means
the reader to understand Thorpe’s pronouncement as a stark
demonstration of his vitiated taste and therefore of the danger he
poses to the impressionable heroine Catherine Morland. In these worthy
additions to the distinguished Broadview Literary Texts series, D. L.
Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf, editors of Matthew G. Lewis’ The Monk, and Claire Grogan, editor
of Mansfield Park, have
created editions that work best to illuminate moments such as Thorpe’s
comment, where an explanation of the literary and cultural context of
Britain in the 1790s allows modern readers to understand works that
could otherwise alienate them because the texts’ allusiveness and humor
depends so heavily on contemporary context.
Macdonald and Sherf explain the literary strategies and cultural impact
of The Monk clearly and
efficiently in their introduction. It describes the personal issues
(Matthew Lewis’ sexuality and his ownership of Jamaican slaves, for
instance) and literary-historical contexts (the French Revolution and
its aftermath, Ann Radcliffe’s brand of gothic novel, The Monk’s reviews and adaptations)
that produce most of the current interest in the novel. One could
hardly ask more of 20 pages aimed at a general reader. An appendix
called “Critical Reception” works similarly well; in only 23 carefully
selected pages of text, it conveys not only the engrossing details of The Monk’s immediate reception
(Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “We stare and tremble”) but also the ways in
which reviewers treated gothic fiction in general. Here we understand
the extent to which major figures of the age, from Mary Wollstonecraft
to Coleridge to Radcliffe, engaged
The Monk. Macdonald and Sherf also provide some of Lewis’ source
materials for the novel and a useful collation of the revisions he made
as he retreated from the scandalous first edition, which serves as the
copy-text for this and all other modern editions.
The utility of the edition’s attention to popular adaptations of The Monk is less clear. The
introduction’s catalog of popular responses to the novel gives readers
a sense of their scale and could provide scholars a useful starting
point for further research. The 37-page appendix devoted to reproducing
three adaptations of The Monk,
while entertaining, would serve most readers better if, like the
appendix on the book’s critical reception, it demonstrated Lewis’
impact on better-known works of 19th-Century British literature. The
introduction closes with a list of British and Continental writers
whose work owes a debt to The Monk.
This reader would prefer that the pages of the appendix flesh out the
novel’s more literary legacy, but the contrary decision does little to
detract from this fine edition.
Where The Monk requires its
editors to explain the logic of archaic excess, Northanger Abbey invites the
editorial decoding of the contemporary social world revealed in the
characters’ conversations. Lewis creates effects with demons, Austen
with street addresses. Grogan’s annotations of Austen’s prose range
from serviceable, as in the case of simply pointing out the author and
year of The Monk when John
Thorpe endorses it, to outstanding, as in the case of the detailed
explanation of General Tilney’s false modesty regarding his pineapple
production—in reality “an astonishing feat of fruiticulture,” as Grogan
puts it, drawing on Richard Bradley’s 1726 essay “A Particular Easy
Method of Managing Pineapples” and Pope’s 1731 Epistle to Burlington. The reader
of Grogan’s edition will encounter similarly useful information
throughout the novel, with special emphasis on the buildings,
conveyances (illustrated in a pictorial appendix), and neighborhoods of
Bath. The edition’s appendices also include helpful maps of Bath and
its environs.
Grogan’s introduction draws out the prominent theme of reading in the
novel, often insightfully, but it sometimes tends more to argumentation
and documentation than introduction. For instance, the annotation to
Austen’s famous defense of the novel on page 59 of this edition appears
nearly verbatim as a paragraph of the introduction on page 14. (In the
introduction, it reads, “Many women novelists portray heroines who mock
or abstain from novel-reading [Hervey Louisa
I:38-39, Williams Julia 2:48]
or who read novels with disastrous consequences [Opie Adeline Mowbray I:55, Hays Memoirs of Emma Courtney I:25,
Wollstonecraft The Wrongs of Woman
I.89].”) Although an excellent footnote, the sentence is not only
redundant here, but also too heavily documented and too lightly
explained to stand alone as a paragraph in the introduction, which
could generally benefit from a more clearly and broadly introductory
approach.
Both of these books are valuable teaching editions, especially for
courses exploring gothic conventions across novelistic genres, and
specialist readers will find new insight and fresh source material in
both. They contribute substantially to modern readers’ understanding of
what in these novels has fascinated, horrified, or charmed previous
generations.
Erik Simpson teaches 18th- and 19th-Century British literature at
Grinnell College.
JASNA News
v.20, no. 3, Winter 2004, p. 21
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