The House of Boffin announces a revised edition of Mr. Elbert Pitts's Final Words on Religion, under the title of Antepenultimate Words on Religion. As Mr. Pitts observes in his arresting Preface, "Finality, in a time of upheaval, is a relative term, and I hope, at intervals of six months or so, to publish my penultimate, quasi-ultimate and paulo-post-ultimate views on the vital beliefs which underlie the fantastic superstructure of dogmatic theology." The new work will be illustrated with three portraits of the author by Mr. Marcellus Thom, taken at various stages of the composition of the work.
Mr. Pitts has also completed a new novel entitled The Bounder of Genius, and has kindly furnished us with a brief outline of its contents. The hero, who starts life as an artificial raspberry-pip maker and amasses a colossal fortune in the Argentine grain trade, marries a poor seamstress in his struggling days, but deserts her for a brilliant variety actress, who is in turn deposed by (1) the daughter of a dean, (2) the daughter of an earl, and (3) the daughter of a duke. Ultimately Jasper Dando, for that is his name, leads a crusade to Patagonia, where he establishes a new republic founded on Eugenics, China tea, and the Prohibition of the Classics. Mr. Pitts thinks it the finest thing he has done, and he is fortified in this conviction by the opinion of Mr. Stoot, the principal reader of the House of Boffin.
We are glad to hear that Mr. Hanley Potter will shortly issue, through the firm of Bloomer and Guppy, a selection from the reviews, notices and essays contributed by him to The Slagville Gazette. "They are interesting," says the author, "as the expression of a fresh and unbiassed mind, unfettered by any respect for established reputations or orthodox standards." The titles of some of the articles—"The Dulness of Dante," "The Sloppiness of Scott," "George Eliot as Pedant," "Jane Austen the Prude"—indicate sufficiently the richness of the treat provided in these stimulating pages.
The Centenary of JANE AUSTEN is to be celebrated in a thoroughly practical manner by the House of Hussell. It will be remembered that, some thirty years ago, an effort was made to revive the waning popularity of SIR WALTER SCOTT by the issue of a series of condensed versions of his novels, in which redundant passages, notes and introductions were removed and the salient features were compressed in a compact and animated narrative. In order to render justice to JANE AUSTEN the process needed is diametrically opposite. JANE AUSTEN'S novels are short and singularly lacking in picturesqueness, emotion, colour. Mr. Hamo Bletherley, who has been entrusted with the task of infusing these elements into JANE AUSTEN'S staid and reticent romances, points out that her vocabulary was extraordinarily limited. Her abstinence from decorative epithets led to results that are bald and unconvincing. One may look in vain in her pages for such words as "arresting," "vital," "momentous" or "sinister." She never uses "glimpse," "sense" or "voice" as verbs. We look forward with eager anticipation to the results of Mr. Bletherley's courageous experiment.
In this connection we cannot too heartily congratulate Mr. Jerome Longmore, the well-known bookman and literary curio-collector, on his latest stroke of good luck. It appears that in a recent pilgrimage to Selborne he met the only surviving great-granddaughter of Sarah Timmins (charwoman at Chawton in the years 1810 to 1815), and purchased from her a pair of bedroom slippers, a pink flannel dressing-gown and a boa which had belonged to the great novelist. A full description of these priceless relics will shortly appear in The Penman, together with a life and portrait of Sarah Timmins, who married a pork butcher in Liphook and died in 1848. One of her letters establishes the interesting fact that JANE AUSTEN never ate sausages.