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BRANTLINGER, PATRICK AND WILLIAM B. THESING, EDS. A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Company, 2002. xii + 513 pp. $124.95.
Among other attributes the Victorian Period has been called The Age of the Novel. Ours might well be called The Age of the Companion. Hot on the heels of The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel and A Companion to the Victorian Novel issued by Greenwood Press comes this third one as part of the Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. Both of the editors are familiar names to Victorian scholars. Brantlinger in addition to his many books is former editor of the journal Victorian Studies published at Indiana University, and Thesing has edited several of the nineteenth-century volumes in the ongoing Dictionary of Literary Biography published by Gale. Most of the contributors are American, with a few British and Canadians and one Australian, among them seasoned scholars along with a few relative newcomers.
The Blackwell Companion is a spacious volume. Its large format makes it almost as long as its two predecessors combined resulting in more expansion as well as extension in scope. The stated aim of the editors is "to provide contextual and critical information about the entire range of British fiction published during the Victorian period" (1). Entire range? Not quite. There are gaps-about which, more later. Reiterating the much cited figures by John Sutherland (in his Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction), that some 7,000 writers produced about 60,000 novels during this period, Brantlinger and Thesing know better than to claim to be covering "all" or even most of them, but their contributors deal with more authors than can be said of either of their forerunners, and succeed better in bringing the lesser writers into juxtaposition with the acknowledged masters. Blackwell, wisely I think, eschews articles on individual novelists in favor of macrocritical surveys. It is more truly a "companion" therefore than either the Cambridge or the Greenwood, with more articles of the encyclopedic type, characterized generally by more incisive writing and clearer conceptualization. There is also more evidence of editorial supervision, notably cross-referencing among articles.
The broad-based opening section dealing with "Historical Contexts and Cultural Issues" opens with "The Publishing World," a compact overview by Kelly J.Mays of...