Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Volume 16 | Issue 2 Article 14

1-31-2004

Review of: Laurence Sterne, 'A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy' and Continuation of the Bramines Journal, vol. 6, The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New and W.G. Day
Ian Campbell Ross

Recommended Citation
Campbell Ross, Ian (2004) "Review of: Laurence Sterne, 'A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy' and Continuation of the Bramines Journal, vol. 6, The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New and W.G. Day," Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Vol. 16: Iss. 2, Article 14. Available at: http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/ecf/vol16/iss2/14

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Review of: Laurence Sterne, 'A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy' and Continuation of the Bramines Journal, vol. 6, The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New and W.G. Day

This article is available in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/ecf/vol16/iss2/14

Campbell Ross: Book review

Laurence Sterne. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy and Continuation of the Bramines Journal, vol. 6, The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New and W.G. Day. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. ISBN 0-8130-1771-8.
This new edition of A Sentimental Journey , published in tandem with the work more commonly known as the Journal to Eliza , appears some thirty-three years after Melvyn New began editing The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman , the first instalment (3 volumes; 197884) of the continuing Florida Edition of the W orks of Laurence Sterne , which also includes the Serm ons (2 volumes; 1996). Like its predecessors, the volume under review offers a great deal more than Sternes texts, which as before are presented clean. Here, the texts amount to just 225 of the volumes 639 pages, which also include an introduction, extensive and discursive annotation, and a series of textual appen dices. T he seriousn ess of intent of so scholarly and long-lived an enterprise is nowhere in doubt. W hat then does the present volume offer the student of Sterne, and how does it compare with its predecessors in method and achievement? For a start, what the editors seek to provide is something more than the sum of two separate works by Sterne (one designed for, and achieving, publication just in Sternes lifetime, the other a work unknown until the late nineteenth century, whose very status is debatable). Here, the undoubted and intriguing connection between the two works is pushed to and perhaps be yon d e xtre m e s. D iverging from Gardner D . Stout, Jr, e ditor of th e valuable University of California Press A Sentimental Journey (1967), New and Day argue that Stout did not believe the chronological and thematic relationships between Journal and Journey were essential to a reading of the latter. Our own presentation of the two texts in a single volume of the Florida Edition is based on the contrary beliefnamely that A Sentimental Journey cannot be sufficiently understood without the context supplied by Bramines Journal (p. xxvii). In so arguing, the editors set themselves very deliberately against not merely Stout but most, if not all, previous commentators (to say nothing of readers), playing down the relationship between Sternes own travels through France and Italy and the Journey , in favour of a connectionbased on a shared concern with mortality with the sequence of letters written to Eliza Draper following her departure for India in mid-April 1767, that the often gravely ill author continued, increasingly fitfully, until 1 November. Whether or not one is wholly convinced, the argument has some merit, especially as put forward here, with the editors declaring in relation to the second part of the Journey that the author was preventing from writing by his death that it is probably an error to suggest that, for Sterne, touring Italy would have been different from touring France: The raw materials of his travels ultimately do not seem to be the necessary cause of his writing (p. xviii). That the Journey cannot be sufficiently understood unless read alongside the Bramines Journal is perhaps a little less susceptible of demonstration, especially given the very different status of the texts. So, for the Journey , the editors follow Stout and others in taking as copy-text the first edition, despite the existence of a manuscript of the first part of the work in Sternes hand, used by the compositor. Acknowledging the tem ptation this offers the m odern editor to correct the compositor on its basis, New and Day stand by their conviction that Sternes text, as he offered it to the public, was created from a manuscript that he had authorized his compositors to turn into a printed version (p. xxxii). How different is this from the situation in relation to the Bramines Journal. Here, in fact, the lack of an authorized version for public consum ption is so marked that L.P. Curtis, in his edition of Sternes Letters , not only printed the letters that comprise the Journal as interpolations between surviving letters of

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Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 16, Iss. 2 [2004], Art. 14

the same period but did so in his accustomed manner: that is, with all legible corrections and deletions, including supra-linear and infra-linear insertions. Curtiss editing of the Journal offers possibilities for an extremely divergent reading from that suggested by the Florida Edition s clean textsomething that is, of course, recognized by the editors, who provide some sample photographic reproductions of the manuscript as well as a scrupulous List of Emendations (appendix 8, pp. 51620), and a Collation of the Manuscripts with the Florida Text (appendix 9, pp. 52144). This last records, for exam ple, corrections made in different ink, a potentially crucial indicator to how exactly we should read the Journal, which is, as the editors acknowledge, a highly selfconscious autobiographical document (p. xlii; their italics), and one never sanctioned, and perhaps never intended, for publication. As a complement to Curtis, the present clean text of the Journal is extremely valuable but by itself potentially misleading at least to all but the m ost dogged as well as manually dextrous reader, willing and able to consult the text, notes on the text, and two appendices simultaneously. Though the editorial procedures can seem, on first acquaintance, to cut too decisively through complex issues, it must be stressed that nothing in this volume is done without careful thought. Nor is it done without a design on the reader. To his credit, New the primary editor (p. xliv)has attempted to acknowledge some of the criticisms made of earlier volumes in the Florida Edition , especially that his garrulous annotation served, in News own words to bolster perhaps unfairly a not-so-hidden [interpretive] agenda (p. xliv). Acknowledging editorial bias, New now argues that what others saw as coercive attempts to press his own interpretations on the reader were in fact designed to inform rather than suppress critical discourse. This would be easier to accept if the present volume did not contain yet more instances of the kind of slights to other scholars, and remarks on their alleged failings, and the inadequacy of their readings that marred earlier volumes in the series. H ere, Eva C. van Leewen, Christopher Ricks, Jonathan Lam b, and even Gardner Stout are among those taken to task, on occasion after their views have been treated with some freedom. Even where reviewers suggestions for the improving of editorial procedure or principles of annotation are taken on board the response is, at best, grudging. For all its shortcomings, the Florida Edition is a most valuable contribution to Sterne scholarship; as it continues, might we hope that, without compromising scholarly integrity, it also prove a more generous one? Ian Campbell Ross Trinity College, Dublin

Please note that pagination within this pdf file does not correspond to the pagination in the print version of this issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, published in January 2004. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 16, Number 2

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