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DAVID, DEIRDRE, ED. The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xxi + 267 pp. $60.00 cloth; $22.00 paper.
BAKER, WILLIAM AND KENNETH WOMACK, EDS. A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. vii + 445 pp. $94.95.
The only safe generalizations one can make about the Victorian novel are that it was popular and that it was abundant. "Everybody in the nineteenth century read novels, and to the collector it sometimes seems that everybody wrote them," in the words of that prodigious collector Robert Lee Wolff. Nobody knows how many novels were published during this great age of fiction; the number has been estimated from 50,000 upwards. It is true that for every special correspondent to posterity, as Walter Bagehot once dubbed Dickens, legions have landed in the dead letter office. Nevertheless, by now it is assumed that among the forgotten are some underrated and unjustly neglected names, and efforts have been made by scholars to bring some of the submerged to the surface. John Sutherland, for example, in his Stanford [Longman's in England] Companion to Victorian Fiction suggests as an "educated guess" that some 7,000 Victorians could lay claim to being novelists; he provides biographical sketches for 878 of them (566 men, 312 women), and synopses of 554 novels.
In the face of such statistics, it has to be said that these two "companions" under review cover but a fraction of their professed universes. Nor do they altogether reflect the latest trends in scholarship in the field. Significantly, the latest edition of the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 1800-1900 (1999) under the editorship of Joanne Shattock has erased the traditional division between "major" and "minor" novelists. Yet both of these books, while devoting some space to so-called "sub-genres" like the sensation and detective novels, hew pretty close to the wellthumbed canon, with heavy concentration on the Brontes, Dickens, and George Eliot. One would not be aware from either of such developments as the rediscovery of a number of "New Women" novelists and other fin-de-siecle figures, or of a subculture of newspaper serial fiction. Also, the Victorian novel here is largely English; Scotland (except for Scott) and Ireland are virtually ignored. Moreover, if one goes...