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The
Cock and Anchor Edited by Jan Jedrzejewski
ISBN 0-86140-423-8 xxii, 490 pp. £35.00 First published in 1845, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's The Cock and Anchor is one of the most interesting historical novels written in Ireland in the nineteenth century. It is many things: a record of the mores and manners of early eighteenth-century Ireland, a story of love struggling against the prejudices of class and religion, a penetrating moral study of crime and punishment, an engaging thriller. But first of all it is a full-bodied, energetic, lively picture of Dublin - its palaces and its inns, its streets, its people, its way of life. Written in the early years of Le Fanu's career as a novelist, it provides an exciting introduction to the work of one the most intriguing novelists of Victorian Ireland.
The Editor has provided notes, notes on the text and appendices
which give the major and minor textual variants of the tale, and nearly
thirty pages of contemporary reviews published in Ireland, England and
Scotland. Educated at the University of eódn, Poland, and Worcester College, Oxford, Jan Jedrzejewski is Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Ulster. He wrote Thomas Hardy and the Church (1996), edited a selection of Thomas Hardy's short fiction Outside the Gates of the World (1996), and published numerous papers on Victorian fiction, modern Irish literature, and Anglo-Polish literary relations. 20/05/2009 |
