The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature ... - uogenglish

Editor’s preface
This is the first volume of The Cambridge Bibliography of
English Literature third edition to appear. It is the work of an
international community of scholars who have collaborated
to produce a definitive primary bibliography of nineteenthcentury
authors and texts.
The third edition of CBEL has distinguished forebears.
The first edition, edited by F. W. Bateson, was published in
1940, with a supplement in 1957. The second edition, The
New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL),
edited by George Watson and Ian Willison, was published in
four volumes between 1969 and 1974 with an index volume
in 1977. As was the case with the previous edition, the third
edition has built on the strength of its predecessors. The
first task in the process of revision was to update and
augment the bibliographical details already available. In
practical terms this has resulted in a radical recasting of a
large proportion of the existing entries in line with the
buoyant state of scholarship and textual criticism on
Romantic and Victorian literature over the past thirty years.
Equally important to the new edition has been the introduction
of hundreds of entries for writers previously omitted
from the Bibliography. The size of the new volume for
1800–1900, nearly fifty per cent longer than its predecessor,
is a tangible pointer to the impact of the new material.
Although the new entries are spread throughout the
volume, certain sections of the Bibliography have been
transformed by the additions. We have extended the
number of poets, particularly in the period 1800–1835, by
nearly fivefold, and of novelists by an appreciable if less
dramatic percentage. The section on children’s books
contains entries for over four hundred writers for children.
There is a small but significant addition to the number of
dramatists and the sections on source materials for the
study of the nineteenth-century theatre have been thoroughly
revised. We have introduced a new section on political
economy, an acknowledgement of the large amount of
writing on the ‘dismal science’ in which authors were
engaged during the nineteenth century, and a section on
household books, the domestic manuals and conduct books
which were a major part of mass publishing from the midcentury
onward. The section on philosophy has been
expanded to include writers on science, another area in
which interdisciplinary research has flourished in the last
three decades. Writers of non-fictional prose are now given
full entries, in which the variety of their work, editorial as
well as creative, is documented.
A large proportion of new entries across all genres and
subjects is devoted to women, underlining the enormous
amount of recovery and rereading of women writers which
has taken place since the previous edition of the
Bibliography. The new entries for these writers are located
not only in the traditional genres of poetry and the novel,
children’s literature and household books, but in history,
philosophy, science, English studies, and non-fictional
prose, reflecting their emergent voices and significant
contributions to a variety of discourses in the nineteenth
century.
CBEL is a bibliography of English literature in its
broadest sense. The genre sections of poetry, the novel,
drama and non-fictional prose occupy a central position.
But just as the nineteenth-century reader was determinedly
non-specialist and assumed that current ‘literature’
included history, philosophy, and scientific writing as well
as poetry and fiction, so the genre sections of the
Bibliography are complemented by a number of subject
sections, on history, philosophy and science, religion, travel,
English studies, the literature of sport, education, and
newspapers and magazines. These sections are author
based, and concentrate on primary texts. In addition the
Bibliography contains two important and extensively
revised sections on book production and distribution and
on literary relations with the continent.
Any bibliography which aims to be comprehensive is
inevitably implicated in the formation of a canon, however
unofficially. The new entries and the revisions to this
volume of CBEL have appreciably altered the existing
nineteenth-century canon as well as reflecting the main
focus of research over the last thirty years. The new edition
has made a significant alteration to the canon in another
respect by abandoning the distinction between major and
minor writers which was a feature of the two previous
editions. This unnecessary classification not only produced
some now indefensible categorizations, but it has been
recognized that a bibliography such as CBEL plays a
significant part in the ongoing process which constantly
revises and challenges such categorizations.
One enormous difference in circumstances separates the
contributors to the third edition of CBEL from their prede-
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