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TOBIAS SMOLLETT. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. Thomas R. Preston and O M Brack. Athens: Georgia, 1990. Pp lx + 500. $45.
Humphry Clinker will be the centerpiece of the splendid Georgia edition of Smollett because that novel transcends its time and continues to find an audience.
The textual problems of Humphry Clinker are well known and more or less inevitable in editing any fiction of the period -the absence of an autograph manuscript, the likelihood that Smollett did not proofread at any stage, the shifting norms of mideighteenth-century typographic style. For over twenty years, Mr. Brack and a multitude of others have worked through various copies of the first edition of 1771 and the second edition, also of 1771, using eye, Hinman collator, and a large amount of informed good sense. It is not only the classic textual problems which they have had to resolve: characters within the novel use dialect words, which need to be understood, recognized as such, and not normalized; and characters sometimes distort and misspell, all of which must be preserved. The surprising result is that there are so few cruxes. Most of the emendations involve spelling, punctuation, and consistency. Only a very few involve something so substantive as the presence or absence of a negative and most of those have been identified by previous editors. Not to minimize the importance of the Georgia edition, however, it clearly establishes a definitive and...