Volume 29, Number 15 · October 7, 1982
Grub Street Revolutionaries
By Norman Hampson
The Literary Underground of the Old Regime
by Robert Darnton
Harvard University Press, 258 pp., $16.50
A good many years ago Robert Darnton, as he puts it, 'walked into a historian's dream: an enormous cache of untouched archives, the papers of the Société typographique de Neuchâtel.' What he discovered there forms the basis of this collection of articles, most of them on the French writers whose works risked censorship before the Revolution, and were therefore published by such Swiss printers as the ones at Neuchâtel. To find a gold mine may be a matter of luck, though it rarely is; to exploit its potential calls for knowledge, skill, and the investment of resources. Darnton is amply supplied with all three. He has an enviable gift for reading between the lines, extracting meaning and life from unpromising material, and finding relations between things that have no obvious connection with each other. Whatever he writes is stimulating to read.
Review, 2817 words
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