Duncan Wu's Wordsworth's Reading: 1770-1790 : A Supplementary List with Corrections

Duncan Wu's Wordsworth's Reading: 1770-1790 (Cambridge UP, 1993), a dated catalogue of the poet's reading during his formative years, is arguably the most important reference work on William Wordsworth to appear in almost two decades. It is also, as its author suggests, a work in progress, for new evidence about these matters will always be coming to light. It is in that spirit that I offer the following supplement to Wu's catalogue. It was originally compiled as part of a review article for The Charles Lamb Bulletin [91 (1995)]; when Wu himself assumed editorship of CLB , he was understandably reluctant to publish such a lengthy review of his own work, and, with my approval, the list was cut. I submit it now to Romanticism on the Net , not only because it contains new information, but also to advocate the usefulness of electronic publication for scholarly reference works. Studies like Wu's ought never again to appear as printed books; instead, they should be assembled and published as electronic documents, which can be constantly and easily emended and updated as our knowledge of their subject grows. One hopes that his publisher, Cambridge University Press, now a leader in scholarly electronic publication, will see fit to issue future volumes of his work in the electronic format for which it is much more aptly suited. In the list that follows, I make no pretense to being comprehensive; indeed, what I offer will be highly idiosyncratic, focused mainly on Wordsworth's knowledge of Chaucer and the Roman classics, which has been the main subject of my research. I have arranged the list, as Wu does, in alphabetical order. When offering a correction to Wu's catalogue, I supply both its catalogue entry number and page number in his volume; I also include the lowercase Roman numeral which Wu uses to distinguish multiple readings of the same work from each other. Besides the editions and translations of Virgil that Wu has listed, I would like to add the following: