The editing of the correspondence of major figures in
intellectual history is an essential
scholarly activity. Yet in this country in recent years it has
neither been the priority it
should be, nor has it received the support that it deserves. Of course
there have been exceptions to this, perhaps notably – for the early
modern
period – the epic one-man effort
of Esmond de Beer in his later years in producing The Correspondence
of John Locke
(though this regrettably, and frustratingly, lacks a composite index).
A further exception, the edition of The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg
by
A. R. and M. B. Hall, was
unfortunately flawed by the need to change publishers midway in the
series, which has led
to a marked disparity in the availability of the latter part of the
set compared with its early
volumes. In any case, like the Locke edition, this was conceived in the
heady days of the
1960s and early 1970s, and few have ventured such enterprises since.
Virtually the only
exception is Noel Malcolm's edition of the manageable-sized
Correspondence of Thomas
Hobbes (two volumes, 1994). Moreover, it is revealing of the
acute need to justify the
publication of such material felt by editors and publishers alike that
the promotional leaflet
for this edition went so far as to claim that it was ‘one of
the most important scholarly
publications of the twentieth century’ – a claim
that is the more ironic in view of the quite
significant shortcomings in its method of presenting the material that
it contains.