Pastless Present

All anthologies are afflicted, more or less, with a case of the "froms": from this, from that, from the other thing. I've found myself increasingly frustrated this semester with some especially pervasive froms. Editors of Victorian literature anthologies (and, it seems, anthologies in general) all appear to be allergic to the "past" in Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present, even though Carlyle's meditations on Jocelin of Brakelond are key to his theory of an ideal community. John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua results in a different headache when excerpted: Newman structures the book according to an organic model of narrative and personal development, which means that short excerpts don't necessarily make much sense; worse still, there's rarely anything included from Charles Kingsley, even though Kingsley's attacks on Newman prompted the Apologia in the first place. (At least last time I checked, the excerpt in the Norton edition also veers off into theological technicalities that leave even advanced students--not to mention, I suspect, quite a few instructors--at sea.) Similarly, while John Stuart Mill's mental breakdown is certainly a high point (so to speak) in his autobiography, it would be awfully helpful to see it in something resembling context. I'm more forgiving when it comes to excerpts of E. B. Browning's Aurora Leigh, which I once made the mistake of teaching in its entirety.

In many ways, it's ungracious to complain about hard editorial choices. What concerns me more, I think, is the way in which the excerpts themselves have become "canonical," to the extent that they begin to float free from the text and begin to reproduce themselves in anthology after anthology. William Buckler's older Riverside anthology, which does, I think, the most judicious job of excerpting, leaves out a number of figures many instructors might now want to assign. But we can't simply keep multiplying textbooks, which is unfair to cash-strapped students. Moreover, while e-texts may well be the wave of the future when it comes to anthologies, in many instances there's still a dearth of good scholarly electronic editions (despite many notable contributions such as the ones linked in my sidebar). For the same reason, it's often not enough to simply photocopy a public domain text--the students need footnotes, which not all instructors have time to supply, and the instructor needs access to a decent edition. I can certainly explain "the other stuff" in class, but if a taste of "the other stuff" isn't already in the anthology, then many students won't go looking for it elsewhere. (And not because they're lazy, but because they often don't have the time--especially if, like many of my students, they're juggling full-time schooling with full-time work or child-rearing.)