242 26 13MB
English Pages 156 [157] Year 1967
EDITING NINETEENTH-CENTURY TEXTS
EDITING NINETEENTH CENTURY TEXTS Papers given at the Editorial Conference University of Toronto November 1966
edited by John M. Robson PUBLISHED FOR THE EDITORIAL CONFERENCE COMMITTEE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO BY UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Copyright Canada 1967 by University of Toronto Press Printed in Canada
Reprinted in 2018 ISBN 978-1-4875-8133-6 (paper)
CONTENTS
Contributors Introduction John M. Robson Old Wine in New Bottles: Problems of Machine Printing Fredson Bowers Charting the Golden Stream: Thoughts on a Directory of Victorian Periodicals Michael Wolff Editing Balzac: A Problem in Infinite Variation Bernard Weinberg Editing the Carlyle Letters: Problems and Opportunities Charles Richard Sanders
vii
3
9
37
60
77
Contents
vi
Principles and Methods in the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill
John M. Robson
96
Nineteenth-Century Editorial Problems: A Selective Bibliography Warner Barnes
123
Members of the Conference
133
Index
137
CONTRIBUTORS
Warner Barnes, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa, is Director of Textual Study for the Harper and Row edition of Mark Twain's works, and with Walter Blair is editing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He is working towards a definitive edition of Leigh Hunt's letters in the Brewer collection at Iowa. Founding editor of Books at Iowa, his publications include The Texas Browning Collection and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Descriptive Bibliography. For 1967-68 he has been awarded a National Humanities Foundation Fellowship for preliminary work towards a forty-six volume critical edition of James Fenimore Cooper. Fredson Bowers is Alumni Professor and Chairman of the Department of English at the University of Virginia. In 1958 he was Sandars Reader in Bibliography at Cambridge University and in 1959 Lyell Reader at Oxford University. The respective lectures have been published as Textual and Literary Criticism and Bibliography and Textual Criticism. He has edited the dramatic works of Thomas Dekker in four
Vlll
Contributors
volumes, and is the general editor of a new edition of Beaumont and Fletcher. He is textual editor for the Centenary Edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Early Works of John Dewey, and the Works of Stephen Crane. His new edition of Marlowe will soon appear. His Rosenbach Lectures On Editing Shakespeare have recently been reprinted in enlarged form by the University Press of Virginia. John M. Robson, Professor of English, Victoria College, University of Toronto, is a graduate of the University of Toronto (Ph.D., 1956). Textual editor of the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, he is editor of the Mill News Letter, an advisory editor of the Wellesley Index and of the Burke Newsletter. He has written a forthcoming book on Mill's thought and articles on Mill and other Victorians, and edited two student texts. Charles Richard Sanders, Professor of English at Duke University, was educated at Emory University and the University of Chicago. He is the author of Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement (1942) and Lytton Strachey: His Mind and Art (1957), and has written many articles on Byron, Leigh Hunt, Tennyson, Browning, Ruskin, Maurice, and Carlyle. He has recently compiled the section on Carlyle for the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. Bernard Weinberg is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. As a result of his association with the Balzac Project at that university he published his French Realism: The Critical Reaction, 1830-1870 and edited, with E. P. Dargan, The Evolution of Balzac's "Comedie humaine." Later works include A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, The Art of Jean Racine, and The Limits of Symbolism.
Contributors
ix
Michael W olfl, Associate Professor of English and History at Indiana University, was educated at Cambridge and Princeton (Ph.D., 1958). He is editor-in-chief of Victorian Studies, an advisory editor of the Wellesley Index and of Studies in British Culture, and a member of many international committees and study groups on Victorian culture.
EDITING NINETEENTH-CENTURY TEXTS
INTRODUCTION
John
M. Robson
AS R. J. SCHOECK EXPLAINED in his introduction to the first volume in this series, a group at the University of Toronto began in 1965 to plan annual conferences on editorial problems. 1 Our first conference (October 1965), dealing with the sixteenth century, was followed by a second in November 1966, out of which the present volume has grown. 2 Our experience of these two justifies Professor Schoeck's hopeful assessment of the value of meetings "at which scholars actively at work upon editorial tasks could come together for a free discussion of their work, learning from each other's experience, pooling their common intellectual resources, and seeking out expert opinion and counsel." Some ninety scholars attended the second conference, which featured library displays, a reception, dinner and lunch discussions, as well as the formal 1 See Editing Sixteenth-Century Texts, ed. R. J. Schoeck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966). 2The members of the Committee for 1966 were G. E. Bentley, Jr. (Convenor), Victor E. Graham, Francess G. Halpenny, Douglas Lockhead, John Leyerle, John M. Robson (Chairman), and Richard J. Schoeck. The names of those attending the Conference will be found at the back of this volume.
4
Introduction
sessions, and we are emboldened to say that this is about the optimum number for such conferences. There were amply sufficient interests and attitudes, yet not too many for useful and frank discussion, and there was room for interested graduate students from the area. Few came away from the sessions without having learned something of immediate value and without having been prompted to further hard thought. The conference began on Friday, November 4, with a reception which was doubly pleasant for, under the sponsorship of the University of Toronto Press, Professor and Mrs. Walter Houghton were honoured to mark the publication of the first volume of the Wellesley Index, a monumental and indispensable reference work for students of the nineteenth century in Britain. The reception was followed by dinner, at which Claude Bissell, President of the University of Toronto, himself a nineteenth-century scholar, welcomed the members. The major paper of the conference was given in the evening by Fredson Bowers on problems relating to machine printing. The two sessions on Saturday, containing two papers each, were separated by a lunch and followed by discussion periods. As suggested above, these discussion sessions were extremely valuable to the participants, ranging as they did beyond the formal subjects of the papers, and drawing on wide and long experience. Although this volume can make no attempt to reproduce the cross-fire and discreet nudges, one can safely predict that the major issues will eventually find their way into print in other forms. It is always matter for regret that limitations on subject cannot be avoided in brief meetings, and some gaps in our programme will be obvious: for example, the absence of poetry, the restriction of fiction to one paper, and the avoidance of American authors. (Professor Bowers' discussion of analytic principles, of course, helps fill the last two gaps.) In fact the omissions are deliberate, for we are reserving such matters for possible future conferences, believing that too
John M. Robson
5
wide a range produces scattered shots. (Our third conference, on late eighteenth-century problems, will be held in October 1967.) The word "problems," used in the title of our conferences, reflected ( without concert) in the titles of four of the items in this volume and appropriate to the other two, might be held to signal a dreadfully earnest approach to literature. Almost, one might say, a Victorian approach. The earnestness is there, along with the dedication to perfection that is another high-Victorian trait, but a delight that is still professional can be seen in these papers. The Victorians, after all, believed that problems have solutions, and we, as editors, would appear to share the belief. Some of us, it must be admitted, holding that there may be more than one solution to a problem, apparently give up the editor's final goal of a permanently definitive edition. Perhaps the voice of Ruskin can be heard: "All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy." 3 It is far too early in the history of nineteenth-century editing to make a final judgment on a related matter on which two differing positions can be seen in the papers of Professors Bowers and Weinberg. The principles of analytic bibliography are in no serious danger of supersession, but their complete relevance to one project-Balzac's works-is questioned by Professor Weinberg. The wide range of materials in the nineteenth century, the particular problems connected with individual authors and texts, and the economics of publishing and specialization of audiences may interdict the full use of analytic techniques or, at the very least, limit the recording of individual findings. Nonetheless, the major contributions to be expected and cherished from tried and true (and still expanding) methods are well heralded in Professor Bowers' 3The Stones of Venice, II, vi, 25.
6
Introduction
paper, which may be taken as one of the first important steps in an exciting journey. Professor Bowers, like Professor Sanders and myself, is in a sense reporting on a group project. The increasingly evident values of such projects will not inhibit scholars from pursuing the rich non-monetary rewards of individual work, but in a conference there is perhaps more to be learned from considering co-operative ventures. In any case, there is much to be gained from the suggestion of projects such as that outlined in Professor Wolff's paper, which is as much a plea as a description. His title, it should be mentioned, is derived from the name of a Baptist children's magazine, Pearls from the Golden Stream, in which the stream is the Gospel. In an earlier unpublished paper, which uses that title, he comments that "the newspapers, magazines, reviews, and serials of midVictorian England go a long way towards providing a broad and accurate sampling (pearls) of the How of mid-Victorian life (the golden stream)," and notes the appropriate Victorian quality of the metaphor-"richly ornamental and quite indifferent to meaning." In the paper here printed he argues for the charting of that stream, and one can only hope that many will join him in the task which, following the Wellesley Index, would make our travels so much more pleasant and profitable. Bernard Weinberg's probing of that sensitive area between bibliography and criticism, with his proposal for formal control over the selection of variants in Balzac, will provide justifiable comfort for those who recognize the need for honest assertions of subjectivity. It will be seen, however, that such honesty is based on a full examination of the materials, so that subjectivity is not merely prejudice or ignorance. His comments will also comfort those graduate students and advisers who may be worried about the decreasing store of editing materials; here we have a proposal for infinite variant editions. Michael Wolff's incidental indication of the undiscovered mines of
John M. Robson
7
variants in journals may also solace those whom it does not terrify. I have often wondered about the state of mind of the scholar in the twenty-first century who tries to discover just what the Daily Mirror said or did not say on a certain day through all its editions. C. R. Sanders' full account of the Carlyle letters will find a ready place in the somewhat meagre literature on editing letters. Again the importance of the material itself in determining procedures is seen in his remarks (and this message is itself important), but there is also much to be carried over to other projects. The interpenetration of our labours is indicated in his mention of the various people interested in the Buller papers; I might add that Professor Mineka has searched diligently for them, and a colleague of mine working on Canadian history would dearly welcome their appearance. Even this negative instance helps prove the value of conferences, for much letter-writing time was saved through conversation. My own paper is designed to cast some light on a large co-operative project in which the needs and demands of nonliterary disciplines are constantly asserted. In this area too there has been little published comment on the problems; a more objective comparison than I am capable of should be made of our principles and those governing, say, the current editions of Arnold (ed. R. H. Super) and Bagehot (ed. Norman St. John-Stevas). The bibliography prepared by Warner Barnes is yet another proof of the value of the conference, for it grew out of his suggestion that a reading of the available papers would convert the old scholar into the new bibliographer. Solvitur
ambulando.
At this time our Committee is not able and does not think it wise to plan specifically more than one year in advance. Some future area topics, such as American or Romantic, will be obvious, but considerable interest has also been shown in
8
Introduction
conversations and correspondence about conferences on, for example, electronic aids and techniques, an eighteenth-century S.T.C., copyright, and the role of the publisher and his staff in editing. This last matter was brought into focus nicely during the last conference when editorial staff expressed some valid annoyance at the different status accorded by some scholars to authorial rewritings made at the suggestion of the publishing house on the one hand and of literary friends of the author on the other. Many will acknowledge the debt owed to copy-editors; I am happy to say that this version of these papers is more authoritative after the ministrations of the University of Toronto Press than it was when submitted to the press.
OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES: PROBLEMS OF MACHINE PRINTING Fredson Bowers*
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CRITICS are apt to distinguish sharply between the eras of hand and of machine printing and their problems. At the extremes a true distinction does indeed present itself in the technical difficulties faced by an analytical bibliographer applying his craft to solve problems of text. The crudities of hand composition from a fount of limited size and of hand machining of sheets on a wooden press leave a trail "'In the discussion that followed on this paper various participants in the Conference demonstrated that here and there considerably more has been discovered in isolated cases about printing problems than I had allowed. However, the general point remains valid, I think, that we do not know enough to know how common or conventional were the pieces of evidence that are adduced; moreover, nowhere is a continuum of our present knowledge available with the mutual support that would accrue from a systematic survey. Indeed, even the traditional nineteenth-century printers' manuals have not been edited, with notes explaining the exact nature of the procedures that are too often allusively described in them, and how from bibliographical evidence within books the described processes may be detected and identified. As one small instance, the brief mention in the present paper of the two methods for bridging the settings of simultaneously working compositors analysed from the manuscripts of Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables and Blithedale Romance could never be recovered with equal precision from the accounts of the treatment of takes either in MacKellar's American Printer or De Vinne's Modern Methods of Book Composition.
10
Old Wine in New Bottles
of evidence that is quite obscured by linotype or monotype keyboard composition and by printing from rolls of paper on huge mechanical presses. Whereas in an Elizabethan book some individual pieces of type can be identified by their imperfections and thus traced in groups through the typesetting, the distribution, the setting in other formes, and so on through the book, the uniformity of modem type-metal and the appearance of any sort only once in the composition removes at a stroke all of the kind of mechanical evidence that in early books enables us to determine a number of most valuable facts. As Professor Hinman has shown us in his monumental analysis of the Shakespeare First Folio, and as Professor Turner has confirmed in several studies of Elizabethan dramatic quartos, the identification of individual types can demonstrate whether a book were set by formes or seriatim. The association of a set of type-cases with a compositor, as suggested by identified types, can also serve powerfully to back up spelling tests that may in themselves be less than demonstrable. The identification of types is also at the base of the analysis of early printing procedures from the subsequent evidence of the progression of running-titles in their formes through the sheets during successive impositions. In the late seventeenth century the bibliographer's ability to identify running-titles begins to decrease, and as the eighteenth century progresses this evidence becomes practically extinct. Outside of the difficulty in identifying types from the increasingly uniform founts, bibliographers are faced with such a multiplicity of presses that could be brought to bear in printing a book that the pattern of running-titles would be almost impossible to interpret even if the sets could be identified with confidence. But, increasingly, we are learning the extent of what we do not know. And we do not know whether it was usual in eighteenth-century printing, or when it may have become usual, for running-titles to be set with the pages,
Fredson Bowers
11
not transferred from forme to forme as part of the furniture, as was the earlier procedure. This matter is almost completely a mystery. The increasing uniformity of compositorial spelling habits as the eighteenth century progresses begins to deny to the textual bibliographer the evidence of variant spellings as a means of identifying the different workmen who typeset a given book. Nevertheless, exceptions do occur. Something perhaps can be done, at least in broad outline, with certain variable punctuation habits in Fielding's Tom Jones. And indeed, as late as Hawthorne's Fanshawe, printed in Boston in 1828, spelling evidence plus variant treatment of punctuation conventions identified five compositors and the stints they set with fairly sharp demarcation. New printing methods call forth new bibliographical techniques for dealing with the changed problems, as may be indicated by Professor Todd's investigation of eighteenthcentury press figures that McKerrow thought of little account. Likewise, plated books were at first taken to be a completely closed bibliographical secret. The return in printing to what is actually a modified block-book system, without seeming opportunity for variation, appeared at first sight to close the door to bibliographical analysis. But, in fact, the use of plates in printing has opened the way to new investigations of printing practice. Thus, the discovery that in reprinting, plates might be imposed in variable relation to each other, a relationship that sometimes can be detected by measuring the gutter margins, has made it clear that not all reprintings from plates need be unidentifiable. Yet the art of dealing with plates has gone much farther. By comparing multiple copies of plated books on the Hinman Collating Machine, the evidence of progressive type-batter can be utilized to suggest an order of printing; and when the batter is of the kind that occurs during the storage of plates, the opportunity exists to identify unremarked separate printings.
12
Old Wine in New Bottles
In addition to type-batter, the repairs of plates may present evidence. Plates wear out unequally, or become damaged. Plates may contain errors that need correction. When holes have been cut in plates and types soldered in as repairs, the Hinman Machine detects this evidence instantly whether or not there are actual changes, and the bibliographer can begin to sort out printings and to observe the progress of textual variation within a set of plates. Some very sophisticated bibliographical and textual evidence has been derived from the study of plated books by these techniques, as for example the sorting-out of four previously undifferentiated and otherwise unidentifiable printings in 1851 of Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables, or the assignment of a fifth printing to 1852 though its title-page is dated 1851. Or Professor Bruccoli's even more important distinction of five Boston printings in 1860 of The Marble Faun. As an even more refined example, Professor Tanselle, who is associated with the project for a new edition of Melville, is accumulating data to determine what can be used as evidence for plate alteration even before the first printing; that is, whether inequalities of inking or alignment can show that first-printing plates were altered in any respect from the typesetting that produced them even before they were sent to press. The changing methods of book manufacture marked by ever increasing uniformity are not the only factors that baffie bibliographical analysis or else demand the invention and application of new bibliographical techniques. Vitally affecting textual and bibliographical critics of modern books is the increased role played by the publisher as a middleman between the author's manuscript and the finished product of the book. That is, historians of Elizabethan books customarily speak of the printer but seldom of the publisher as in any way affecting the transition from manuscript to printed sheets. This identification has been carried to such extremes, indeed, that careless writers often impute to the printer what must have been the
Fredson Bowers
13
publisher's unique functions of securing manuscripts, deciding on the size of editions, and even dictating the form and often the content of title-pages. In fact, this identification is valid only when the printer was his own publisher, or vice versa. The Elizabethan job printer who manufactured books exclusively for others has long since become the norm. This extreme separation of publishing and printing responsibilities has opened up a vast no-man's land where historical studies have by no means filled in the topography. For instance, when did it become customary, as now, for a publisher to style an author's manuscript instead of leaving the responsibility to the printer? Hawthorne's manuscripts in the United States in the early 1850s and in England in the early 1860s show no sign of editorial intervention. At about what date do preserved printer's-copy manuscripts begin customarily to be marked in this manner for the press? The question has a bearing, of course, on the use of the common phrase "house style." Rightly or wrongly, most writers on text have grown so accustomed to using these words as tacitly applying to the printer of nineteenth-century books that it came as something of a shock to me, recently, to find that a reviewer of the Hawthorne edition had assumed that we were, instead, referring to the publisher's house-style and was worried about the evidence we had for such an application. When did it become customary for a printer (or publisher) to return an author's manuscript with proof? This question became of some real import in the analysis of the printing and proofing of Hawthorne's Marble Faun in late 1859, in England; and the evidence is by no means clear whether or not the copy was indeed returned to him. On the other hand, do the curious folds still present in the manuscript leaves of The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance signify that the copy was returned with the daily sheet of proof by Ticknor and Fields, or the printer, in the United
14
Old Wine in New Bottles
States in 1851 and 1852? No reference tells us, nor do historians know. Indeed we have no means of knowing whether Ticknor or Fields read proof before or after it was sent to Hawthorne, or whether he dealt directly and exclusively with the printer in the matter of the entire proofreading. That a publisher's reader had some concern with the text, however, even though at a later date, can be demonstrated by some interesting changes made in the second edition of The Scarlet Letter, as will be remarked. A rather extraordinary case demonstrating how little we know of the history of printing, to say nothing of the relation of printer and publisher and author, came to light in the edition of Hawthorne's Seven Gables and Blithedale Romance. The House of the Seven Gables was printed in 1851 by Metcalf and Company, and The Blithedale Romance in 1852 by Thurston, Torry and Company. Yet the names of several of the compositors marked on the manuscripts are the same, and it seems manifest that both manuscripts were set in the same printing-house. From this anomaly emerged what, I think, was a new historical fact in printing, that at this date, in Boston at least, the so-called printer was quite literally the printer in that he machined the sheets and nothing else. The type was set by the firm that was named as the stereotyper, the one that made the plates. This is information of crucial importance for the textual critic, of course, for the identification of the printer in the sense of the shop in which the type was set is the first step towards assumptions about accuracy, styling, and so on. Printing historians, so far as I am aware, have not noticed this separation of functions, when it began, when it ended, and how it came about. Until they do, no statement about the printer on a title can be taken at its face value, necessarily. It is difficult to tackle the editorial problems of almost any complex nineteenth-century book without coming upon new and unsuspected evidence about printing methods. For
Fredson Bowers
15
example, the assignment of the exact compositorial stintsand thus an estimate about the faithfulness to copy of the various workmen-could not be made for Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables and Blithedale Romance until the markings in the manuscript printer's copy were correctly interpreted. When a manuscript is set simultaneously by a group of compositors, the copy is divided into "takes," or sets of manuscript leaves, assigned to each workman. In the Hobart and Robbins shop in 1852, with The Blithedale Romance manuscript, when a compositor in a group had, towards the end of his take, either paged his galleys himself or had a maker-up mark his copy as the pages were determined, he could decide to continue to set type from the remaining text on the last manuscript leaf of his take, and to keep on until he had completed the unset material above the compasitor's signature on the first leaf of the succeeding take. Or, on the contrary, he could tum over his final leaf, and its remaining text below the marked page ending, to the next compositor. The latter would then know where his first page could begin and would set from the lower part of this leaf and continue from the top of the first leaf of his own take until he came to the paragraph opening where, according to his signature, he had earlier started to set. He could then page, or tum his galleys over to a maker-up for paging, and when he came to the final leaf of his take he could treat the next compositor, in tum, according to the material on his final leaf. This is the simple interpretation of the markings on the leaves of the Blithedale manuscript, which at the foot of some printed page-the last leaf of a take, usually-will exhibit a pencil bracket, the next page number, and the name of the compositor who was to begin that page. The assignment of the compositorial stints, hence, required little interpretation since ordinarily on completion of the final page, the last leaf of a take was handed over to the next workman, who would
16
Old Wine in New Bottles
then set type until he had reached the type already composed from the first paragraph on the initial leaf of his own signed take. And so on, through the group of simultaneously composing workmen in staggered order. The stints of the workmen, as a result, would generally correspond with the beginning or end of a page, and a new page immediately succeeding would mark the start of a different compositorial stint. On the other hand, the manuscript of The House of the Seven Gables, set a year earlier in the same shop and in part by some of the same workmen, reveals a quite different system of markings that needed to be interpreted from scratch in order to demarcate the compositorial stints. That is, as in Blithedale, the first leaf of a take had the compositor's signature in the first paragraph opening (since that alone could provide the first full line of type he could be confident of setting when he began his take). But the brackets with signatures and page numbers on the last leaf of the preceding take were missing, ordinarily, and thus the system for bridging the takes must have differed. The interpretation finally arrived at of this evidence was that for Seven Gables-quite contrary to the Blithedale practice-each compositor automatically continued typesetting over onto the first leaf of the next one's take until he came to the end of the paragraph above where the compositor of this take had begun his typesetting, as indicated by his signature in the paragraph indention. The number of type-lines would then be entered in the foreman's book so that credit could be given each compositor for the linage set. The use of these two systems had never before this investigation been distinguished, nor has their rationale, which may depend in part on the distinction between short takes (as in Seven Gables) and long takes (as in Blithedale Romance), been determined. The difference between the systems is of singular importance for the textual bibliographer, however, for in the one the compositor's stints are defined by
Fred.son Bowers
17
the page units whereas in the other the work of a new compositor will ordinarily begin at the start of a paragraph within a page of type. The distinction may prove to be important in bibliographical analysis. For instance, the assignment of compositorial stints in Fanshawe was made by the investigators on the hypothesis that the page was the unit, whereas some anomalies that developed in the application of this hypothesis, particularly among the short takes at the end, may have resulted from the transfer of copy within the page, instead, according to the then unsuspected method of Seven Gables. Moreover, as a consequence, the transition from relatively long takes in the first two-thirds or so of Fanshawe to relatively short takes at the end, doubtless marking a transition from seriatim to simultaneous composition, was not fully understood in the Textual Introduction to the Centenary Edition of Fanshawe. In Elizabethan times an author was ordinarily expected to attend the press daily if he wanted the opportunity to proofread and correct his book. Time, tide, and printers waited for no man, and machining of the sheets would begin at convenience, with the first pulls laid aside for whichever functionary in the printing-house was to serve as proofreader. When proofs were marked and returned, the press was stopped, the alterations made, and printing resumed. Proofs might be read and corrected in this manner in several stages. If the author wished to substitute at any stage for the printinghouse reader, that was his privilege if he chose to be present at an appropriate time. Otherwise, he would never see proofs. Some commercial printing by the late Restoration seems to show signs that an author might have proofs pulled for him to be read at leisure. Certainly this was the established procedure long before Henry Fielding had his Joseph Andrews printed in mid-eighteenth century. But what about revises? Hawthorne's correspondence with his publishers in mid-nineteenth century never mentions these second opportunities to correct
18
Old Wine in New Bottles
or alter one's work. In The Marble Faun at least one reading appears, in the Preface, that was almost certainly a revise from the original reading of the first proof-sheet. But did Hawthorne make this change in a physical revise sent him as a matter of course, or did he order it by special message after re-reading a spare copy of the proofs that he had retained after the first and only round of actual reading? No historian appears to tell us with anything like precision what is the history of authorial proofreading, let alone of the vital question of automatic revises. Hawthorne's proofs were sent him both in the United States and in England in what we would call page-proof form but with the pages already imposed and proofed in a folded sheet such as would later form a gathering in the printed book. English publishers of the present day prefer to send out the first proofs in just this manner, but American commercial printers, especially of novels, now send proof in galleys. When did this latter custom begin? The answer is of considerable importance, for a revising author can add or subtract freely in galleys whereas cavalier rewriting is so extremely expensive in page-proofs as to be almost prohibitive, and therefore rare. Although Hawthorne in the United States received only page-proofs from Hobart and Robbins in Cambridge, I have seen galley proofs for a Mark Twain book, as I think I recall. The historians do not tell us whether the difference in method was an individual case or a change in procedure at a later date. Not too many years ago an American novelist would receive galleys first, and then revises in the form of page-proofs though not imposed in sheets. In the present day he is sent only galley proof and in normal circumstances sees no revises. When did this change occur, and how uniform was it, or is it? A textual critic of the future, and certainly even of the present, would like to know. These are samples of the wide gaps in our knowledge that
Fredson Bowers
19
have resulted from a changed relationship of publisher and also of author to the finished product of the book that began with the submission of manuscript. Moreover, publishers, and printers, have often made little effort either to keep their records, or to make them available to investigators. Thus although a bibliographer of modern books might expect to have a mass of external evidence about the numbers of printings and their dates as well as the size of the impressions, bills for plate changes, and so on, in fact it is a rare scholar who can speak with as much authority about these details in a book of the present day as about their equivalents in the Elizabethan age. Authors themselves have contributed to the difficulties that face textual criticism and bibliographical investigation. A trained textual critic can sometimes make important assumptions about the accuracy of a text-leading occasionally to necessary emendation of readings-by correlating the known difficulties and ambiguities of an author's handwriting with what seem to be textual errors. But the author who types his own work offers fewer opportunities for reconstruction. On the other hand, when authors turn over their own handwritten or typed copy to professional typists, the opportunities for undetected error multiply. Particularly, these days, many authors send draft copy to their agents, who assign it to typists, and the author never proofreads the resulting script until it is set in type. His own copy will not be preserved unless he specifically requests it, and thus he has no ready means but his memory to know whether he wrote some questionable phrase or not when he has not annotated his carbon copy (if he made one) as fully as his revised typescript. Yet these differences called for in the techniques of bibliographical examination, and the results that can be anticipated according as one deals with old or new printing and publishing conditions, should not obscure the general experience of editors that principles behind the applications of
20
Old Wine in New Bottles
bibliographical techniques remain largely the same, that the same laws of evidence hold good, and thus that the continued search for physical evidence to be applied to textual problems will yield results, according to the circumstances, whether one is working in the sixteenth or in the twentieth century. The editor of Stephen Crane, as of Shakespeare, finds the same problems of copy-text and of the transmission of text affecting his editorial decisions. The same bibliographical rules of evidence that distinguish authorial revision from compositorial sophistication apply to Hawthorne's Marble Faun as to Thomas Dekker's First Part of the Honest Whore. Various techniques of bibliographical expertise will differ in their applicability, but editorial logic remains constant in its relation to bibliographical evidence. And the best training for the textual editor of nineteenth- and twentieth-century books is still a broad experience in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. It is this constant factor within the physical changes that attend book manufacture and publication that I want to illustrate by a few selected examples. It is a hard fact, but a true one, that the easiest texts for an editor to deal with are those about which he knows the least, in the sense that the minimum evidence has been preserved concerning the translation of the text from manuscript to print. In the nineteenth century a typical text is that of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter of 1850. Here the manuscript was destroyed and the first edition thus becomes the major authority. When one inquires whether any physical evidence about the printing of this text assists in the search for ultimate authority, what are perhaps a surprising number of pieces of bibliographical fact can be gathered together for survey. This first edition was printed from type-metal, not from plates. In preparing our edition it was therefore of the first importance to collate a number of copies on the Hinman Machine to see if variation had occurred during the course of printing. The eight copies machine-collated disclosed no
Fredson Bowers
21
attempt to correct or revise the text during the course of printing, such as one customarily encounters in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books. I should venture to say that the usefulness of multiple collation in order to discover authorial or printing-house corrections made during the printing of the sheets vanishes in the early eighteenth century when the major shift in proofing procedures seems to have been completed. That is, what slight evidence we have suggests that in the late seventeenth century many commercial books began to be proofed, in something close to final form, whether authorially or professionally, before the formes were laid on the press for machining, and that this process was the normal one within a few decades. The very valuable insight that Elizabethan books can provide between the readings of the original typesetting and those that resulted from the casual ministrations of the printing-house proofreader is barred to the editor of most nineteenth-century texts. On the other hand, this comparison of copies by machine collation is still a necessity, although for reasons other than those that obtain with earlier books. For instance, although attempts to correct or revise the text while sheets are in press must be rare indeed, the plates of the text can degenerate from the form represented by its original typesetting, or the relative purity of the original typesetting cannot be established without the facts gleaned from collation. In The Scarlet Letter, for example, lines 9-11 on page 321 were reset during the course of printing, no doubt to repair some accident to the type. In this place no textual variant was created, but whenever resetting of any variety is encountered the opportunity for error exists, whether in type or in plates. In the fourth printing of the first American edition of The Marble Faun, the plate for page 98 of the second volume seems to have been damaged since the whole page was reset and a new plate made. Five textual errors occur in the resetting of this one page. In The Scarlet Letter the collation disclosed the
22
Old Wine in New Bottles
previously unknown fact that the two pages of text that comprise the last gathering of the first edition were set in duplicate for easier machining. The evidence in this case had no textual significance because the duplicate setting was identical in every respect; but in somewhat the same situation in duplicate plates made from a single setting in The House of the Seven Gables a comma appears in one plate but not in the other, and an editor must decide whether to include or omit it. The answer, of course, is based on what must have been the order of the two sets of plates made from the type-page, which in tum is based on the physical process by which plates are made. The degeneration of a text during its first printing from type-metal may be illustrated by the five variants that were revealed in the eight Scarlet Letter collated copies. Two of these were trivial in the extreme in that they represented only the shifting of loose type that produced variant spacing. The other three variants also resulted from loosened type in which one or two letters dropped out. The errors are so obvious, however, that no editor could be misled. One rather interesting variant remains, in which we know that an exclamation point completing a speech dropped out before the quotation mark, early in the printing since it is present in only one of the copies examined. Trifling as this variant is, it had its editorial significance in that the second edition, set from a copy without the point, substituted a comma, which has appeared in every version of the text up to the Centenary Edition. By good luck, the correct exclamation point was present in a single copy among the eight collated for this edition. The only other bibliographical fact discovered about the first edition was that its octavo gatherings had been imposed both formes together in one sixteen-page forme and printed by the work-and-tum method. Two other editions of The Scarlet Letter were printed in 1850 and these, of course, had to be examined scrupulously to see if any authorial intervention had occurred in the
Fred.son Bowers
23
transmission of the text. Bibliographical examination turned up a considerable amount of previously unknown material about the second edition, also printed from type-metal. Both preliminary quires a and b were set in duplicate, the only difference between them being the absence of a comma from the first edition in one page; but since the third edition was set from a copy with the comma missing, this punctuation became lost to the textual tradition. Of major import, however, was the discovery of a fact not previously known, that standing type from the first edition started to appear irregularly in gatherings 14 and 15, and beginning with gathering 16 and continuing to the end the second edition was printed entirely from standing type of the first. In the 96 pages of standing type eight variants appear, of which three are in spelling, four are in punctuation, and one in word-division. Obviously an editor had to attempt to discover whether these were authorial changes, since a decision would then affect at least some of the 62 variants that appeared in the 226 pages of reset type. Fortunately, at least two of the eight variants moved away from first-edition Hawthorne forms that could be established as characteristic from his manuscripts, and thus it was possible to decide that a publisher's reader but not the author had ordered the eight changes in the standing type, no doubt by marking a copy of the printed first edition throughout. This point settled, logic required an editor to reject automatically all variants in the reset pages as non-authorial, a decision that might not have been so easy were it not for the decisive evidence of the changes made in standing type, which could be identified as non-compositorial. The third edition offered no problems in deciding that it was a straight reprint of the second, without any authority. In the careful bibliographical examination of The Scarlet Letter problem, the results were not directly illuminating in the sense that they led to no new substantive readings (although in fact one new substantive emendation was made),
24
Old Wine in New Bottles
no unsuspected revelation of authorial intervention in later editions. This fact disappointed one reviewer, a mid-Western library-school Dean, who declared roundly: At the end of this long journey through the bibliographic underbrush, one might hope to find evidence of textual alterations that would throw significant light on the maturation of Hawthorne's philosophy, the development of his characters, or the course of the plot. But no such happy discovery rewards the investigator. Textual variants are limited to ... typographical trivia ... and so on and on through some forty pages of introduction and seven appendices dealing with such topics as variants in the first and second editions, editorial emendations in the copy-text, word division, and special collation lists. All of these add up to the conclusion that there were in the first edition very few substantive departures from the text of the lost manuscript of the novel, that publishing-house style accounts for many of the variants and that most of the corrections in proof were not made by Hawthorne but by another hand, or hands, associated either with the publisher or the printer.... [One] cannot suppress the wish that [the] heavy bibliographic artillery had bagged quarry more worthy of the ammunition .... Doubtless ... one should be grateful for the labor of those bibliographic drones who spend countless hours in a tireless search for printers' errors, no matter how fortuitous or trivial; but let us not confuse it with scholarship, not even when done with a Hinman Collator or, for that matter, a bright and shining IBM 7090. I take it there is little need to enter an extended defence against confusion of this variety. False hopes among the ignorant may often be raised by the claims of textual bibliography -although I do think, in passing, that to expect bibliographical examination of a simple text like The Scarlet Letter to shed significant light on the maturation of Hawthorne's philosophy, the development of his characters, and the course of the plot is to betray a certain na'ivete of attitude. Analysis of Hawthorne's manuscripts in one or two cases can perform these wonders, especially in respect to the plot and characters of The Marble Faun; but Hawthorne was not a rewriter of what he had in print.
Fredson Bowers
25
I take the time with this long and rather foolish quotation, which in fact I have materially condensed, to exemplify the non-scholarly resistance that the bibliographical method may encounter in its normal operations. The history of The Scarlet Letter text following its first edition was one of constantly increasing corruption. The results of the bibliographical examination demonstrated that the original edition was the only authority and that changes made in the second edition, although sometimes inviting, had no relation to Hawthorne's wishes. The first edition thus established as copy-text was shown to be variant but only in insignificant ways, so that an editor was faced as his ultimate authority with the typesetting of this first edition and nothing else. On this point, the whole editorial method converged. To an amateur, evidence that is negative is useless and disappointing. Unless one can find something by bibliography that will change the author's text, one becomes a bibliographic drone. To a scholar, however-and here I think we may separate ourselves from this reviewer-the negative evidence of the examination of The Scarlet Letter that constantly narrowed the authority of the text back to the first edition and only the first edition was as valuable for the accuracy of the editorial job at hand as more exciting evidence would have been that broadened the spread of authoritative texts by the discovery of authorial intervention during the printing or in some later form than the first edition. An editor's job is to recover from the extant documents the purest final form of the authorial text in every minute detail. It was too bad that Hawthorne did not revise his texts in print. But when it was established that he did not (and it was a new fact that was thus established), the rigour of the examination and the analysis of the evidence then in a most helpful manner prevented an editor from making an ass of himself by dealing with variants in the second edition, especially in the reset pages, on a subjective critical basis
26
Old Wine in New Bottles
that might readily have led him to accept some of these compositorial or editorial changes as Hawthorne's own. Negative evidence, therefore, in no uncertain fashion delimited textual authority and established the exact materials proper for an editor to utilize from among the various extant documents. This was a singularly valuable gift that bibliographical analysis offered to textual criticism, and its true though unassuming usefulness should not go uncelebrated despite its frequent misinterpretation by incompetent critics. In The Scarlet Letter the extrapolation of evidence from sections of the book printed from standing type in the second edition to sections printed from reset type, in an endeavour to establish by this evidence the nature of the alterations in the reset portion, was a form of textual criticism based on bibliography, in that the physical facts of standing versus reset type were used as the basis for inferences about the nature of the changes in each section according to the physical circumstances of the print. Yet the problem was elementary in The Scarlet Letter compared to cases where two or more authorities can exist for a text. At one extreme, an editor of Shakespeare faced with a play first printed in the Folio can rely on his own analysis of the variants in the Second, Third, and Fourth Folios, and on the experience of editors of other plays with the variants in these editions, to come to the conclusion that he has only a single authority for his text and must do what he can by emendation, or refusal to emend, to reconstruct the purest text from the only extant authoritative document. This was The Scarlet Letter situation. On the other hand, certain Shakespeare texts, like King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and 2 Henry IV, exist in texts of different traditions and of multiple authority. Immediately, two central problems arise. First, what is the physical relationship of these two forms of the
Fredson Bowers
27
text; and second what is the history of the text behind each and thus the nature of its authority? It is well established that the first edition of Hamlet is a memorially reconstructed text, as are the first editions of King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, The Merry Wives, and Richard III, although perhaps in varying measure. These texts are, then, less reliable than texts like Othello or Troilus that have some transcriptional link with the original Shakespearean manuscript although with differing authority. The physical relationship between two variable texts is singularly important to establish since much textual logic depends upon it. For example, if Polonius is to call Hamlet's vows to Ophelia "pious bauds" instead of the "pious bonds" found both in the Second Quarto and in the Folio, the emendation is easier if we suppose that an annotated copy of Q2 was behind the Folio text than if we attempt to explain this as a common error in two independent manuscripts. The problem of Stephen Crane's Maggie in some respects resembles that facing an editor of Shakespeare's 2 Henry IV. The Folio 2 Henry IV offers a text that has been remarkably cleaned up from its Quarto colloquialisms and made much more of a literary text. It is bad enough for an editor to have to conjecture what could have been the agent and authority for this change; it is worse that the case is not wholly demonstrable either for an annotated quarto or an independent manuscript as the Folio copy-text. Thus an editor does not have the basic physical information at hand from which the assessment of the nature of the Folio variants as authorial, editorial, or compositorial must stern. Stephen Crane published Maggie in 1893 under a pseudonym, and after the success of The Red Badge of Courage was encouraged by his publisher to revise the raw tale of vice and squalour for a more general audience. The second edition, published in 1896, is a curious mixture of Crane's stylistic revision and rewriting for purely literary purposes, of
28
Old Wine in New Bottles
his own alteration of objectionable words and phrases under the general instructions of his publisher, of some alterations that are very likely the publisher's additional "improvements" or censorship, and no doubt of some undetected compositorial variation as well. The editorial problem can be approached in various ways, and in some respects a parallel-text edition would be ideal. But if an eclectic text is attempted, a critical edition, I suggest, should reject all alterations dictated by censorship while accepting all alterations that are literary in origin. I see nothing bibliographical in this series of decisions, which are of the utmost critical difficulty, but I do see some foundation given to the attempt to separate not only the two traditions but also any compositorial interference by the establishment of the fact that Crane made his changes in a copy of the 1893 Maggie and not by writing out a new version. If we could positively demonstrate even this simple fact for 2 Henry IV, we should be much farther advanced in our knowledge of the transmission, and thus in part of the origin, of Folio changes. The need to establish the exact facts of the transmission of a text are particularly acute when a manuscript is preserved. Any variations in the first edition from the manuscript must be either compositors' errors not detected in the proofreading or else authorial proof-changes. The one kind is to be rejected, the other to be accepted as the author's final intentions. This is a clearcut case in respect to the Hawthorne texts of The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun, where printers' markings demonstrate that the preserved manuscripts were the actual printer's copy. But the textual problem of Crane's Red Badge of Courage is very considerably complicated by the question whether a lost intermediate typescript, made by a professional typist, intervened between the preserved manuscript and the typesetting. Some
Fredson Bowers
29
changes difficult to assign to Crane, the publisher, or the compositors might have originated in this intermediate transcript and Rowed into the final text undetected. Even under the ideal circumstances of the Hawthorne romance texts, however, the decision about readings is not an easy one. I recall vividly that when I first started to edit The House of the Seven Gables I gave it up about a third of the way through the collation, since I could not understand the nature of the variants between manuscript and first edition. I then turned to The Blithedale Romance, which fortunately seemed to offer much less difficulty, and was able to cut my teeth on that. Only later, when once more engaged with Seven Gables, did I discover the reason for my difficulty. In The Blithedale Romance various differences between the manuscript and print could be assigned quite plausibly as compositorial misreadings, since a comparison with the manuscript word often showed how the compositor had misconstrued its letters. Other variants were so widely separated in their wording as to remove either compositorial misreading or memorial error or sophistication as a cause, leaving only the hypothesis that these must be Hawthorne's own proofalterations. In between was a group of neutral changes to which no definite agent could be assigned with any initial confidence. In this group, as in the others, the bibliographical analysis by compositors of all variants proved to be helpful: it established the proportion of alteration in each man's work (since the stints were marked on the manuscript), and his proportion of clearcut error; finally all such evidence was applied to an analysis of the neutral variants. This scientific approach, factually based, could not neglect an editor's critical opinion, but criticism was definitely limited by the evidence first secured by bibliographical analysis. The result led to an acceptance as Hawthorne's proof-alterations of roughly twothirds of the variants between manuscript and print.
30
Old Wine in New Bottles
It then developed that the difficulty with Seven Gables lay in the fact that the same methods established, on the contrary, about two-thirds of the variants as printer's errors to be rejected, as against only one-third authorial proof changes. The proportion was so high as to be puzzling and indeed inexplicable on my first encounter with the text. But physical circumstances did seem to have resulted in this wide disparity. Seven Gables proof, sent a sheet a day, was corrected on the counter of the Lenox County post office and mailed back by return, after a walk of several miles through the mud that Hawthorne detested. Clearly, there was a reason for carelessness here in comparison to the Blithedale proof, corrected under more agreeable and leisurely circumstances near Boston. The Marble Faun illustrates how refined methods of bibliographical analysis can, when the right conditions obtain, result in a marked increase of editorial certainty. Superficially the conditions are the same as in the two preceding romances with preserved manuscripts. That is, we have the exact printer's copy and the first edition each as an authority. We have the compositors' stints marked off, and analysis shows the same highly varying degree of competence in the London workmen as had appeared in the compositors within the Hobart and Robbins shop in America. The proportion of error is very considerable indeed, due in some part to the difficulty these compositors had with Hawthorne's hand and in some part, perhaps, to the freedom they felt they should take with his American style and idiom. Thus the problem is particularly acute to separate Hawthorne's proof-corrections from the large amount of compositorial variation that he overlooked in proof and did not alter. Here a purely bibliographical situation develops that is of peculiar interest to any editor of nineteenth-century books. The Marble Faun was printed in England before Hawthorne left to resume his residence in the United States after his term as consul at Liverpool. Ticknor and Fields, his Boston
Fredson Bowers
31
publishers, had made arrangements to have the English printed copy sent to them in sheets from which they could set the American edition. Owing to some mixup about arrangements, copy was delayed in the sending and a serious question arose whether Hawthorne would lose his American copyright if the Boston edition could not be produced quickly enough. Thus some correspondence developed that gives us the dates when the copy for the English first and third volumes was sent across the Atlantic, with the date for the second volume still indeterminate. We now come to the fascinating bibliographical situation about the textual relationship of these two editions. Some fifty-two recognizably significant substantive variants exist between the first English edition in three volumes and the first Boston edition in two volumes. These are distributed with considerable unevenness. For example, in the whole area of the Boston edition where the first volume of the English served as printer's copy, the Boston text was so carefully printed that in no case did it depart from its source to create a substantive error and the five verbal differences that appear are all necessary corrections of obvious English errors. These pages, then, offer a sample that is large enough to be significant for estimating what should be expected in the remaining two-thirds of the text, even though no compositorial analysis of the Boston edition is possible. As compared with this record of five variants from Vol. I of the English copy, when Vol. II was set in Boston twentyseven variants appear between the two editions, and twenty in Vol. III. Moreover, in only a very few cases do these variants agree with those in Vol. I as correction of the errors in the English copy. When we examine the variants in the Vol. II copy, we see a further odd fact. The text of this second English volume begins with preliminary quire 19 and ends with sheet 37. Only six variants appear in the seven text sheets 20-26, but
32
Old Wine in New Bottles
a total of twenty-one occur in the eight sheets 30-3 7: that is, six variants in the first seven sheets versus twenty-one in the last eight sheets. Moreover, the nature of the variants seems to change from misprints or memorial errors to clearcut substantive alteration of a distinctive kind. The same anomaly is found in Vol. III of the English copy. In the first nine sheets, 38-46, there are only two variants, one a correction of an error and the other an obvious mistake. But beginning with sheet 47 and continuing through the next eight gatherings to the final sheet 55 of the English edition, the number, the concentration, and also occasionally the nature alter almost as markedly as in Vol. II. That is, in the first nine sheets two variants occur, but eighteen appear in the remaining nine sheets. It is the nature of bibliography to deal with printing units, in this case with the sheets. If variation occurs within a pattern that can be distinguished by the sheets treated as units, then a mechanical explanation in the printing process must be sought. Here the only hypothesis that will interpret the statistics in a reasonable manner is that Vol. I was sent to Boston in sheets that had been revised after Hawthorne's proof-corrections; indeed the copy was almost certainly the printed sheets themselves as later issued in England. Thus no differences appear that cannot be imputed to the Boston correction of errors in the copy. The low percentage of variation in the first seven sheets of Vol. II (six variants) and in the first nine of Vol. III (two variants) also argues for essentially the same conditions. In the latter half both of Vol. II and Vol. III, however, the ratio of variation increases markedly, and the nature changes. The inference follows that in each case the package sent to Boston was a mixed one containing already printed sheets or their final proof form, and also proof-sheets that had not yet been marked with Hawthorne's corrections or revisions. The critical analysis of the variants agrees with this bibliographical hypothesis: those variants from the English text in the later
Fredson Bowers
33
sheets of Boston Vols. II and III that agree with the manuscript represent the original readings of the English proofsheets that were subsequently corrected or revised by Hawthorne to the form of the readings in the English first edition. It follows that where we have the controls of the reconstructed original English proof-sheets (and they represent about a third of the romance), editorial decision may be governed almost exclusively by bibliographical logic. Whenever in the conjectured proof-sheets the manuscript and the English edition agree and Boston differs, the Boston variant must represent either an original English typesetting error corrected later in proof but perpetuated in its early form in Boston, or else a Boston error made from correct English copy save for the rare cases when Boston might correct a joint manuscript and English printed error. Whenever the manuscript and Boston agree against the English print, the English edition's reading must, of course, be established as a Hawthorne proof-correction, save in the rare cases when the English is a misprint and Boston independently corrects it and thus returns to the reading of the manuscript. Finally, whenever the English and Boston editions agree against the manuscript, the reading must be either an original error in the London sheets perpetuated in Boston, or else a natural London correction of a faulty manuscript reading. To summarize, whenever the manuscript and London agree against Boston, the odds favour acceptance of the English reading as a Hawthorne proof-correction that returned the error in the proof to the correct reading as represented in the manuscript. These London readings should be accepted. Whenever the manuscript and Boston agree against London, the odds favour the London reading as an authorial proofrevision that must be accepted. Whenever the London and Boston editions agree against the manuscript, the odds favour the acceptance of the manuscript as the authentic reading. This series of syllogisms clarifies completely the editorial
34
Old Wine in New Bottles
problems in the seventeen sheets printed in Boston from the English proofs. The conclusion thus reached is a blessing, as any editor can testify, because it removes all personal, subjective judgment from the choice of readings among the three extant authorities. Almost as important, it reconstructs the proof-sheets that Hawthorne marked, and so provides a body of fact about the nature of his proofreading of this book and also about the correctness of the various compositorial stints in the proofs. In these control sheets, therefore, statistics about the compositors' rate and kind of variation are fully trustworthy. Finally, all this valuable information can be extrapolated to serve as a guide to editorial decision about readings in the two-thirds of the book printed in Boston from the English sheets in their extant printed form. A non-bibliographical editor would Hounder in this complex textual situation, the nature of which he could not recognize, and whose very existence he would not suspect. His critical taste would inevitably be wrong in a number of choices, as I can testify from the preliminary choices I made between the manuscript and the printed London readings before the significance of the Boston evidence penetrated my skull. As a result, I think the final text of The Marble Faun will represent the most scientifically edited and accurate text to date of a nineteenth-century American author. If it warns editors to investigate carefully the value of evidence in editions printed both in England and in America when related to hypotheses about the nature of printer's copy it will have served its purpose. Other rich goodies are contained in the bibliographical analysis of this text, but I should like to reserve a few surprises for the edition itself. I can mention, however, that some variant readings made by plate-changes in the third Boston printing appear to go back to a supplementary marked proof sent from England at a later time, and thus may help to reconstruct that proof-sheet. Moreover, a study of the
Fredson Bowers
35
variant foliation of the manuscript demonstrates one area where a single chapter has been revised to form two chapters, and somewhat later another chapter has been inserted, all this during Hawthorne's inscription of the romance in its present fair-copy form from a lost original. These changes made during the last stage of preparation of the manuscript do seem to reflect a development by Hawthorne of the relations of Miriam to the Model and thus have a direct bearing on the plot leading to the crime on which the romance turns. It would be easy for critics to seize on this interesting evidence from the manuscript about the plot and characters and to dismiss as bibliographical dronism the whole painful reconstruction of the lost proof-sheets that in tum served as the basis for the establishment of the text, of what one reads, on an evidential basis and in a form far superior to the corrupt first edition or even to the manuscript. They would be mistaken to do so, however, for the text is the foundation stone of all literary criticism, and only when it is established in definitive form can the critic proceed about his evaluative business with any confidence. The nineteenth century, and the early twentieth, remains the period where critics have been least interested in textual concerns, however. Not only the complacency with which critics quote from corrupt texts in any sort of reprint edition, whether English or American, is shocking. It is even more shocking to find so little critical attention paid to the transmission of an author's text from manuscript to periodical to first edition and then to collected edition. A revising author shows us what he is trying to achieve and thus points the way not only to a more refined analysis of his style but also to a more precise, because evidential, evaluation of his literary intentions in general as well as in specifics. Most critics simply are not interested in such studies-the worse for them. This being so, it is perhaps inevitable that they have not yet learned to demand pure texts that are as close to the
36
Old Wine in New Bottles
author's intentions as the most painstaking and informed bibliographical investigations can contrive. The emphasis should be on the not yet, however. Sometime in the future the textual sophistication that marks the Elizabethan scholar will extend itself into nineteenth-century precincts, and recognition will come that the study of texts is the most intimate and exact study of an author. And that no other study has any demonstrable validity until study of the text is completed. Datta.
Dayadhvam.
Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
CHARTING THE GOLDEN STREAM: THOUGHTS ON A DIRECTORY OF VICTORIAN PERIODICALS* Michael Wolff
THE STUDENT of periodicals speaks: Periodical literature may be compared to a vast wilderness, 'without form and void'; its extent unknown, its ramifications unfathomed.... It has been a dream of my life to explore this region, to compass its extent, to open roadways by which it may be conveniently traversed, to lift up some of the once noble forms which lie mouldering in oblivion; to rescue many a bright memory from the mass of decadence in which it has become embedded; to analyze the underlying strata, and to show of what its successive formations have been composed. There is a history in each of these, no less than in the strata which constitute the surface of our physical globe. As I move upon the confines of this almost unexplored region, imagination comes into play. The dreary waste appears before me like a vast cemetery of unrecorded history. Here lie buried noble aspirations, heroic efforts, financial sacrifices, heartbreaking struggles, crushed-out hopes. I resolve to unravel these; to bring into proper association enterprises and individuals; to reconstruct the scattered elements into something of concrete life. But the means of doing this-here lies the difficulty! "I should like to dedicate this paper without permission to Walter Houghton, "Mr. W. H., the onlie begetter."
38
Charting the Golden Stream
After years of such contemplations and musings, with ever changing plans of accomplishment, I resolved . . . to make a start, even if it happened, as it probably might, that this start should prove a false one. It is my present purpose to tell you ... what has come of this resolve; the means employed, the progress made, the prospects in the future. I shall endeavour to state the case with frankness; recording failures and doubts, as well as successes; also seeking advice and assistance.... In the first instance I had resolved to purchase all the more out-of-the-way magazines and newspapers that could be met with; and a commencement was actually made. This course soon proved an impossibility: the cost, and still worse the space for stowage, or rather for shelf-room-for stowed out of reach they are of little use-was an overwhelming obstacle. . . . I now wish to propound the actual steps taken for commencing the work, and as near as may be in the order taken. The first necessity was a house containing large rooms for table space, as also for shelf accommodation, in view of collections obtained and necessary future additions. I was fortunate in obtaining the house next to and adjoining my own. A communication between the two was liberally permitted, by the landlord and by the insurance offices largely concerned. Three considerable rooms were at once requisitioned, and duly equipped: for it is of the essence of the scheme that all work once accomplished shall be available for instant reference by all employed thereon.
Now this is, to be sure, not my own history but that of Mr. Cornelius Walford, who published in The Bibliographer for I 883, "The Outline of a Scheme for a Dictionary of Periodical Literature." Mr. Walford died two years later in his late fifties and, as far as I know, nothing has been preserved from his work. Yet I quote this in part with a serious purpose-as a solemn warning to myself and as a plea for tolerance. There is something both overwhelming and overwhelmingly attractive about periodicals research. It is not just "that untravell' d world, whose margin fades for ever and for ever as I move." It is that every new title investigated, almost every fresh page turned, is "A bringer of new things." One can become, I am convinced, a periodicals addict. Mr. Walford
Michael Wolff
39
was. If the symptoms are detectable in me or any of the scholarly fraternity, we should be patiently humoured in our claims to be of service. I have in point of fact three purposes in this paper: first, to suggest that the study of Victorian England has reached a stage in which a new sort of research material is needed and that the newspapers and periodicals provide precisely that new research material; second, to demonstrate that the state of bibliographical scholarship, library information, and, indeed, actual library holdings is such that it is extremely difficult for researchers to use this material properly, and, moreover, that in the ordinary course of research we shall not be able to improve very much on this situation; and, third, to indicate some way in which we might go about making the newspapers and periodicals not only physically more available, that is, more readily usable by people who know what they want, but also bibliographically more available so that scholars could more readily find out what they might want to use. My claim for the special importance of the newspapers and periodicals at this stage in the study of Victorian England rests on indications that there is a new phase in the historiography of the period (including its literary history). This new phase may be characterized for the historians by an unwillingness to rest satisfied with the descriptive and narrative accounts to which the domination of political, constitutional, and diplomatic histories has accustomed us. For the literary historians it means an increasing awareness of the context within which authors worked and of the definite but extremely complicated ways in which, perhaps especially in Victorian England, this context impinged on the literature. These developments have inevitably blurred the lines between disciplines; they have forced scholars to begin asking questions about the internal quality of historical events, whether the event is the publication of a novel, a bank failure, or the passing of an Act of Parliament.
40
Charting the Golden Stream
To be quite specific, I think that it is becoming increasingly realized that the prime factor distinguishing Victorian England from previous societies is the growth in population. Several other factors converge to multiply the effect of this distinction: the massing of a considerable proportion of the new population in cities, the accompanying rapid improvements in transportation and other forms of communication, the new political sensitivity inherited from the panic engendered by the French Revolution-all these factors added a further increase in sheer visibility to the increase in the number of people. Furthermore, economic expansion, the spread of literacy, and the slow but steady progress of liberal democracy meant not only that there were more people but that more and more of them actually had a role in determining the tone and the substance of national culture. A great deal of the new work, then, involves the recognition that there are large numbers of people who have to be taken into account, larger than the conventional sources permit us to reach. Much of the new research has, for instance, to do with public opinion. In literary history, it has long been realized that Victorian art is a peculiarly public art-not only the novel, whose rise in itself really describes the growth of an audience, but also poetry and the essay, much of which was written with a special awareness of a new and strange readership. It is one of the tasks of the literary scholar to try to unravel the nature of this awareness and thus to attempt an examination of the readership. Similarly, in political history, sociological factors begin to intrude as parliament itself becomes less its own master, as the classes and groups of people which have to be taken into account and which affect policies and determine votes grow steadily larger. Essentially then the area of historical investigation has spread and more and more scholars are being forced to follow evidence further and further afield. The sheer increase in numbers of Englishmen during the
Michael Wolff
41
nineteenth century is not just a matter of numbers: it actually changes the major areas of historical concern. G. M. Young implies, in the early pages of his Portrait of an Age, that the two controlling forces of the time were evangelicalism and utilitarianism. It is with a good deal of trepidation that one ventures to suggest even a difference in emphasis from the master, but in this case his emphasis does seem to me to characterize a partial viewpoint which sees everything in terms of the people who "matter." I would claim, speaking on behalf of what seems to me to be a more inclusive view, that the two controlling forces were egalitarianism and industrialism and that both evangelicalism and utilitarianism were responses to their new and apparently impersonal power. 1 But, of course, egalitarianism and industrialism are not impersonal: they seem to be so because they involve numbers of people so great that the historian who is interested in people cannot see the trees for the wood. And indeed his evidence tends to support him in his feeling that he cannot "get at" the anonymous crowds which comprise the Victorian public-or rather publics-and which help to generate the various Victorian atmospheres which the ambitious historian now wishes to analyse. It is by some such argument that I would attempt the intellectual justification for a parallel broadening of the historian's primary evidence. We are beginning, I think, to investigate Victorian culture as a whole, and we need for such an investigation a correspondingly broad and pervasive fund of primary research materials. Such a fund is to be found in the newspapers and periodicals. As attention is 1 Relevant here is G. Kitson Clark's comment in The Making of Victorian England (London: Methuen, I 962): "The struggle for political progress was conscious ... ; the apostles of religion knew what they desired, so did the humanitarians. But there were also at work in the country blind forces of great power, two of [which] must be of primary consideration in any assessment of the Victorian situation . . . ; they are the nineteenth-century increase in the population and the nineteenth-century increase in the powers of production ...." (P. 64.)
42
Charting the Golden Stream
increasingly focussed on social and cultural history, researchers become interested in social groups, evidence of whose opinions and attitudes, evidence of whose very existence, is not easily obtained, at least with any vividness, among the conventional sources. For it has been in the nature of the earlier phase of historiography that the most articulate and influential sections of a community have made themselves most available to the historian-through parliamentary debates, official documents, the preserved papers of important people, the high literature of a period, the events which reach the pages of the Annual Register, the deeds of those whose deaths are recorded in The Times. But there is recorded material which has made a less obvious impact on posterity because it is about people whose history it had not seemed so important to preserve. The newspapers and periodicals occupy an unrivalled position as repositories of the general life of Victorian England. They represent the complete national range and they represent it on every imaginable topic. Their growth during the century is a direct response to demands for information, for discourse, for instruction, for propaganda, for entertainment, for platforms, each demand corresponding to a new facet of national life. One might almost claim that an attitude, an opinion, an idea, did not exist until it had registered itself in the press, and that an interest group, a sect, a profession, came of age when it inaugurated its journal. The newspapers and periodicals are from some point in the early nineteenth century, perhaps up to the present if we can subsume broadcasting under the heading of journalism, in any event at least through the reign of Victoria, the national history at its most self-conscious. It was, as Wilkie Collins said, THE age of periodicals.2 At the outset, we have the development of literacy, of high-speed printing and other technological breakthroughs, of increasing freedom from taxation. There is an 2 "The Unknown Public," Household Words, XVIII (Aug. 21, 1858), 222.
Michael Wolff
43
extraordinary outburst in education and entertainment which expressed itself naturally in journalism. These factors establish a significance for the press which only begins to diminish, if at all, with the competing forms of communication such as the radio, movies, and television, with the inevitable fragmenting of the audience as the academic journals like Mind (1876) and the English Historical Review (1886) and penny papers like Tit-Bits (1881) and Answers begin to make their particular appeals, and with the competition of non-literate forms of entertainment, especially organized sport. By whatever measurement, the years that we call Victorian are best mirrored in the serial publications-literature, argument, the tastes and preoccupations of just about every level and sort of society, all display themselves in the newspapers and journals. At the back of my mind is the conviction that the basic unit for the study of Victorian cultural history is the individual issue of a Victorian periodical, and that it is therefore a prime obligation of current scholarship to further that study by making greater attention to the periodicals possible. It should, of course, not be necessary at a Conference which has recently shared honours with the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 3 to emphasize the importance of those periodicals; and, if it is, one has only to turn to the opening of Professor Houghton's admirable introduction in which he writes: The importance of Victorian periodicals to modern scholars can scarcely be exaggerated. In scores of journals and thousands of articles there is remarkable record of contemporary thought in every field, with a full range of opinion on every major question. . . . Indeed, there are aspects of Victorian culture . . . which simply do not exist in published books, or if they do, are entirely hidden because there is no subject index to Victorian ideas and attitudes. (The only approximation to one, it turns out, is an index 3 The opening of the Conference coincided with the official launching, by the University of Toronto Press, of Vol. I of the Wellesley Index [Ed.].
44
Charting the Golden Stream
to periodical literature.) Also, because reviews and magazines reflect the current situation, they are indispensable for the study of opinion at a given moment or in a short span of years. (P. xv.)
I don't wish to suggest that nothing has been done with the periodicals. Recent books use periodical articles as their main evidence, for instance, Richard Stang's and Kenneth Graham's on criticism of the novel, respectively from 1850 to 1870 and from 1865 to 1900, and D. P. Crook's American Democracy in English Politics, 1815-1850. 4 There are, I believe, a good many reception studies in the offing: Laurence Lerner and John Holmstrom, George Eliot and her Readers (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966), is the first, I gather, of a series. There have been specific studies of famous journals: Marchand on the Athenaeum under Dilke; Bevington on the early influential years of the Saturday Review; Mineka on the Monthly Repository; Nesbitt on the early Westminster Review; Thrall on Fraser's; Clive on the Edinburgh; Altholz on the Rambler; and Maurer on Froude and Stephen as editors. 5 There have 4 Richard Stang, The Theory of the Novel in England, 1850--1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959); Kenneth Graham, English Criticism of the Novel, 1865-1900 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965); D. P. Crook, American Democracy in English Politics, 1815-1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). 5Leslie A. Marchand, The Athenaeum: A Mirror of Victorian Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941); Merle M. Bevington, The Saturday Review, 1855-1868: Representative Educated Opinion in Victorian England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941); Francis E. Mineka, The Dissidence of Dissent: The Monthly Repository, 1806-38 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944 ); George Lyman Nesbitt, Benthamite Reviewing: The First Twelve Years of the Westminster Review, 1824-1836 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934 ); Miriam M. H. Thrall, Rebellious Fraser's: Nol Yorke's Magazine in the Days of Maginn, Thackeray, and Carlyle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934); John Clive, Scotch Reviewers: The Edinburgh Review, 1802-1815 (London: Faber and Faber, 1957); Joseph L. Altholz, The Liberal Catholic Movement in England: The "Rambler" and Its Contributors 1848-1864 (London: Burns and Oates, 1962); Oscar Maurer, "Froude and Fraser's Magazine, 1860-1874," University of Texas Studies in English, XXVIII (1949), 213---43; Oscar Maurer, "Leslie Stephen and the Cornhill Magazine, 1871-1882," ibid., XXXII (1953), 67-95.
Michael Wolff
45
been reprints: Goodwin's Penguin of the Nineteenth Century; more recently, Weintraub's selections from the Savoy. 6 There are a whole host of centennial celebrations, numbers and volumes. And, in the work of Altick and Webb, efforts to reach the new readership in part through popular periodicals. 7 Technically more important perhaps than any of these are Ellegard's studies of public opinion through the press. 8 In these he has attempted to characterize the national judgment of Darwinism by examining comment on Darwin in some ninety periodicals, relating it to their editorial stances and to their estimated circulation, and so constructing a classification by politics, religion, education, social class, in order to determine how and in what sequence certain types of people and certain groups within the population came to terms with key Darwinian concepts. Trying to break through the bibliographical impasse is W. S. Ward's Index and FindingList of Serials published in the British Isles, 1789-1832 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1953); and Altick again both in the CBEL (following the great work of Pollard) and in the Common Reader has made very valuable contributions towards gathering together existing sources both contemporary and modern. Above all, Houghton's work in itself and as a model suggests both what can be and what has yet to be done. It is instructive to remember that Houghton's work was, so to speak, forced on him by his feelings of frustration over the 6 Michael Goodwin, ed., Nineteenth Century Opinion: An Anthology of the First Fifty Volumes of "The Nineteenth Century" (London: Penguin, 1951); Stanley Weintraub, ed., The Savoy: Nineties Experiment (University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966). 7Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); R. K. Webb, The British Working Class Reader, 17901848 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1955). 8 Alvar Ellegil.rd, "The Readership of the Periodical Press in MidVictorian Britain," Giiteborgs Universitets Arsskrift, LXIII, no. 3 (1957); "Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin's Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1858-1872," ibid., LXIV, no. 7 (1958).
46
Charting the Golden Stream
anonymity of the articles which he used for his Victorian Frame of Mind. However, despite all this specialized work, what one must generally conclude about the current use of the periodicals is that scholars' needs have been met and that familiar evidence has been extracted only from familiar sources. The great pioneering reviews have been mined, their files are in most scholarly libraries, they have been thought of as providing matchless evidence even at a time when their actual influence had levelled off and when other journals and other types of journalism had become more prominent. In addition to the great reviews, librarians and scholars have sought after, acquired, and made available journals which famous people like Newman and Dickens have been connected with, or which, whatever their contemporary importance, represented the beginning of something, like the Germ. Whatever the reason, most of the work on the periodicals has been from above, that is, a particular magazine has been singled out for a particular reason and all within this context of very limited knowledge and availability. The journals have rarely been thought of as independent pieces of evidence but rather as attachments or appendages to movements or to people important in their own right-they have been seen as secondary, confirming evidence and not as primary representative sources. The problem, then, with the use of the periodicals at present is that the working scholar, the subject-matter specialist, often at the mercy of library holdings, always runs the risk of relying on hackneyed sources, on inadequate secondary works, on a haphazard and uneconomical probing wherever half-educated guesses lead him, or he becomes a specialist in the periodicals and has no time for anything else. Houghton is, to be sure, a refutation of this caricature with his book on Clough-but he will be the first to admit that working in the periodicals is like wading in a swamp with the distractions
Michael Wolff
47
of swamplight leading the researcher on to one false short-cut after another. What prevents the full and free use of the newspapers and periodicals? In the first place I think I should give you some sense of their scale. The Wellesley Index deals with eight titles and its second volume will have details on a further thirty or so. Now, a while ago I quoted Houghton's introduction. I would make only one amendment to his remarks, but that a significant one. Where he says, "scores of journals and thousands of articles," I have to say "thousands of journals and millions of articles." I have so far on my books 12,500 titles for the years 1824-1900. I cannot yet tell you about their duration, but I do have information about all the journals I have titles for, which were running during the five-year span, 1861-65. The average total run for these 2,000 journals is something over 28 years (10 per cent ran for a year or less, 5 per cent for at least the full time between 1824 and 1900); the total Victorian years of operation for all these journals then is about 56,000. I cannot yet break these particular figures down into dailies, weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies, but I can for a still smaller sampling, namely the 720 journals published in London during 1864: for these the average number of issues is 31 a year. If this can be projected, it gives us, for the 2,000 journals running during the five-year period, just over 1,750,000 issues. And this figure, crude as it is, doesn't include the journals in operation any time after 1824 which failed before 1861, or journals which began between 1866 and 1900. If we make allowances for the presence in the 1861-65 sampling of all the long-run journals, we must multiply our number of issues by three for a total of over 5,250,000. If again, being unembarrassed by the statistical crudity and the recognition that newspapers, for instance, normally have no articles, we say that every issue has between 5 and 10 articles, we come up with something between 25 and 50 million
48
Charting the Golden Stream
articles during 1824-1900. Staggering as this figure may be, and staggeringly inept as my arriving at it may also be, I should think that we are working with the right order of magnitude at least, and that it can be no exaggeration to say "millions of articles" as well as "thousands of journals." There are two reasons, all this suggests, for the neglect of what can be claimed to be uniquely important evidence: first, the very scale of the evidence seems to forbid any but the most casual treatment; and second, the material is extremely difficult to use. Many of the newspapers and periodicals are very scarce, though, often through ignorance, they do not get the special attention, in terms of preservation and of possible reproduction, usually given to "rare" books. Most are poorly served by bibliographies and finding-lists, all of which tell us something, but not even a combination of which will tell us, for instance, what the Victorian periodical holdings are in a particular library, or which periodicals were being published during the 1870s, or which were reviewing books or noting technological innovations or printing editorials on colonial policy. And scholarly services so poor must discourage the widespread use of this type of evidence. The most useful tool for the non-specialist would be a subject-index. Given the amount of material, it is patently impossible even to imagine anything approaching a thoroughgoing subject-index of Victorian periodicals except through the massive use of computer scanning. There is, as it happens, only one considerable subject-index, Poole's, 9 and he handles only ninety British journals, chosen, for the most part and naturally enough, because they were the most available and therefore the most widely used. Houghton, while doing full justice to this pioneer work, has shown its limitations even on 9Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, rev. ed., 6 vols. (New York: Peter Smith, by special arrangement with Houghton Miffiin, 1938). The first volume, published in 1883, covered the years 1802-1881; five supplementary volumes brought the work down to 1906.
Michael Wolff
49
its own terms. 10 A descriptive index, classifying periodicals by topical preoccupation and by departments such as book reviews, political editorials, illustrations, serial fiction, gossip columns, is, I think, the best feasible compromise with a subject-index, especially if it can be accompanied by a highly selective indexing of sample issues. But nothing of this sort exists or is contemplated, as far as I know. Without a subject-index or a descriptive listing, a scholar simply has to find his own way to the titles he wishes to investigate. If we may go back to what is, after all, the standard situation, where the scholar has no particular title in mind, but wants to study the reception of a book or the commentary on a policital crisis, how can he determine the Victorian serials even in his own library? Consider for a moment how you would go about compiling a list of nineteenth-century British journals in your own library, short of going through the whole card catalogue or shelf-list. In the first place, is there a separate periodicals catalogue? Most libraries don't have one. Indiana discontinued hers a few years ago because it was apparently inaccurate to the point of being more misleading than useful-and, they claimed, this was bound to be so. There is no simple way, once you have gone beyond the obvious call numbers, such as the Library of Congress classifications AN4 and AP4 (for general British nineteenth- and twentiethcentury newspapers and periodicals), of tracking the holdings by looking under particular call numbers. Nobody, it appears, has extracted the periodical headings from the Library of Congress classification. I had hoped to produce here, in moderate triumph, a useful mimeograph compilation which would show an immediate return on my research. But cataloguers are given the most startlingly wide opportunities for classifying periodicals (and, incidentally, society publications, lO"Reflections on Indexing Victorian Periodicals," Victorian Studies, VII (1963), 192-4.
50
Charting the Golden Stream
under which heading, we must remember, are listed many periodicals) and such a list would have been too large for easy reproduction, and perhaps too large to make the job of searching noticeably easier. In any event, I gave up the task. But let us suppose that the scholar has compiled a list of titles which he wishes to check. He can now go to the fivevolume Union List of Serials for American and Canadian libraries and to the four-volume British Union-Catalogue of Periodicals for British libraries. Both of these works cover serials from all times and all places, though it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that someone might sometime edit out the Victorian entries (it would have been easy enough if the entries had been computerized). But, to confine ourselves to the Union List and the very new third and last edition, there are difficulties about its use and limits to its reliability. In the first place, no newspapers of our period are included (this is also true of the British work). In fact there is no list of British newspaper holdings in the United States, although there are some local listings, for example, for the Library of Congress and the Chicago area (both seriously out of date) and a good microform list (though American libraries have taken little advantage of what microfilming has been done in the United Kingdom). In the second place, the Union List is much more reliable on new titles than on old ones. I plan to do a detailed 1 per cent check of all my Victorian titles (somewhere between 120 and 150 in all) against both the Union List and the British Union-Catalogue, but it is already clear that co-operating librarians have been comparatively slack in reporting acquisitions since the second edition and, presumably for financial reasons, an as-yetunascertainable number of entries submitted for that edition were not included. Microforms are, of course, not listed, though there are separate lists of those, with their own problems. It is, therefore, fair to say that however diligent the researcher, there are a good many Victorian periodicals in
Michael W olfl
51
American institutions which he will not be able to uncover, and we have the grotesque situation of a man travelling to the British Museum under the impression that it is there that he will find the only copy of a particular title which may, in fact, either in bound volume or in microform, be sitting on the shelves of a neighbouring library. There are also problems about the entries themselves, both as to the titles and as to the holdings, examples of which are given below. Another difficulty lies in the heavy restrictions which the Inter-Library Loan people place upan the mobility of the periodicals. I'm not certain about the rights and wrongs of this, but it is obviously one more factor discouraging any but the most thoroughly pre-digested use of periodical material. How can a better finding-list be constructed? It seems to me that a proper finding-list depends on having an adequate overall checklist to begin with. The only way in which one might unearth locations for the scarcer titles would be to send round such a checklist, more or less complete, and try to get the co-operation of all those in a position to help. I think that this might, perhaps even in the short run, be more productive than giving the classification, nineteenth-century British newspapers and periodicals, to librarians and other scholars, and asking them for lists from their own libraries. Indeed, it is a good deal preferable to what one must now do, namely, try to make an extraction from the existing mammoth, and for North America seriously unreliable, finding-lists. The nearest approach to an existing checklist of Victorian periodicals is the Times Tercentenary Handlist of English and Welsh Newspapers, 1620-1920, an attempt at an exhaustive listing based initially on the British Museum Catalogue. Although this list happily ignores the distinction between newspapers and magazines, it does not include Scottish or Irish periodicals. It gives titles under the year in which the journal started, and there are two chronological lists, one for London and one called provincial. This arrangement has its
52
Charting the Golden Stream
disadvantages (only title and date are given and the journals are listed quite haphazardly within their year of origin), and the list has rather more than the expected number of errorsrepetitions, misreadings of dates, confounding of similar titles, a whole range of cross-referencing difficulties-but it is still the most useful single volume from which to begin an assault of the scale I am contemplating. To Poole's Subject Guide, the Union List of Serials and the British Union-Catalogue of Periodicals, and the Times Tercentenary H andlist, you can add the British Museum Catalogue, the relevant sections in the Cambridge Bibliography, the various overlapping and incomplete lists of microforms, and you have just about everything the scholar interested in the general use of material can avail himself of. It is at once too much and too little. There are too many different directories covering too many journals and providing the answers for too few important questions. Before I turn from this rather unhappy state of things, I must glance at what contemporary evidence there might be. It is an indication of the state of scholarship that the most valuable work in this category, Mitchell's Newspaper Press Directory (1846), which after an erratic beginning settled down to an annual coverage in 1856, has not been accumulated for scholarly use. It is very difficult to find any of its early volumes (the Library of Congress has only spotty holdings) and my guess is that a complete set could not be made up from all the holdings in North America. If Mitchell's and other trade publications, the Post Office Directory, and the advertisements and gleanings from the literary gossip columns were to be fed in, year by year, with information about price, frequency of issue, printer and publisher, sponsoring organization, and so on, we could begin to repair the deficiencies in the modem reference works. This is precisely what we are beginning to do, at Indiana, under a generous grant from the Chapelbrook Foundation of Boston.
Michael Wolff
53
We have made a card for every entry in the Times Tercentenary Handlist that was alive, so to speak, between 1824 and 1900. We have tried to repair the Scottish gap by taking the Scottish newspapers from the British Museum Catalogue of Newspapers, 1801-1900, 11 where they are, fortunately, segregated, and for the magazines and reviews we are in the process of checking as many Scottish towns as we can in the general Periodicals catalogue of the British Museum. We shall use the nineteenth-century material to supplement this basic list, trying systematically to go through the most valuable sources from 1824 on, and, presumably, learning more and more about the reliability of the trade journals and of the British Museum Catalogue as an exhaustive copyright depository. This compilation will provide us with a single alphabetical checklist. It will also give us a chronological listing by five-year units so that we can, working with the beginning and end dates of each listing, discover promptly all the journals running at a particular time. On the all-important matters of the finding-list and the descriptive index, we shall have, in this first study ( whose object, after all, is to determine whether a comprehensive directory is feasible), to resort to sampling. We have decided on two samples: the first, already mentioned, will be all the titles running during the middle five-year span of our period, namely, 1861-65 (this sample has just passed the 2,000 mark); second, we will take a random 1 per cent (every hundredth card in the alphabetical checklist, now about 120, probably at most not more than 150). The larger sample we will check through the existing finding-lists, noting blanks and general availability, anomalies in titles and dates. We shall begin investigating the problem-titles and the ones poorly represented in America, starting a descriptive index for those we manage to see, and trying to arrange, perhaps by subscription, to get copies made of those we cannot 11British Museum, Catalogue of Printed Boob; Supplement: Newspapers Published in Great Britain and Ireland 1801-1900 (London, I 905).
54
Charting the Golden Stream
see. For the smaller sample, we shall try to go to the bitter end for each title, until we have established the full publishing history and current accessibility of each listing, checked who the potential users might be, and found out how expensive both of time and money it would be to place a file of each serial within reasonable reach of everyone who, once he knew about it and its contents, might wish to use it. As we pursue this course, we shall be trying to determine what new techniques the electronics people are working out for retrieving information so complex and multiform. It may not be too long before we need only concentrate all material in one or two places and let the computers and communications satellites bring us what we want at the press of three or four buttons. The upshot may be a progress report to a conference of librarians and other scholars, followed by a decision about going ahead on a broad front and, if that decision is positive, presumably a desperate effort to get support from the profession and the foundations. I think the American National Endowment for the Humanities is the natural place for us to go, but then so do a lot of people with a lot of projects! I shall close with a few illustrations of the sort of thing that has come up during the last two years. They have been chosen to support assertions of mine about the value of the serials, about the difficulty of using them and about the rewards for persistence. A couple of years ago I investigated sample issues of some thirty journals of the same date chosen at random. Two of these thirty were not in the British Museum or in its Catalogue (some titles in the Catalogue are not in the Museum because they have been lost or destroyed), and I could find no evidence of their survival. When the new Union List came out last June I looked for these two, and there was one of them, The Arrow (Apr.-Dec., 1864), apparently complete at the Newberry. I wrote off for it mentioning, by the way, that it
Michael Wolff
55
was the only recorded copy. In reply, I was told that they had bought it sometime in the 1940s for less than $3, but that now they were going to move it into their rare book room and it would no longer be available for Inter-Library Loan. One of my thirty sample issues was a number of the Artizan. In the absence of any descriptive index or even of subtitles in any reference work compact enough to be used by the non-specialist, the Artizan would appear to be a workingman's magazine, either political, autodidactic, or evangelical. It turns out to be a fascinating journal of engineering with elaborate illustrations. Its subtitle is "A Monthly Record of the Progress of Civil and Mechanical Engineering," though this is not recorded in the British Museum Catalogue. A man doing research in naval and military technology of the midnineteenth century was in an audience to which I mentioned this journal and, I am happy to say, in the language of the advertisements of the time, he has since used it extensively. I encountered in the same research two titles very little if at all known, both of which are to my mind of great potential importance for social historians. Each portrays in exceptional detail a type of Victorian not much noticed in the textbooks. The British Controversialist and Impartial Enquirer (185072) gives a complete profile of the intensely ambitious working-man who is determined to improve himself. The man for whom the Controversialist was published and who seems to have provided its editors with material for the debates they printed was neither socialist nor atheist; he was both utilitarian and vaguely pious; terribly anxious for education, consequent advancement, and consequent respectability. He was the man for whom Mill had such high hopes and who convinced Gladstone that he deserved the vote. Reconstruct him from the pages of the Controversialist and you can, in part, account for the eclipse of radical collectivism between the collapse of Chartism in 1848 and the re-emergence of socialism in the 1880s.
56
Charting the Golden Stream
Again, the Anti-Teapot Review (1864-69) sounds like a joke and in a way it is. It was written by undergraduates. But it shows in the raw a totally unabashed Toryism which anticipates, which must have grown up into, the new powerful support for the alliance in the 1880s between the antiGladstone Whigs and the post-Disraeli conservatives into the imperialist, anti-Irish, competently lazy, government, relatively indifferent to domestic reform, which ruled England almost without a break from 1885 to 1905. The enemies of the Anti-Teapot society of Europe (that is, the Teapots) are in fact the Liberals of that period: internationalists, Nonconformists, Irish Home Rulers, temperance advocates, all the earnest consciences of the day. Here is a description of the titles of a journal which ran for only nine or ten months. In the Union List under the headnote, "Age: London, No. 1-29, Apr.-Dec. 1864," we find this: "No. 1-6/Tallis's Illustrated Life in London; No. 7-22/ Tallis's Theatrical, Musical, Fine Art, Literary and General Family Newspaper; No. 23-26/The Age, Theatrical, Musical, Sporting; No. 27 /The Sporting Pilot and Age." We have about the same in the Tercentenary Handlist. But in the British Union-Catalogue, it turns out that there are thirty-nine numbers, not twenty-nine (as indeed there should be since the journal ran from 2 Apr. to 24 Dec. or thirty-nine weeks), and this catalogue gives us Nos. 28-39 as The Age again. But there are two errors here: in two cases the numbers and the dates for one of the changes in title don't match, and I know from personal observation that at least one of the last eleven numbers (not represented in America and typographically killed off by the Tercentenary Handlist) reverted to the Sporting Pilot. One can see in the shift of titles, I think, a desperate effort to keep the publication alive by broadening the ostensible appeal and searching for a responsive audience. In the Tercentenary Handlist appears The Child's Companion and Sunday Scholar's Reward, 1824, and still in progress in 1920. This is not in the Union List of Serials, but a
Michael Wolff
57
similarity of titles and dates suggests a possible confusion with the Child's Magazine and Sunday Scholar's Companion listed in the Union List as running from 1824 to 1845. In trying to unravel this the Indiana project wrote to the libraries listed in the Union List, and it turned out that Teacher's College at Columbia had three volumes of the Child's Companion, the magazine for which it appeared that there was no American copy. Moreover, in the progress of this investigation, the University of Western Ontario sent us a photocopy of Volume I of the Child's Magazine and Sunday Scholar's Companion. But this volume had had bound into it the Sunday School Magazine, evidently of 1823, and the Child's Magazine (no subtitle) also of 1824, apparently a continuation of the Sunday School Magazine having nothing whatever to do with the Child's Magazine and Sunday Scholar's Companion, because of which it had presumably lost its right to independent cataloguing and, in effect, to independent existence, for it is not in any of the lists on either side of the Atlantic. So, in one probing of anomalies in the various lists, we unearthed a hitherto unrecorded location in America for one periodical and it seems uncovered another that had been completely submerged. This, incidentally, was one of only two entries checked. Finally, a couple of examples which I offer you precisely because I can make no use of them. They are quite differentone is for members of history departments and the other for members of English departments. What they have in common is that they demonstrate that wherever you dive into the periodicals, you come up with pearls. In the history of the growth of the animosity between Great Britain and Germany before World War I, an editorial in the Saturday Review for September 11, 1897, is often cited. It ends with the words "Germaniam esse delendam." In 0. J. Hale's Publicity and Diplomacy: England and Germany, 1890-1914 three or four pages are given to the effect of the article. W. L. Langer, in the classic Diplomacy of Imperialism,
58
Charting the Golden Stream
writes that the editorial "established a new record for newspaper effrontery," echoing Bernadotte Schmitt's equally classic England and Germany that it was "probably the most provocative diatribe in the annals of newspaper effrontery." 12 Particularly offensive, of course, were the words "Germaniam esse delendam." But of nine American copies of that issue only three have those words (Stanford, Harvard, and New York Public); Indiana, Illinois, Cincinnati Public, Minnesota, Enoch Pratt, and the University of California have them not. There are two other relatively insignificant differences in the two versions. I have no idea whether the extra words were added to or deleted from the original version. Nor can I conjecture at this stage of ignorance why or indeed how the changes were made. Here is a problem in the mechanics of editing, printing, and distributing the weeklies and, more horrifyingly, in the whole matter of textual variation in the periodicals which has never, to my knowledge, been tackled. For those people interested in the periodicals because it was there that the Victorian reader first encountered Dickens or George Eliot or Mrs. Gaskell or Wilkie Collins or Hardy, let me record here that, contrary to what I at least had always thought, the vast bulk of the fiction serialized in the periodicals (I can speak confidently only of the early '60s) was never reprinted, and a full bibliography would expose a whole underworld of Victorian novelists whose work is now quite unknown, whose very existence is probably unsuspected, and who may well have never published a book. Let me give you one instance. Charles Obbign (perhaps a pseudonym) was by 12Oren James Hale, Publicity and Diplomacy, with Special Reference to England and Germany, 1890-1914 (University of Virginia, Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, Monograph 27; New York: AppletonCentury, 1940), 164-6; William L. Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism, 1890-1902 (2nd ed.; New York: Knopf, 1951), 437-8; Bernadotte Schmitt, England and Germany, 1740-1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 155. This anomaly was brought to my attention by Gail Stokes, then a graduate student in the History Department, Indiana University.
Michael Wolff
59
the end of 1864 ( which is as far as I go) the author of at least six novels, two of which were running at the same time in October: "Sir Aubrey's Triumph" was coming out in the Halfpenny Journal: A Magazine for All Who Can Read, and 'Winning a Coronet: A Woman Wronged" was coming out in the Household Journal: The Key to Amusing and Instructive Literature. None of these six appeared as a book, and I have been unable to find out Obbign's name in any catalogue, bibliography, or biographical dictionary, nineteenthor twentieth-century. Another oddity which makes one wonder about the management and about the readership of these journals is this little fact. "Sybil Lee," of which chapters 16-18 are running in the London Reader of Literature, Science, Art, and General Information, and the "Death-bed Marriage: An American Romance," of which chapters 21-23 appear in the same week's issue of the Household Journal, are one and the same story. I must conclude with a plea for help to all those who use or expect to use the periodicals. What sort of periodicals directory would be of most value to you? What sort of evidence would you like to be able to get at easily? What frustration have you encountered in trying to use magazines or newspapers? What unrecorded journals or unregistered microfilms do you know about? What are your libraries willing to do to help locate and purchase serials in book or microform? Would you be willing to co-operate so that instead of each scholar stumbling around independently, a co-ordinated assault could be made, and where before one hundred researchers looked isolatedly and randomly through ten volumes apiece, they could now economically and systematically look through one thousand together. It may be impossible to work with Victorian serials on the scale I here suggest, but it is also essential.13 131 am grateful for the help given me throughout this research by Miss Dorothy Deering, and for financial supPort from the Chapelbrook Foundation and the Council for Library Resources.
EDITING BALZAC: A PROBLEM IN INFINITE VARIATION Bernard Weinberg
ALONGSIDE THE MOUNTAIN of books that have been written about Balzac-bibliographies, biographies, critical studies, everything, and alongside the considerable hill of current and mostly uncritical editions of his works, one could not make even a very small pile of critical editions of his writings. It takes more than one thin volume to make a pile; yet one thin volume is all we have. And in that thin volume the Balzacian text, repeated three times for three separate versions, is only ten pages long for each version. This is the edition by Jean Pommier of L'Eglise, 1 originally two separate short sketches which appeared in periodicals in 1830, were combined into an independent story and printed in the Romans et contes philosophiques of 1831 and were reworked for the Etudes philosophiques of 1836; a story that in its tum was tacked onto Jesus-Christ en Flandre for the Etudes philosophiques of 1845, where it remains today. We therefore have, today, in a critical edition worthy of the name, something like ten pages out of a relatively short work which is lost in the great mass of the Comedie humaine. 1 L'Eglise, edition critique publiee per Jean Pommier (Paris: Librairie Droz, 1947).
Bernard Weinberg
61
Such poverty cannot be attributed to laziness, ignorance, or lack of opportunity; society has not been organized in a way to preclude the making of proper critical editions of Balzac. On the contrary, the world community of Balzac scholars, a rich and flourishing one, has had its hunger for new subjects more than sufficiently appeased in all areas except that of the critical edition. If this area has failed to provide the thesis topic or the first book towards the libera docenza, it is for two fundamental reasons, separate but related: first, the nature, the abundance, and the confusing interrelations of the extant materials for any work of Balzac's; and second, the traditional concept of what constitutes a proper critical edition. Anybody who has worked with Balzac, since first people began to work with him, has been fascinated by the accounts of how he wrote, how he rewrote, how he corrected and rewrote again. Contemporary accounts such as that of Werdet, 2 and Balzac's own letters, tell the story in great detail, and it is completed by an examination of the materials that have come down to us. He wrote his original draft at white heat, through the night and with endless pots of coffee, undoubtedly more concerned with blocking out the major lines of his story than with refining the expression or working out the last detail. The manuscript that he sent off to the printer at dawn was thus a fairly clean one-perhaps, thinking of what was to happen in the next step, I should say "relatively clean." (That is the condition of the holograph of Eugenie Grandet now in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.) 3 Before many hours the printer, who was usually setting type for a feuilleton publication in the daily or weekly press, returned to the author 2Edmond
PP· 94-101.
Werdet, Portrait intime de Balzac (Paris: Dentu, 1859), esp.
3 See the description in The Pierpont Morgan Library, 1924-1929 (New York, 1930), p. 30: "Eugenie Grandet. 116 pages. This is the original draft of the novel, containing innumerable corrections, erasures and additions. To the manuscript are added 41 pages of corrected proof sheets of the journal, 'L'Europe litteraire,' in which Chapter I was published on Sept. 19, 1833. This manuscript was presented on Dec. 24, 1833, to Mme. de Hanska, whom Balzac married in 1850."
:.:.~0~, i,,blltiv6'·p:,!,onnl11i1M dl~tllun !I !,;,,i.1,vii brnsiJ:ueric. • • - Et que m'importcut cu hommcs .;Je leur permet1 ~• D\'u:, 1:u1iner. -
_J_
Ce aoqt·des aM.Win,, dit-cllc,
-Ne t'ejl jnquifte pas, nous Jes tenon,, chtre cnrant! n4 / IA. t•occtpe pat~•eux 1 .mais d~ mot, N_e 1u'.aime1-!l.,donc pas? ' l,t. . -'!iire l •~ rf". ,y I -I-'.-: -Sire,.-r~.~-t-il Ff. raisatt jaillit desetincelte!_~U yenr; . ..H,-- QA-\.1 l t"-~ tr• dii~f,: ~~~::;:;o;:~~oa!:!/:. .
YI,,
• '
f'yt..,
y'
i
I
('IWVI~ .. _.. · , .. - · - -
Vous ttcs_pl ,
,crl-
- nest bic.n beau; dit" Charles IX tii"prenant son fits. 'n y
v~cl~l!outc~vio(eutf 6ur ce 4ui se faitc~c.z:c.ct homme, -;-,. Jf, 1u1tempo11i.1nn6, 11 s'est prCpar6 le pot!IOni'fn nn w ,.-
,._,.11'..f tl ""'
lr
p.usion d'un·~Hail\ d'1fotr:igue pour toi. :Marie le e"arda 11.'un ai si ll1.'r, que leroi devint b.ontcur, n ce moment, cs eris llu pet 111· e1 e Vato s, 'JUI nnai t de a'i\·eiller et quc sa nuurrice apportait sans doute , se fircut cntendre dans le lillo.u voisin. Eutl'cz_lJ Bo:.ll'guigno1.!}_! dit Marte en alfant prcndrc sou
hA ~ p:1,u~_nt bier/ , mes yeux rm:ent attires Jiar une , ive cla1 Cqtli [~ J✓ pa1t'1t des comblc.,; de ta ma1son oU dcmeure Ren6, le 1· ~
I~v.1-f~ J ..,,.,.__,
yeux dans lq yet i de sa UUJ[~esse. J'ai entendu pal'ler de l.i rollo
-
'1-,
.
Ah I i'ep:i:'16 roi d'un jlir sombre, aurai:Hu done quelque cbose l te reprocher, el 1_:i ga~dilutentre SH bras it plongeascs -
J/..,,1
I
•'ecrialiirie ,n reg,rd,at le
pri.o-l;>iw, et i'efTOr4=.mt d't aueindre, tj'dl !ffl! -
me'-'r et le gautier de ma mtrc~, le Lien, cetui de b co
J' · . nt JC.
. f:.!= J.]l,_..J. .,.~ _, __ 41"""i/ J _/
I/
au.is arri-it:', suivi'.de Tav:mnct, en un endroit d'oU fiti .P ,·ol_r u.-,Q a.,ns~lrovu, UU·.1,'peclacle myst.erieux, .,..remarquer d s o.;u 71 '? ~\o~t".ll!giti01~n1c1ioupc;of5elm'ontinspirt lesrnc.s're qui ,•~_pnses. N'a.s-tul!"lilllio)ll.,,_les comble1 qui terr i1 nt la . n ~ d e udamofFl oi-eotir l Le1croisl!esducOt\l ~ .irue 4~ ~it louJ~ar• ferm!es, excep la derni!ro, d'oU. 1100 , . i l'h6- / ~ \ct-4eSoluonset l.1 cblOf oe u'a!aitbltirma-mt!rc / 10 r &all • '\a.wtrologae Cosruc Ruggieri. ans ccs combtes , il se o o uu ' ,·iogtm8.'1 t et une gi!.lerie qu· ne sont etlaires que du MC de I.a
'!,?Pr1 ~J,! ~1:!-·'Iue, po_ ~! !~c~q~s'y.t~it, !! !~!•~ !~r ~ ?'l
•
j ..
~-
,1
/
&A--'
J
.,AA;,,;,,,r_\A,_..r;. (J,11, i;h ' ( f o.AJ "f "'-
4
, ,
1
tJ. &NJ-,,,./ f~ /_
1~ "!~/ ,
\ ' .....
/ r; ' 7
Ii t....
t
• .., · JU/1~ / ••
(... /l.~. ·~--. jj~',,..._-,_ .,,,._, ,ol\
v:. ~ · 1 .,,,,. "\!'.:.
0-
:....:atoilit\lll ~Cl co111lMn it le N35euili!e, ditlJarl1 , llo. d~\ tu p s:es l ton sourire. .... . . _ ~ Si pctit, dern:mda le rot tn ~ou~-;.:-;1t. . _ Le.a hommcs ne ,·culent p;i.s _cro1re .c!s _chosea-1~, d1~c1le ~ "llllis joucs avtc Jui, regarde-h: ! t1cu1, n at:••Je p:11 ~at on. 'i,;-O'est vral , &'~clia le rai fun mouvem!n\ de l en!a~t/~ . . _ L;i jolic flt:u:r ! fit la 106r~- .11 ne me qmttera 1amii.s, lu±l
~;!~''tt1:~
l\C~ 0r:Jo:~~ti:,1:: l~l fai!:t lt sa~~~I i~ le baijAit; ~~ll. f ron t ,•ecla_i,•cJt, ta joie rtvint_s~r sa Ogut• at~ri•.s.}Ce '. rt q'Jil.Ud Jfaria vit que ton oinant oul>ha.1t tout , e~o lul , - . poaall,la.
1
/.~#- ~ C -f/)1.1.~ ·
U~~:s:~ CJi:~~:*us va.s, mon Charlot, 1>0ur1luoi vou:t ma -Oounezdes;ssaashu .\ gitrdt r, etquct!;o~t ceshotn?'es, otcc _ .A,, que \'Ous en comptci faire? Enflu, . ..ilhez-vous iliJlsur eel J ""'-''7 ,_ toit1 ' J'csp~re ,1u'il r. e s';i.git pas d'one £cmme? /t 01,t.' ~ v: • ""I - Tu m':1imcs M4t? d1t le ro1 surpm par le rayon clair d'uq. dece!I rtg.1t ds m quu.11tr1 que W!cmmC111o.veut1i lllcnJcttr, /~ .I---. , ~"'1'-t _Yous.& avcz pu doutc1•f reprit-cllo en 1·oulant de♦ humer · \ tJentre ses belles pau[nClu fr;i.lche,, ~ - U y a des femmes da.n,. ~u l\'enture i uul.• ce sout de-. 11orcierrs. 01.'t en Ct.ais-je? • .. - Nous Ctions ~ deux pa5 d'ici, sui- le pignon d'u.n1 mauoq ._ dit M:il'ie, dau.s qu"tc!le rue ?.. .. . - H.ue Saiut•Hono re, woa f,inon, dit le roi qlli r1rul 1'itrt rtmi.l, et qui, en rcpren.:int ,;cs idtc,, ,oulut mettf! ~• rnal~1~•!~ d_c !~!:·Cnc q••~ ~~~! ~e p.l~ e~ ~~~e_:: !!!~:.
1r•i'
I Il'!t-
+
f~ ~!!
FIGURE 2
'""°t/
/
64
Editing Balzac
a first set of galley proofs, pulled on very large and very wide paper to make possible that next step. It consisted in so extensive and complex a correcting of the first proofs that frequently the text was doubled in length and all but rewritten. Great new chunks of material were added, others were moved from one place to another, sections of dialogue were inserted into the narrative, the style was made the object of painstaking revision-to say nothing of the mere correction of typographical errors. The first proofs were returned to the printer, the type was all but reset, and a second set of galleys soon reached Balzac-only to be subjected to a similar kind of reworking. We have, at the University of Chicago, three sets of galley proofs for chapter II of Le Secret des Ruggieri and four sets for chapter III; one can appreciate, even by looking at a few of the pages, how complex and how confusing are the materials that any editor of that story must take into account (figs. 1, 2). These are, typically, proofs for a preoriginal edition, the publication of the story in the Chronique de Paris ..4 Ultimately, the first periodical edition or the first book edition of the story did appear; but that was only the first step in another series of publications, most of them accompanied by revisions. One might trace thus the typical history of a Balzacian novel: after its appearance in newspaper or magazine, the novel came out in one of those collections of narrative works that, from the beginning, Balzac used as media for massive presentation of his writings: the Scenes de la vie 4 University of Chicago Library, MSS Collection, PQ2163.fC87 1836. For a description, see E. Preston Dargan, "A Balzac Acquisition," The University Record (University of Chicago), XIII (April, 1927), 124-6, and W. L. Crain's edition of the Secret des Ruggieri (described in the following note), pp. xxviii-xxx. The University of Chicago has an all but complete collection of the first editions and of other contemporary editions of Balzac, on which (for an early description) see E. Preston Dargan, "Remarkable Collection of Balzac Secured by the University of Chicago Library," The University of Chicago News Letter, XV (Mar. 23, 1923). Many important items have since been added to the collection.
Bernard Weinberg
65
parisienne, the Scenes de la vie privee, the Scenes de la vie de province, the Romans et contes philosophiques, the Etudes philosophiques, and so on. Since each of these collections had various editions, and since Balzac frequently changed his mind about the proper location for a given novel or short story, the individual work would pass through a whole series of editions in collected form, usually with more or less extensive revisions. For the longer novels there were also separate editions. Finally, after he had had his great idea, Balzac reworked many of the novels in order to fit them into the larger fabric of the Comedic humaine, to the final edition of which, in his last years, he made further marginal corrections and changes. It is obvious that so many book editions of each work, added to the extensive writing that preceded the first periodical edition, would have produced-and did produce-a number of variations and variants of the text that could not possibly be taken into account in a critical edition. The problem of editing Balzac is a problem in infinite variation. It is a problem, however, that is made more grave and more insoluble by what I have called "the traditional concept of what constitutes a proper critical edition." This is, it may be recalled, my second explanation for the absence of critical editions of Balzac's works. Traditionally, we have wished to think of a critical edition of Balzac in exactly the same terms in which we think of a critical edition of the Chanson de Roland or of Gargantua et Pantagruel. We have decided that it is necessary to represent fully every change in the text from the first blackening of the paper down to the novelist's dying marginalia. No change is really minor; punctuation and spelling are as important as long additions or as major shifts of materials; and every stroke of the writer's pen must be preserved as precious. In a word, we have continued to pursue the ideal of the nineteenthcentury philologian, an ideal conceived for the Greek or Latin text of antiquity or for the vernacular text of the Middle
66
Editing Balzac
Ages or the Renaissance. We have pursued the ideal, and occasionally we have attained it; and I can cite at least one example and show it to you. I said to begin with that we possessed only "one thin volume" of Balzac "critically" edited in published form; but we possess at least one more work, and that in a very thick volume, in an unpublished critical edition that would satisfy, and brilliantly, all of the philologian's aspirations. That is a critical edition of Le Secret des Ruggieri presented as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago, in 1937, by William Leeper Crain. 5 Professor Crain's edition is unpublished because unpublishable; it is unpublishable perhaps because it comes so close to achieving the philological ideal that I have been describing. It is a perfect critical edition according to the old formula and the old criteria. Everything that is in the texts is in the edition, and by the texts I mean the original manuscript, the Chicago proofs of some of the chapters, the Lovenjoul proofs of the rest (in the Chantilly collection), the pre-original edition, and all the subsequent printed forms. In order to include everything, Professor Crain was obliged not only to produce two separate and parallel texts (one up to the first printed version, the other from that version on down to the end of the text's history), but also to devise a highly complex system of notation. He could thus represent in his edition all the erasures, all the additions and deletions, the additions that remained and those that were deleted before the first publication, and all the subsequent changes. It was a heroic task and it will never have to be done again. My question about it is this: should it ever have been done at all in this particular way? 5 William Leeper Crain, "A Critical Edition of Balzac's Le Secret des Ruggieri," University of Chicago doctoral dissertation, 1937. Pages 138 and 166, reproduced here, show "left-hand" pages on which Professor Crain gives the text up to but not including the first publication in the Chronique de Paris, with variants from the manuscript and the successive proofs. The Introduction to this edition was published in The Evolution of Balzac's "Comedie humaine," ed. E. Preston Dargan and Bernard Weinberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), pp. 280-367; description of the galley proofs is found on pp. 295-8. See figures 3 and 4.
Bernard Weinberg
67
The philological editions that scholarship has been producing since the time of the Renaissance were intended to serve two purposes. They were meant to rescue from the debris of the ages a text-the text of Homer, the text of Cicero, the text of the Chanson de Roland-and they were meant to provide us with data for the study of the language in which that text was written. As a result of the achievements of the philologians, we now do have texts that are infinitely superior to those with which we started and we know a great deal more about the languages. Somewhat over a century of labours on the Chanson de Roland, for example, has carried that text from the amateurish understanding of it in the Romantic period to a high degree of expertness and critical sophistication, and the text itself has contributed markedly to our knowledge of the history of the French language. With Balzac-and I suspect that the same might be true of many other modem writers-the goals cannot possibly be the same. The materials are so recent and so abundant, the evidence of the author's approval is so clear, that we can have no doubt about what the definitive text was supposed to be, and what it is. The definitive text is the last text published during Balzac's lifetime, usually in the last form of the Furne edition, sometimes corrected by Balzac's final marginalia. 6 Occasionally, of course, there are problems of faulty or doubtful text; but these can usually be resolved bibliographically with little difficulty. Indeed, the answer to the question is so easy that all editors of "current" (if not necessarily "critical") editions of Balzac have based their editions on this same definitive text. 7 As far as language pure and simple is concerned, I 6 The copy of the Fume, Dubochet, Hetzel edition of 1842 that bears Balzac's corrections is now being photographically reproduced and republished by the Association des Bibliophiles de !'Original, Paris, 1965 ff. 7 Cf. the Avertissement to the recent edition of the Oeuvres completes published by the Societe des Etudes Balzaciennes, I, 4: "l'etablissement du texte que nous publions, selon une reference classique, d'apres l'exemplaire de La Comedie humaine de !'edition Furne, sur lequel Balzac avait porte ses corrections pour la prochaine edition de son c:euvre...."
.A.,p. I A: Pr I A ms, Jl.
138
rellcha aoua lee deux premiers rois de la Maison de Bourbon.[ 41 5Peu de personnes avaient le droit d'arriver avec leurs gens et leurs fl.ambeeux dene la cour du Louv~e. 6 Les charges qui donnaient Elltree apres 7 souper dens les appartemmts etaient rares.a Le marechal de Retz qui faisait alors faction sur 1a9 gouttiere offrit un jour mille ecus de ce temps a l'huissier du cabi~ u r y entrer une seule foislO+ en un moment ou 11 n•en IJ.Vait pas le droit
pour parler ! Henri III.
La reine Elisabeth d'Autriche et sa belle-mere
----- - - -etaient Catherine de-Medicis as sises au coinl l de la cheminee,
U+Le· roi ~ le fauteuil se trouvait !_ !.'~U~!_ :_o!._n, y dameurait dens une apparente apathie autorisee par la digestion, 11 avait mange coimne un ho11mte qui revenait de la chasse. 13 Les courtisans se tena1ent 14 debout et decouverts au fond de la
and, after la Maison de Bourbon, inserts: , elle prit une forme orientale SOUll le grand roi; car 1•etiquette est venue du Bas-Empire qui la tmait de l'Aaie. The C de p sent.ence structure is smoother and more orderly. 5Pr I [C+], C de P begin this sentence with En 1573, non-seulement; this takes the place of En ce temps omitted from the preceding sentence and prepares the way for fusing this sentence with the one following. 6Pr I [C+J, C de P insert: , comme sous Louis XIV les seuls dues et pairs entraimt sous le peristyle en carosse, mais encore •• , The added comparison is appropriate end helps complete the picture. The mais encore links up with non-seulement in note 5 for closer-knit sentence structure. 7pr I [C+J, C de P insert le. 8Pr I [C+], C de P: se can;i°aient. 9Pr I [C+], C de P simplify by substituting alors en faction dans sa. lOTo avoid the awkwardness of the h-o phrases beginning with ~ • parallel in form but badly placed, Pr I [C+J, C de P omit pour y entrer une seule fois and transpose pour pouvoir parler a Henri III to take its place. Note the addition o f ~ · Finally, a whole sentence is inserted at this point to round out the paragraph: Ainsi done a cette heure, 11 ne se trouvait au Louvre que les personnages les plus eminents du royaume. 11Pr I (C+], C de p insert gauche for exactness. 12Tbe stylistic changes mad~his sentence by Pr I (C+J, C de Pall 110rk in the direction of greater conciseness end vividness. In place o f ~ le fauteuil ee trouvait a l 1 autre coin, y demeurait dens we find plonge dans eon rauteuil affectait; the phrase A l 1 autre coin is moved to the beginning or the sentence. The adjective appe.rente, rendered unnecessary by the new verb ~.!.• is omitted; ~ is inserted before 11 avait mang,, and en prince replaces comme un homne. 1 3Pr I [C+], C de P insert; peut-Atre suesi voulait-il ae dispenser de parler en presence de tant de gens qui eepionnaient S!lpensee. This notion of Charles•e having to hide hie intimate thoughts existed in the original passage FIGURE
3
~P• I B (Fr I A ms, B): Block !I
166
que par les intrigues du gouvernement, comme lll1 joueur ne peut viV:re que par les emotions du jeu. Profondement convaincue de la maxime: diviser Eour re~~• elle oppose constamment une force a une autreJlO] {Henri II ~o::, ~!_i .!! coimaissait si bien, qu•11ll+ dit a son compare le connetable de :Montmorency que tout serait perdu le jour ou on la laisserait toucher aux affaires. Jus.!u•au moment de!!:. mort de Henri II, elle fut toujours occupee de soins ~;r. nela. Cetta femme, menacee de sterilite, donna dix eni'ants a la race des pour le saisir, avec les Guise, les ennemis du tr~ne, et que pour garder lee ~es de l'ttat entre ses mains, elle uea de tous les moyens, ~ ~ jusqu•A ses enfants. Cette fellllle de qui l'un de ses ennemis a dit a sa mort: Ce n•est pas une reine, c•est la royaute qui vieot de mourir, ne pouvait Vivre que par les intrigues du gouvernement, comma un joueur ne !!!,que par les emotions du jeu. Quoiqu•italienne et de la voluptueuse race des Medicis, les Calvinistes, qui l•ont tant calomniee, ne lui ont pas decouvert un seul emant. Admiratrice de la maxima: diviser pour reg~ . elle opposa constamment une force a une autre. The purel,- stylistic variations are unimportant as compared with the elaborations 11nich reinforce the idea of Cathe~ine•s desire to rule at any coat, end thus heighten our interest in the subsequent material of Block II. We have seen in notes I 98, 102, 155, etc., how Balzac drew on Dreux du Radler for this characterization of Catherine as it appeared in earlier versions. In Dreux du Radler 'Ml also find a footnote ( ~ . , IV, 252) llhich is related to one of the expansions made for C de P. Writing of Catherine•s death, Drewc du Radler says: Il est certain qu'elle mourut le 5, veille des Rois; ce qui i'ait dire a Etienne Paaquier, dens 1'.Spitaphe de cette princesae: "Erlfin est morte une veille des Rois; "Et par sa mort, je crains, peuples i'ranqais, "Q.u•avec lapaix, la ro,-aute soit morte." Jeunesse de Pasquier, p'. 537 •. However, the footnote does not maintain that De Thou made the statement, BB Balzac does later, in his Introduction (see note toll. 300-302). 11 AB we have seen in note 10, Pr I [C+J, C de P place the passage in braces {1 ahead of the material ot note lo. It lllll.S rewritten and expanded a, follows, italics showing variants: Q,uant a la soif de domination qui devorait Catherine et qui fut engen• dres par un desir inn.S d•etendre la gloire et la puissance de la maison de Medicis, cette instinctive disposition etait si bien connue, ce genie poli• tique s•etait depuis long-temps trahi par de teii;-demangeaisons, qua !!_e::r.!._ !_I dit ~ connetable de Montmorency qu'elle avait mis en avant pour ~!0!!.~~: Mon comp~re, vous ne connaissez pas ma femme, c•est la FIGURE 4
70
Editing Balzac
suppose that there is nothing to be learned from Balzac's hesitations that could not more easily be learned from more accessible documents. These things have been known to Balzacians from the beginning; those who worked in variant studies (and we made many of them at the University of Chicago over a twenty-year period) 8 and those who aspired to the critical edition thus set themselves other goals. They were literary goals, and they were set with a literary rather than a philological audience in mind. When I say a "philological" audience I mean one made up of historical scholars who were primarily concerned, themselves, with the establishment of texts and with problems of language. I distinguish from them a "literary" audience as one interested, rather, in the work of art itself or in the processes by which it became a work of art. It was the last of these aspects that attracted the early Balzacians and that continues to attract Balzacians today. These are the great questions: how much can we learn, by studying all the successive stages of a given work, about the creative process in Balzac, about the ways in which he worked? What discoveries can we make, by following minutely the changes in language and expression, about Balzac's ideal of style and about his struggle to reach it? Which processes of correction were designed especially to integrate the separate works into the vast total of the Comedie humaine? At Chicago we added a fourth question: is it possible to perceive, through a study of the variants, the gradual development and the perfection of those private techniques that characterize Balzac's "realism"?9 Good questions; some of them excellent questions. Yet the literary historians who asked them, when they asked them, 8 For some of these variant studies, see "Summaries of Variants in Twenty-six Stories," chapter v of The Evolution of Balzac's "Comedie humaine"; and, more especially, chapter 1n of the same volume, Professor Rachel Wilson's "Variations in Le Cure de Tours," pp. 188-279. 9 See also Studies in Balzac's Realism by E. Preston Dargan, W. L. Crain, et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932).
Bernard Weinberg
71
may have made a fundamental error. They placed the crux of the literary problem in the creative act, in the developmental process through which the work reached its final form. But they did so without reflecting seriously enough about the difficulties involved in the discovery of that form and about the techniques that would have to be developed if form were to be usefully analysed. In a sense, they attempted to transfer to literary analysis a body of philological methods that must necessarily remain insufficient, because such methods could apply properly only to superficial aspects of the form. Variant studies-as parts of editions or as separate from them-tended to deal largely with language, and the statements with respect to the "evolution" of Balzac's art were mostly statements about the "evolution" of his style. Such evaluative judgments as might appear drew their criteria from universal rhetorical principles rather than from considerations relevant to the work itself. After the study of language came the examination of changes in the most visible elements of external form: the addition to the original straight narrative of sections of dialogue; extensions or shortenings of the narrative itself (the latter rarely); the moving about of blocks of material from one place to another in the story. The one criterion available here was that the new position was "naturally" or "logically" better than the old one, and that Balzac was thus justified in making the shift. Finally, a third kind of study addressed itself to those variations in the text that were to be accounted for by its integration into the general plan of the Comedie humaine; and here no criterion of evaluation was needed since the facts themselves sufficed. My central misgiving about this whole procedure is that, while the aims changed and the audience changed, the methods remained the same. Literary goals relevant to the work of art itself were introduced, a new audience with predominantly literary interests was envisaged, and still the old philological procedures were maintained. All this may have
72
Editing Balzac
come about because the literary goals themselves were never completely defined, because the audience's interests were not sensitively gauged, or because goals and interests merely happened after the fact of the philological investigation. I should like to propose, in a brief speculation, that we make audience and purposes really prior to the methodology of textual editing and that we try to imagine a different set of perspectives for editing Balzac. The two critical editions as well as the variation studies of which I have spoken were made a generation ago for another generation of consumers. It was a generation almost totally oriented towards literary history, trained as it was by the schools of Heidelberg and Paris. It wanted to know, on any matter, everything that was to be known and verified (always a laudable ambition). When it approached the problem of editing Balzac, for example, it really did so with the primary purpose of recording systematically and in an organized way the welter of basic materials that had been brought to light by the efforts of its own predecessors, the generation of Lovenjoul. It was its own audience, doing a specialized job for specialists like itself. When it began to ask questions about the ultimate usefulness of what it was doing, it answered those questions in literary-historical terms. It dealt with evolutions and processes, with developments from an initial to a final stage, changes which-since they were made by a great artistmust necessarily represent a passage from imperfection to perfection. Our generation, especially on this continent, has other orientations. It is more critical than historical; it is directed more toward the work of art as it is than toward the process through which it developed. We are concerned with matters of evaluation, with the techniques for reading and interpretation, with the discovery of the intimate and essential form of works-in a word, with understanding and enjoying the work instead of just knowing about it. We are still interested in the
Bernard W einherg
73
act of creation, but we think about it in different ways. We are convinced, or at least I am convinced, that as an act it is essentially ineffable; or, if anything can be known about it, it will be known by people other than the literary historian or the literary critic and in ways other than through the examination of the successive stages of the work that have come down to us. An examination of that kind, however, may well serve other purposes, and I shall include them among the objectives to be sought in a critical edition of Balzac. Here is my proposal for such an edition: 1. Since the contemporary audience for a critical edition of Balzac wants, exclusively, Balzac's final version of the work, it should be given the last Fume text ( with Balzac's marginalia where useful) or the last text of a separate edition. Bibliographical science on Balzac has progressed to the point where the question of the definitive text is quickly answered in most cases. 2. Before he even begins to think about the critical apparatus that should accompany that text, the editor should make the same kind of formal analysis of the work that his readers will later be making. He should attempt a complete discovery of its inner workings, a penetration into the statics and the dynamics of its structure, a clarification of all the interrelations among the parts and between the parts and the whole, an understanding not only of what happens within the story but also why-in terms of the story itself-everything happens as it does and everything is expressed in the words actually used. This should be a discovery of internal or essential form, having nothing to do with the attention paid by his predecessors to external or superficial form. The editor, in a word, must take off his philologian's hat and put on, instead, his critic's hat. If I say that he must do this immediately, it is because I regard such an analysis as preliminary to the study and the preparation of such variants as will be included with his text. Let me put it this way. The reader of
74
Editing Balzac
his text will ultimately wish himself to make an artistic study of the work, to engage in the act of analysis and evaluation. But he may also, both for aesthetic and for historical reasons, be interested in the successive stages in the achievement of the final form. For him, each version of the story is a separate work of art, having its own form capable of analysis and evaluation: the original manuscript draft of Le Secret des Ruggieri is a whole work, distinct from the story as it appears in the first set of proofs, which in its tum is distinct from the total story in the second set of proofs. And so forth. The aggregate of all the changes introduced into one stage of the composition makes of it an independent work different from its predecessor. However, since the writer ended where he did with the definitive form that we have, each of the preceding versions may be regarded as a way-station on the road to that definitive form. The penultimate form is different from and something less than the ultimate form, but it moves toward it. The discovery of the form toward which all others move is prior to the study and the discovery of the antecedent forms. 3. I would thus have the editor make first his thoroughgoing analysis of the final form and then, working forward from the first to the last or backward from the last to the first, make a similar analysis of each of the extant versions. In any case, the final form would serve as a guide or a touchstone to the understanding of all the others. I would then have him write and present in his edition his critical analysis of all the versions. This would constitute in a way a first set of "variants" for the edition, a new kind of variants in which each of the successive forms would be considered as a variation upon the preceding one and all would be considered as intermediate forms leading into the final form. The "variant-analyses" would probably not appear at the bottom of the pages or in those never-to-be-found pages at the end of the volume; rather, they might well constitute the main body of the introduction, taking there the place of the old philological disquisitions.
Bernard W einherg
75
4. There should, however, be proper variants, and they should properly appear at the bottom of the pages. I think of them as falling into the following categories, all of them related to the analysis of the forms of which I have just spoken. First, blocks of materials large or small that show states of the form different from the next one or from the final one. These would be easy to spot once the editor had arranged, in his own mind, the series of distinct forms constituting the total work, and they could be made intelligible to the reader by references to the introductory series of analyses. They might represent changes in the line of action itself, or in the delineation of the character out of which action Hawed, or in the presentation of situation and circumstances, or in the development of the passions and the thoughts and the arguments of the various personages. Second-and this would be peculiar to editions of Balzacblocks of materials large or small that show the steps taken by Balzac to work a given story into the framework of the Comedie humaine. As we know, once he had had the great inspiration that revealed to him the possibility of uniting all of his separate narratives into a single historico--sociologicofictional corpus, he set to work to change each of the stories as needed for the process of integration. He altered the dates and the chronologies of the individual stories to make them fit, changed the names of personages, moved people back and forth from one story to another, invented new situations and episodes, all of this in order to establish links for the reader between the one novel that he was reading and all the other novels of the Comedie humaine. Such variants should all be included, just as they were in Professor Crain's edition, but perhaps in a more closely organized way and with more direct reference to formal considerations. Third, stylistic variations, variants of language. These should be much fewer than the ones given in existing critical
76
Editing Balzac
editions. Most of the actual differences in language should be left unrecorded, and that because they are without interest to the kind of reader and the kind of audience I have in mind. The criterion for their inclusion would have to be a new one. Rather than singling out the "more vivid" verb or the "more colourful" adjective, rather than worrying about the ways in . h th e express10n · b ecomes "clearer" or "more correct, " t h e wh 1c editor should focus his attention on those changes in diction that correspond to changes in the conception of the total form. In a well constructed work-and many of Balzac's are very well constructed-a single phrase or sentence or passage may reveal the whole of the form; a new conception of the form may penetrate down to a substitution for a single word. Once again, the editor's reference would be to the total form at any given stage in the development of the work, and the reader would be informed, through the variants, with respect to the passage from an initial form, through intermediate forms, to the definitive form. I do not know how such an edition would look. I am not sure that it could be done. But the doing of it would, I believe, constitute a fresh approach to the study of any individual work of Balzac. Were it done, moreover, the reader would have before him, for the first time, a body of chosen and intelligible materials that would help him in his comprehension of the "history" of the work and in the understanding and the evaluation of its literary merits.
EDITING THE CARLYLE LETTERS: PROBLEMS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Charles Richard Sanders
WHEN IN 1952 I TOLD one of my colleagues at Duke that I was considering a complete edition of the Carlyle letters as my next and perhaps last research project, he politely but sceptically shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows, as if to say that he thought Froude, Norton, and Alexander Carlyle had already done the job, not to mention D. A. Wilson's six-volume biography, containing many letters and excerpts from letters. I have often thought of his gesture and attitudes as through the years I have laboured at collecting the letters and editing them. After it became clear that there would be between 9,000 and 10,000 letters, requiring between thirty and forty volumes for publication, the very scope, to say nothing of the expense, seemed almost terrifying. Certainly a project of such large dimensions needed rational and convincing justification, particularly after the decision, in 1955, to include Jane Welsh Carlyle's letters with those of her husband. Does the present situation really demand an edition? It would be unfair to minimize the importance of the work done by many early editors. Even Froude, though he was too careless about textual matters to be a good editor, and could be
78
Editing the Carlyle Letters
naive in his consideration of evidence, was remarkably perceptive in dealing with the psychology of human relations, and possessed a style and sense of form which made him probably the most gifted literary artist, with the possible exception of Logan Pearsall Smith, who has worked with the Carlyles up to now. Charles Eliot Norton made the mistake of allying himself with Mary and Alexander Carlyle in their attack on Froude, but managed nevertheless to bring out editions of Carlyle's early correspondence and his letters to Goethe and Emerson which are for their day unusually accurate in text and judicious in interpretation. Alexander Carlyle, Canadian-educated son of Carlyle's brother Alexander, despite the persistent and rather ill-natured attack on Froude which runs through all his work, has been the most copious and in many respects the most capable editor of the Carlyle letters so far. Many others have published Carlyle letters, more or less thoroughly and competently edited, in books or articles. 1 Not the least important of the editors was Carlyle himself, who after the death of Jane Welsh Carlyle in 1866 called in as many of her letters as he could, had them copied in longhand by her cousin Maggie Welsh, and wrote his own extremely valuable notes in the margins of these copies and on extra sheets and scraps of paper. 2 Carlyle realized fully the high literary merits of his wife's letters3 and the importance of preserving them, and had much experience working with letters in his writing of Cromwell, Schiller, John Sterling, and Frederick the Great. lMost deserving honourable mention are C. T. Copeland, Richard Garnett, Reginald Blunt, Edith J. Morley, Leonard Huxley, William A. Speck, Townsend Scudder, John Graham, Jr., Trudy Bliss, Grace J. Calder, Suzanne H. Nobbe, Waldo H. Dunn, and Joseph Slater. 2 Most of these copies with Carlyle's notes are in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, and the original letters are in the National Library of Scotland. 30n several occasions when Jane was in an unhappy mood, she accused Carlyle of writing letters to her which he intended for publication. At the same time she was well aware of the literary value of her own letters.
Charles Richard Sanders
79
A new era in Carlyle studies began in 1928, when Miss Margaret Carlyle Aitken presented seven hundred autograph letters of her uncle Thomas Carlyle to the National Library of Scotland; this gift was followed by large donations of letters and manuscripts by her cousin Alexander Carlyle, from 1929 to his death in 1931. Many important accessions have been made by this library since then, and it now has more than eighty-four bound volumes of Carlyle letters. They are in considerable part made up of the great mass of material which Carlyle himself had collected and left to Froude in his will, with stipulation that they were to be given to Mary, Carlyle's niece and Alexander Carlyle's wife, when Froude was through with them. About 1934, also, Carlyle scholars were further encouraged by the appearance of copious excerpts from the 250 letters from the Carlyles to the Ashburtons, an indication that these extremely important and interesting letters might later be available for complete publication. 4 Of the approximately 9,500 letters which have been found, about half have never been published. Many of those which have been published are widely scattered through periodicals, newspapers, and biographies of the Carlyles' contemporaries. At least half of the published letters, furthermore, are incomplete; and in some of the well-known collected editions, such as Froude's Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, numerous blanks indicate the omission of names which can now be supplied from the manuscripts. On these grounds, then, knowing that the text of about 90 per cent of the letters can now be based on manuscripts or facsimiles, it may be maintained with assurance that a new and complete edition of the letters is now needed. In this assurance, our project is being sponsored by Duke University and the University of Edinburgh. 5 4 They
will be included in our edition. original editorial staff consisted of an Associate Editor, Professor John Butt (General Editor of the Twickenham Edition of Pope and a member of the Advisory Board for the Pilgrim Edition of Dickens' letters), an Assistant Editor, Mrs. Janetta Taylor (formerly of the University of 5The
80
Editing the Carlyle Letters
The true justification, of course, lies in the literary and historic merits and significance of the letters which, recognized in the Carlyles' own lifetimes and pretty well taken for granted ever since, need only be mentioned here. On the one hand, the letters provide almost complete autobiographies of two of the most gifted, interesting, and complex persons of the nineteenth century. On the other, they provide narrative, description, and spicy commentary concerning thousands of people, events, and problems, from the time of the first letter in 1812 to that of the last in 1879. The subjects treated are international in scope, relating significantly not only to Scotland and England but also to Ireland, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Jamaica, Canada, Australia, and the United States. Practically all the mighty issues of the day are dealt with in them; some of these are touched upon many times and are developed in meaty and at times complex discussions. The keen observation and effective language of the Carlyles provide in the letters many memorable descriptions of persons, places, and happenings. Both had a highly developed dramatic sense which they exploited to the utmost. Both had a keen sense of the ridiculous, which counts for much in the letters and enables the Carlyles to stand on common ground with their friends Dickens and Thackeray. Both had strong and vital intellects, and their letters are charged with a powerful voltage of ideas. But they did not restrict their interests to mighty issues or important persons; instead they fully realized, as Browning did, the delight which can come from the consideration of the minutiae, even the trivia of life. Jane Carlyle rather prided herself on being able to spin a charmingly Edinburgh and the University of Hull), and a General Editor, Charles Richard Sanders. Professor Butt died on November 22, 1965, and Professor K. J. Fielding of the University of Edinburgh, author of a book on Dickens and one of the editors of the Pilgrim Edition of Dickens' letters, has succeeded him. Mrs. Taylor is not only a highly perceptive scholar and critic, but enjoys the great advantage of having grown up in Scotland and has invaluable knowledge of Scottish things.
Charles Richard Sanders
81
vivacious and pithy letter out of practically nothing or, as she said, out of herself. When the complete edition is published, it will resemble an enormous, multi-volumed, crowded-canvas, section-of-life, realistic novel, swarming with major and minor characters, containing much dialogue, and telling a moving and complex story with subplots and component anecdotes, and with many bright comic colours providing relief for some tragic shadows. Furthermore, the two Carlyles function not merely as narrators, but as chorus, giving philosophical comment on the actions and actors. At the same time, they are in a complementary relation to one another: because each is the best possible commentator on the other's letters, they make unnecessary innumerable notes and much editorial apparatus. Such are our materials, and we have great advantages in dealing with them. Microfilm, photostats, the Xerox process, airmail, and improved catalogues and indexes in libraries have all contributed to a trustworthy system of finding and copying letters, not possible forty years ago. Furthermore, great progress has been made in recent years in the science and art of editing letters. Even today, however, the principles have not been established with absolute finality but are still evolving. In working with the Carlyle letters, we often have to play by ear because previously established guiding principles are lacking, and because we have peculiar problems arising from our dealing with two closely related correspandences. Nevertheless there are some guiding principles, and we owe much to those who have formulated them and sometimes demonstrated their value. These principles may be divided into two categories: those which have to do with textual problems, and those which have to do with annotation and problems of interpretation.6 Since 6 Concerning textual problems, Professor John M. Manly used to tell those of us who were helping him to collate the manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales that the place to start in studying the theory of how to
82
Editing the Carlyle Letters
much that holds good for the establishing of texts in other literary genres also holds good for letters, principles like those which have been formulated for the editing of Washington Irving's complete works under the general editorship of Henry A. Pochman, and those published recently by the Modem Language Association for its Center for Editions of American Authors have proved of great value to us. So has the critical edition of Hawthorne's works being published at the Ohio State Center for Textual Studies. The editors of the Pilgrim Edition of Dickens' letters went into the problems of editing letters very meticulously and thoroughly before they began to publish last year; and the late John Butt, who served on their staff as well as ours, was able to provide us with some minutes of their conferences and copies of their correspondence. A very fine essay by Robert Halsband, entitled "Editing the Letters of Letter-Writers" (Studies in Bibliography, XI [1958], 25-37), has also been of help. The editors of the Carlyle letters have also profited much, as later editors will profit, from many other fine recent editions of letters. 7 Problems, questions, and difficulties remain, however. Some establish texts was with Westcott and Hort's Introduction to their Greek text of the New Testament (1881). I sincerely hope that Manly's statement still holds good, for one of these editors, F. J. A. Hort, was a disciple of S. T. Coleridge, and I am always glad to find evidence that there was much in Coleridge's mind besides poetry and intellectual moonshine. 7Worthy of mention are Ralph L. Rusk's edition of the Emerson letters in six volumes (1939); the edition of Horace Walpole's letters by W. S. Lewis and others in thirty-four volumes (1937-65); Gordon N. Ray's edition of the Thackeray letters in four volumes (1945-46 ); Gordon Haight's edition of the George Eliot letters in seven volumes (1954-55); Earl L. Griggs's edition of the Coleridge letters from 1785 to 1819 in four volumes (1956, 1959); George Sherbume's edition of the Pope letters in five volumes (1956); Cecil Lang's edition of the Swinburne letters in six volumes (1962); Francis E. Mineka's edition of the Mill letters from 1812 to 1848 in two volumes (1963); Robert Halsband's edition of the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in three volumes (1965); Madelyn House's edition (the Pilgrim Edition) of the Dickens letters from 1820 to 1839 in one volume (1965); and that great White Whale on the sea of letter-editing, Theodore Besterman's edition of Voltaire's letters in 104 volumes (1953-66).
Charles Richard Sanders
83
but by no means all of these derive from the fact that this edition is peculiar in its attempt to present the letters of two distinguished writers rather than one. There is an economy in this, as I have already suggested, for the two letter-writers find much common ground in their experiences, beliefs, and even taste. But they were not literary Siamese twins, and the editor of their letters has the responsibility of making distinct and clear the important differences of interest, of feeling, of temperament, and of style. At the same time, the two writers serve as foils for one another, in the same way that many of their correspondents may serve as foils for both of them. Some important questions which have to do with the completeness of the edition must be faced. Must we be able to assume, for instance, that we have collected all the letters before we begin publishing a "complete" edition? The answer is no, for if we waited until we had them all we would probably never publish. We have been as thorough as we knew how to be in looking for letters and have sent out thousands of form letters of inquiry to libraries all over the world, the names and addresses of which we have found in standard national and international guides to libraries. Over thirty letters went to Russia; several to New Zealand, where Carlyle letters were found. We have tried our luck in Iceland and Japan, though without success. We have advertised in newspapers like the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times, and the now defunct New York Herald Tribune. We have followed up numerous leads to letters in out-of-theway places and in some fine large private collections. We have watched like hawks the auction and autograph catalogues and have tried to make sure that no letter which came on the market disappeared before we got it or a facsimile of it. The correspondence about the correspondence fills a long drawer in one of our filing cabinets, and generally speaking it represents a wonderful spirit of co-operation in those with whom we have corresponded. And yet every year as many as
84
Editing the Carlyle Letters
fifty or sixty new letters come out of hiding and will continue to do so in the years to come. Furthermore, when we publish, the very publicity will flush out many letters to mock the word "complete" if we should use it. We have conducted a concentrated search for some letters which we have not found: the letters to Francis Jeffrey, some early letters from Jane Welsh to Mrs. Basil Montagu, those by Carlyle to William Fraser, editor of the Foreign Review in the late 1820s, and the extremely important letters which the Carlyles wrote from about 1821 onward to members of the Buller family. We have had the help of other scholars. At least twelve researchers, including well-known Thackeray scholars, for instance, have been searching during the last twenty years for the Buller papers. But after long search one begins to believe that many of these letters, if not all of them, were destroyed. The best that an editor of "complete" letters can do is to be systematic and thorough in his search over a reasonably long period of time and then, having published his collection, put letters which come to light afterwards in supplementary volumes. In our case, since we will be publishing over a ten-year period, we may assume that many letters will be found during this period that can be worked into our edition. An extra dividend from our labours with the early letters has been the discovery of some significant additions to the bibliography of Carlyle's published works. Mr. Ian M. Campbell of the University of Edinburgh, with the help of librarians at the Ewart Public Library, Dumfries, has found in a file of the Dumfries and Galloway Courier many letters by Carlyle from 1814 to 1817 dealing with mathematical problems. Mathematical symbolism was, of course, to count for much in Carlyle's major works. Perhaps more significantly, however, after Carlyle had been attacked by another contributor, he answered in indisputable and highly vigorous Carlylese on March 8, 1814, a date much earlier than is usually assigned to the first appearance of his characteristic
Charles Richard Sanders
85
style. After solving a problem, Carlyle's anonymous attacker had written: "Another answer to the same is here given, according to the method of Master Thomas Carlyle, of Edinburgh, (see your last number); viz. the question is capable of being solved by any of the common methods; though to do it 'we have only to find,' by the rule of fluctions, or by the rule of three, or by the rule, of Thumb, the equation necessary, and the thing is done." Carlyle replied: Respecting an extremely acute "remark", which dropt from the pen of the right ingenious, and (I may add) right Rule-ofThumb-ic "mathematical" solver, to the question in your last, I think it necessary (since your correspondent, with laudable modesty, declines the honour of fathering his jeu d'esprit, though, haply, the only-begotten of his brain) merely to "remark", in my tum, that I did not consider a provincial newspaper the proper vehicle for fluxionary investigations; and that "capable", in my solution, was, by mistake, either in printing or transcribing, inserted instead of "incapable", as was evident to any person not bounded by conceit, and whose knowledge of his mother tongue amounts to an acquaintance with The Adventures of Thomas Hickathrift, or The History of Jack the Giant-Killer. Having thus solved your question, and, "lest he" might have been "wise in his own conceit," answered "a fool according to his folly," I beg leave to add, that, should any further anonymous attempts at wit appear in your paper against me, I shall regard them "as the wind that bloweth," and suffer them quietly to "fleet back" into the "limbo of vanity" whence they came.-1 have the honour to be, &c. / Thomas Carlyle. Edinburgh, 4th March, 1814.
(The substance of this in just two sentences!) Another interesting discovery is that of a long essay on thunder and lightning which Carlyle contributed to the Courier in two instalments, June 6 and 20, 1815, certainly his first published prose of any length. One of his correspondents at the time twitted him about "thundering away about thunder" in the Courier, and another spoke of being "electrified" by his discussion of lightning. He could scarcely have
86
Editing the Carlyle Letters
found another subject which would have had greater symbolic significance in relation to his whole literary career. Still another find, a very significant one, has been that Carlyle translated from the French a long article on political economy written by Sismondi for Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, XVII (December, 1824). Sismondi took issue with the laissez-faire school of economists and was rather gloomy about the ways in which wealth was being controlled and distributed. We may infer that Carlyle's running quarrel with the leading British economists of his day, his fixing of the label "the dismal science" on the subject, and his opposition to laissez-faire, arise not only out of protest against Malthus and his theories concerning papulation, as has been often said, but also out of familiarity with Sismondi. To return to our problems, another question that we have to answer is whether our ideal of a complete edition requires us to include snippets, such as brief notes ordering wine from the grocer, or accepting an invitation, or making inquiry about a railway schedule. Must all the long letters, on the other hand, be given in complete form, even when they contain long repetitious passages dealing with health, or with tedious instructions to the printer or cartographer? This is a vital question, since we have a strong conviction that the Carlyle letters are in the main highly readable, and we want to provide the reader with a clear text and not allow obstructions to discourage him or cause him to stop reading. Nevertheless there can be only one logical answer to our question. All snippets must be published and all long letters published in their entirety for indexing and for biographers and other scholars who may want to use the letters as source material. No one can tell in advance how important a date or fact or even whim in a snippet or dull passage may be to historians, biographers, and other scholars who will use the edition. As for the general reader, we can only hope-and I believe in the case of the Carlyle letters assume-that the momentum of
Charles Richard Sanders
87
interest will carry him through the dull spots, particularly since he has a prerogative of skipping which editors do not have. Perhaps we may coax a few superior readers into reading all thirty-five volumes straight through. The most important consideration in the editing of letters has to do with authenticity and accuracy of text. If the text is untrustworthy, then all editorial apparatus becomes meaningless and without value. Problems of authenticity have given us almost no trouble in working with the Carlyle letters. Both Carlyles wrote very distinctive hands which a forger would have great difficulty in reproducing successfully. And if he did succeed with the writing, matters of substance and style would soon give him away. As a matter of fact, we have found only two instances when Carlyle letters may have been forged, both of these unimportant so far as our text was concerned, for in both instances genuine letters were photographed by the forger and the facsimile, very good as such, sold as an original letter. We have found, on the other hand, problems relating to accuracy of text which are much more formidable. Although more than half of the original manuscript letters are accessible in the National Library of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh, and although we have excellent facsimiles of most of the fugitive letters, we occasionally have to work with a bad facsimile or even a bad original, like one from Dr. John Carlyle, Carlyle's brother, written from Germany with the ink faded by some kind of fumigation chemical used because of cholera in the late 1820s. There are letters written with inferior ink that has faded, letters in which the seal has been carelessly torn away removing a word or two, letters written with bad pens, and cross-written letters (fortunately not many of these, which the Carlyles always protested against when their correspondents wrote them). Jane Carlyle wrote a loose, flowing, careless hand, and she was also careless and unsystematic about paragraphing and punctuation. Often in her
88
Editing the Carlyle Letters
letters dashes take the place of all other punctuation, and she at times displays a maddening tendency to leave space at the end of a sentence to indicate the end of a paragraph without indenting her next sentence for the beginning of a new paragraph. Thomas Carlyle has his own system of capitalization in his letters as in his books, and editors must be everlastingly alert to prevent normalization of capitals from creeping in. He is careless too in forming some of his letters: his i's, e's, and a' s may at times be mistaken for one another; his r may at times look like an undotted i; his k's and his h's may become confused and when he writes double l, one l may decline to the level of an e. Before the days of the pennypost, Carlyle crowded his pages terribly, especially if he was writing to someone abroad, such as his brother John in Germany. In his old age he used many clipped forms with superscripts, such as cd, wd, explann, etc. But in the main the letters of both Carlyles are very legible to those who have had some practice reading them. Repeated collation of the typescripts with facsimiles and, if possible, manuscript letters will enable us to provide the printer with trustworthy copy. This is not to say that the problems relating to accuracy are always easy to solve. From first to last the Carlyles used many languages, Latin, Greek, German, Spanish, and Italian. Carlyle often neglected the Greek accents and wrote bad Latin. He and Jane were at times careless about the fine points of German grammar. Complications arise in some of the mathematical problems to be found in Carlyle's early letters, in which both the theorem and the solution are stated in Latin. The Latin is difficult and, as it happens, faulty enough, but the mathematical concepts and symbols, with which the Latin dwells in close and vital conjunction, are simply beyond the ken of most editors of English literary texts. In such cases the only wise thing to do is to try to find a competent specialist. We were fortunate in being able to get help from an eminent mathematician, also proficient in Latin, who helped us to
Charles Richard Sanders
89
establish our text and at the same time pointed out the shortcomings of Carlyle's Latin and mathematics. Another problem relates to the underscoring of words. The Carlyles often underscore a word two or more times and thus transcend the power of italic type. They may on occasion underscore once as many as five words in a row and then underscore the middle word twice more. Here we have had to choose between a footnote stating how many times the word in question was underscored, and a bracketed statement immediately following the word. We decided to use the second method. Paragraphing has also given us some trouble. In some of Carlyle's letters the postscript is very long, with no paragraph indications, filling the margins and often written up-side-down between the lines of the letter. Here we have had to choose between running the whole postscript together as one paragraph or breaking it up into paragraphs as we think its substance dictates. We have followed the second method. I have mentioned Jane Carlyle's ambiguous paragraphing. Here again we have had to determine the beginnings of paragraphs by studying the change or lack of change that appears in the development of the thought. British spellings we retain in the texts; American spelling is standard in the notes. Misspellings, which appear far more often in Jane's letters than in Carlyle's, we correct when we can do so by adding letters in brackets; after badly scrambled misspellings we helplessly add [sic]. Sic, however, we try to use sparingly since it is nearly always a distraction. Instead we work for maximum readability through the help of clearly indicated editorial additions and emendations. Still other questions and problems have to do with the editors' duties in writing the notes: illuminating the letters, making them fully understandable so far as possible, and doing all that can be done to make it a pleasure to read them. In the first volume a long Introduction discusses in some detail
90
Editing the Carlyle Letters
Carlyle's important role as editor and critic of literary letters; gives the history of other collectors and editors of these letters; provides facts concerning the number, range, and distribution of the manuscript letters, indicating what years were most productive for the Carlyles as letter writers and what libraries have significantly large collections of Carlyle letters; deals frankly with the questions, problems, and difficulties which the editors have encountered; and sets forth with considerable emphasis and strength of conviction the characteristics, value, and significance of the letters. Front-page materials in the first volume also include the usual Acknowledgments, a key to the abbreviations used in the notes, a chronological table of letters written to the Carlyles with an indication of their whereabouts, and two detailed maps, now being prepared by a cartographer in Edinburgh, showing Scotland and parts of northern England. Since these maps will give places, many of them hard to find on ordinary maps, related in a peculiar sense to the Carlyles, the editors hope that they will assist economy as well as convenience by making unnecessary innumerable notes identifying obscure places. (Similar maps of England, Ireland, and Germany will be provided in later volumes.) The letters will not be numbered, and all cross-references will be made in terms not of letter numbers or pages, but of dates of letters with the initials of correspondents. An editor does not have to work with letters long before he realizes the hazards of trying to refer to letters by number as newly found letters continue to arrive, and the editor who tries to make references by pages works with his hands tied behind his back until he gets his page-proofs. The cross-reference, moreover, usually indicates the whole letter, both text and notes, since the matter being referred to is usually to be found in both; but it is suggested to the reader that he can probably find his passage most quickly by reading upward from the note to its number in the text. Cross-reference is made only where the index would not serve well. If the facts being referred to are
Charles Richard Sanders
91
about as brief as a cross-reference would be, the facts are repeated without cross-reference. We place at the bottom of the page the information often given in headnotes in modern editions of letters. Here is found the address of the recipient, postmarks, the whereabouts of the manuscript letter, the books and periodicals in which it may have been published, the statement "Hitherto unpublished" if it fits, explanations concerning the dating of letters, and general information. We compel our headnote, a kind of catch-all, to become a footnote in order to keep the top of our page clear and open as far as possible and thus invite the reader. Likewise, we try to keep our text as clean as possible by holding reference numbers in it, which may look like Hy-specks, down to the minimum. The principle which we are attempting to follow in writing explanatory notes is that the length of the note should be in inverse ratio to the ease with which the subject of the note can be investigated in standard reference works. For instance our biographical notes on Francis Jeffrey and Emerson consist merely of the dates of birth and death and a brief fact or two. James Johnston, Robert Mitchell, James Brown, and Thomas Murray, important in the Carlyle letters though almost unknown outside of them, require fairly full biographies. Arthur's Seat and the Bass Rock near Edinburgh require only brief notes, but Blatum Bulgium, where many of Carlyle's ancestors are buried on the site of an ancient Roman Camp near Ecclefechan, requires fuller treatment. An important question which arises in connection with explanatory notes concerns the degree of objectivity for which the editor should strive. Should he be content to give the bare facts demanded by the passage in the text, or should he also function as interpreter and critic? Should he restrict himself to a colourless, matter-of-fact style, or should he make his own personal style count for something in the notes? When Lytton Strachey, who in his own writings made much of style and
92
Editing the Carlyle Letters
the prerogative of individual interpretation, was editing the complete Greville Memoirs, he did not allow himself to write a single note which called attention to his own style or wit. He assumed that all the spice should be Greville's, and that the editor should be completely subservient to his text. I believe, however, without denying Strachey credit for his remarkable self-discipline and even for much soundness of principle, that one may argue that he carried that principle to an extreme. It is good to have the Greville Memoirs in a trustworthy text illuminated by adequate factual notes. But it would be still better to have in addition Strachey's critical comments on passages in the work, full of his psychological insight and wit and phrased in his neat, incisive style. Now I grant you that most scholars lack the wit and style of a writer like Strachey, and I grant further that there could be nothing worse than an editor competing with the writer of a text or even trying to steal the show from him. Nothing becomes an editor more than humility, and he takes the first step toward wisdom only when he realizes his own limitations and the subordinate nature of his role. Once he clearly knows his limitations and what his relation to the author of his text must be, however, he should make use not only of his knowledge but also of his critical insight to illumine his text. It may be a great waste for a scholar who has spent many years working over and over, back and forth, through a long and perhaps complex text to deny himself the prerogative of interpretation, for he has a familiarity that has been seasoned by time and a perspective of the whole which most other readers will lack. Whether he should also attempt to make his individual style count for something in the notes will depend upon how good and appropriate his style is and how sound his taste is in indulging it. In all circumstances he should practise great restraint and remember that his essential function is to provide a good text. Perhaps Carlyle's own notes on his wife's letters set us a
Charles Richard Sanders
93
good example. These are far from being completely objective, colourless, and unimportant in themselves, though Carlyle never once forgets the subordinate nature of his editorial role. Some of his notes are extremely short, almost clipped. Others are full-blown in his most characteristic style and have a delightful amplitude that contributes much to the pleasure of reading the letters on which they comment. In our edition we plan to place these long notes by Carlyle, not in the footnote section, but in the basic text immediately following the letters to which they relate. One advantage is that this method permits us to use our footnotes to comment on the commentator. Carlyle's brief notes we incorporate into our footnotes with proper identification. There are also very valuable notes by Froude, Norton, Alexander Carlyle, Ritchie, and others which we keep, with due credit to the editors who wrote them. In our own editorial comments we try to steer clear of two pitfalls. One of these is that of taking a side in the controversy between the Alexander Carlyles and Froude which began a few months after Carlyle's death in early 1881 and ran on vigorously and unpleasantly for many years afterward-one may say until the last volume of Wilson's biography was published in 1934. This controversy has done great damage both to Carlyle's reputation and to the works by and about him in which it has been reflected. The other pitfall is the temptation to subject the two Carlyles to Freudian analysesto make much, for instance, of Carlyle's profound and longlasting attachment to his mother, who lived on until late 1853, and of Jane Carlyle's corresponding devotion to her father, who died in 1819, a devotion which was clearly one of the strongest shaping forces of her life and culminated in her wish to be buried in his grave at Haddington, as she was. We do not believe that the editors of the letters should go very far beyond the obvious facts in matters calling for psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, or other specialists outside our discipline, and
94
Editing the Carlyle Letters
we may even be sceptical about some of their conclusions when they confidently assert that all of the Carlyles' marital difficulties were caused by father and mother complexes. Finally, after we have solved or tried to solve all our other problems, there remains the problem of the index, which is to an editor what the Green Chapel was to Sir Gawain. We tread warily as we approach the subject and speak in low tones, uncommittedly and humbly, concerning it. We have not really confronted most of its problems yet, though for editorial use we keep an index to the notes as we write them, which makes cross-reference easy and helps avoid duplication. We plan now to issue an index with each set of volumes as we publish them and to bring the indexes together in a volume or two after we have published all the letters. But what shall we index? Just proper nouns? Ideas also? The letters are richly allusive, full of references to passages in the literature of the world which we identify when possible in the notes. Should we try to index these? The letters teem with expressions which Carlyle, borrowing the phrase, he says, from the German, calls "coterie speech." These are expressions which the Carlyles have heard in talk which seem odd, picturesque, or humorous and which usually have a story behind them. The Carlyles, Jane especially, like to introduce them, some of them many times, like motifs in music, in such a way that those who know the story behind them will get pleasure from finding them in new contexts. Fortunately, Carlyle annotates many of them in Jane's letters. They are highly important in unifying the letters and determining their flavour. But can and should we index them? I have spoken also of how the complete Carlyle letters will resemble a long, sprawling, crowded-canvas novel that happens to be true. Novels do not lend themselves to indexing, and very few critical editions of novels attempt to provide indexes. Should we attempt to index narrative and dramatic elements in the Carlyle letters? We shall do our best to cross these bridges safely when we get to
Charles Richard Sanders
95
them. Just now we lean toward providing a reference table for the literary allusions and coterie speech and an index for everything else that can be treated topically. Meanwhile, I must conclude and not emulate Carlyle in his treatment of silence, which he is said to have praised sometimes for four hours at a stretch and to have loved quite Platonically.
PRINCIPLES AND METHODS IN THE COLLECTED EDITION OF JOHN STUART MILL
John M. Robson
IN THIS PAPER I shall confine myself to the general conditions and practices of the Toronto edition of Mill, partly because of the exigencies of time, and partly because of the lack of accepted principles for dealing with nineteenth-century works. 1 My remarks may be taken as an apologia for our methods, and as a contribution to such principles as may eventually be developed, although I confess to a scepticism concerning the likelihood of a wide consensus ever being achieved around our or any other methods. A brief account of the history of our edition, however, might be of some interest. The Victorians, it may be said, were not averse to publishing their words in "collected" editions, and Mill's failure to do so might be taken as prima facie evidence of his approval of eccentricity. His major works, of course, remained in print throughout his lifetime, and the selection of essays published as Dissertations and Discussions lSpecific comments on the editing of Mill's letters are here avoided; the volumes are in the capable hands of Francis E. Mineka of Cornell University, joined for the Later Letters by those of Dwight Lindley of Hamilton College.
John M. Robson
97
(three volumes during his lifetime and one posthumous) seemed to him to represent all that was worth preserving of his periodical works. A careful study-which I have not made -might show why no collected edition appeared after his death: relevant information would include the attitude of his step-daughter and heir, Helen Taylor, the relations among his disciples and their relations with publishers, the nature of his reputation, and the current knowledge of the extent and nature of his corpus. In any case, apart from an abortive edition with no textual authority begun by Routledge early in this century, no attempt was made during the period when Mill's reputation was high. It is not surprising that there was little interest in edited versions in the period between the two wars, when the seemingly inevitable reaction of the next generation had set in. A new scholarly interest began in the 1940s, partly initiated by and partly reflected in the work of F. A. von Hayek, then of the London School of Economics ( where the main body of Mill's papers is deposited). His work, especially on the letters, carried forward since the early 1950s by Francis Mineka, has gone a long way in making our plans feasible and attractive; I am constantly finding that their labours have lightened mine. As early as 1955, in ignorant optimism, I suggested to a British commercial house that a collected edition should be begun: my suggestion was not received favourably-it is actually not an exaggeration to say that it was not received at all. In the succeeding years the late A. S. P. Woodhouse, F. E. L. Priestley (now General Editor of the edition), and I had informal talks. In 1959 an ad hoc committee of interested persons began to meet with the University of Toronto Press to discuss such a project, and in 1960 the President formally appointed an Editorial Committee on which the faculty and the Press were represented. It was perhaps not surprising that Mill should find a home in Toronto for there has always been
98
Principles and Methods
a strong interest in the history of ideas here. This tradition demands interdisciplinary sharing of knowledge and enthusiasm, and the actual range of faculty interests at Toronto made the project practicable. In the Editorial Committee we have been able to share the wisdom and experience of economists, historians, political scientists, philosophers, psychologists, and literary scholars, each of whom has a professional and personal interest in Mill. (As a practical demonstration of this interest, I might mention that my own debt to him, which I am constantly working off, arose when in my final undergraduate examinations I was able to write substantially the same answer-and receive considerably different grades -on his thought, in Philosophy, Political Science, and English.) We were most fortunate in obtaining, through the kindness of the Cornell University Press and Professor Mineka, The Earlier Letters as our first volumes (published in 1963). These were followed in 1965 by the two volumes of Mill's Principles of Political Economy, and in 1967 by the two volumes of his Essays on Economics and Society. Each year henceforth we plan to issue one or two volumes until the material is exhausted (not to mention the editors). Finally there will be some twenty-five volumes; our terminal date is dimly visible in the late 1970s. Our aim is simply to make as many as possible of Mill's writings readily available in a trustworthy form. We have had the reader very much in mind, and so have paid special attention to presenting texts, many of which have been hard to obtain and hard to read, in as uncluttered and direct a way as is compatible with accuracy. A note of caution is signalled in our calling the edition a "collected" rather than a "complete" one, and I may be forgiven for suggesting that this is a matter of honesty as well as caution. First, although we are reasonably sure that no major essays will escape our net, and almost certain that no monographs are as yet unidentified, there is a
John M. Robson
99
strong probability that some newspaper writings will be identified in the future. Second, there is a certainty that further letters will tum up. And third, we cannot as yet bring ourselves to include in totality two special kinds of item, the full range of materials growing out of Mill's career in the India Office, and his botanical writings. No accurate catalogue of the India House materials has yet been prepared, and probably none could be prepared: they are of minor interest except to historians of India and the East India Company, and even these have found no urge to consult the available materials in their full extent; also there is a major and virtually insuperable problem in assigning authorship to many of the drafts and papers. The pamphlets that Mill wrote during the crucial debates of 1858, and a selection of other materials, with a guide to further research, will be given a place in a late volume, but a comprehensive collection seems both impracticable and inutile. Mill's botanical writings consist of articles in the Phytologist and some MS notes, mainly accounts of plants found in certain areas. As these do not bulk very large, they may be given space as incidental evidence of his full career, but not even I can pretend that they will be of interest to the general reader or, in all likelihood, to specialists. Like Mill's journals of his early walking tours, which will be included (probably in Volume I), they have almost no literary value, and they fall short even of those minor writings in the general quality of topographical description and incidental comment. 2 In establishing the textual canon, we have been enormously benefited by Mill's own bibliography of his published works, 21 might just mention one other possible exclusion, this one from the Letters. Professor Mineka urges the wisdom of merely listing notes accepting, declining, or offering invitations to dine, etc. No one who has examined carefully the splendid current edition of Dickens' Letters can fail to take the point. There, amid all the glorious blossoms, the weeds are all too evident, both in the form of the trivia I have mentioned, and in entries, with full textual apparatus, for letters which are only inferred to have once existed.
100
Principles and Methods
available in the edition by Ney MacMinn, J.M. McCrimmon, and J. R. Hainds, Bibliography of the Published Writings of J. S. Mill (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1945). The extant MS is a scribal copy, containing many errors, but it is surprisingly comprehensive, except in the matter of editions and reissues. 3 With one trivial exception, all the items listed in that bibliography have been located, and research based on Mill's own library, Parliamentary Papers, collections, sales, and correspondence has bulked out and corrected the list. So far as manuscript materials are concerned, the situation is not so happy. The most important manuscripts of published material that have been located are the three versions of the Autobiography, an early draft and the press copy of the System of Logic, one half of the press copy of the Principles,4 and the MSS presented in Anna J. Mill's John Mill's Boyhood Visit to France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960). For Mill's other major works there are no known manuscripts, and only a handful for his minor works and essays. The unpublished MSS (apart from letters) consist almost entirely of Mill's walking-tour journals, debating speeches, early lecture notes (and a short treatise on Logic related to them), a group of translations of Plato's dialogues, and miscellaneous scraps. 5 The overwhelming bulk of the edition, therefore, will be made up of items listed in Mill's bibliography, and although I now have quite a few items in my file marked "Not in 3 For a brief account of its deficiencies, and some new attributions, see my "Note on Mill Bibliography," University of Toronto Quarterly, XXXIV (Oct., 1964 ), 93-7. 4 For the Autobiography, see Professor Jack Stillinger's Introduction to The Early Draft of John Stuart Mill's Autobiography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), and his "The Text of John Stuart Mill's Autobiography," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, XLIII (1960), 220-42; for the Logic, see R. Flower, "The Autographed MS of Mill's Logic," British Museum Quarterly, III (1928), 76-7; for the Principles, see my comments in Appendix F, Collected Works, III, 1021-5. 5The main MSS collections, in most of which letters form the major part, are in the British Library of Political and Economic Science (London School of Economics), the Yale University Library, the Brotherton Library (Leeds), the Johns Hopkins Library, and the Pierpont Morgan Library.
John M. Robson
101
MacMinn," I should again acknowledge the enormous help that that bibliography has been. A simple comparison between lists of Mill's writings prepared before and after its publication will quickly show its importance. In discussing our aims and methods, I must make one obvious point that is never far from our minds: Mill's corpus is not, in the usual acceptation of the term, a literary one. There is no fiction; with the exception of a slight piece of juvenilia, there is no poetry; there is some literary criticism, but even it will not fill one volume. There is, in fact, a bewildering array of materials, relevant to most areas of British thought in the nineteenth century-and by extension, to many areas of twentieth-century thought. The principal implication is a serious one for an editor and a publisher: there is no unified audience, academic or otherwise. To avoid confusion and damaging eclecticism, an ideal audience has to be postulated, but the needs and wishes of the actual audiences cannot be ignored in that postulation. I shall return to this problem in discussing copy-text and its treatment, but the most apparent difficulty has to do with the arrangement of materials. The simplest arrangement-that followed in the current Complete Prose W arks of Matthew Arnold-is chronological. But-ignoring more subtle complications-we feel that a disservice would be done to the main users of our volumes if we accepted this order. 6 For example, much of Mill's work is philosophical, and about one-fifth of our edition may be expected to appeal primarily to students and mentors of philosophy. The major 6An example of the major difficulty will be seen in On the Classical Tradition, Vol. I of the Arnold edition, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), where the essay on "England and the Italian Question" has no subject relation to the title of the volume or to its companion essays. A more subtle problem, Professor Super's solution to which appears to me wrong, is seen in Vol. V, Culture and Anarchy (ibid., 1965), where the Preface to Culture and Anarchy is printed after the text simply because it was written after the first periodical publication of the text (although that first publication is not used as copy-text).
102
Principles and Methods
works, published in discrete volumes, present no problem here, but we have felt justified in grouping together essays on ethics and essays on general philosophy in separate volumes, rather than spreading them throughout the edition. Similarly, essays on economics, on politics, on history and current affairs, and on Indian affairs will be grouped together. This arrangement too has its difficulties, of course, for one cannot expect general agreement as to the main subject of some of Mill's essays, and cross-reference between volumes will always be necessary. The next volume scheduled for publication, Essays on Ethics and Society, will serve to illustrate the problems. It might be suggested by cynical observers that wishing to bulk out our volume, we simply put "and Society" in the title, and shovelled in material that had no other home. Of course there is an optimum size for volumes, and the title may appear less necessary than useful, but I hope that no long oar need be pulled against this possible criticism. My view is that the title is chosen to fit the contents, and that there is a true coherence in the essays. (I mention these points not to justify the ways of these editors to men, but merely to indicate the difficulties.) The central essay in this volume, without question, is Utilitarianism, which is much too short to have a volume to itself.7 With it will appear Mill's early essays on utilitarianism: the "Remarks on Bentham's Philosophy," "Professor Sedgwick's Discourse," and "Bentham." So far so good. But the next essay will be "Coleridge." It might be thought, with some justification, to belong with essays on politics and society, or perhaps with the other essays on general philosophy, or as a student of English ( who had not read it) might think, with essays on belles-lettres. But clearly and from Mill's own statements, it is meant as a companion piece to the essay on Bentham. As an account of the struggle between eighteenthand nineteenth-century ideas, the two essays represent an 7The same is true of On Liberty, which will appear with other essays on Politics and Society.
John M. Robson
103
important step in Mill's adjustment of his practical faith, which was a moral one. Woven throughout the essays is a thread of commitment, ultimately and definitely utilitarian and, as is especially clear in the essay on Coleridge, utilitarian in a social context. There is always an awareness of the social dimension in Mill's ethical thought, as the dedication of the utilitarian to social happiness should entail, though in some utilitarians and their critics the dimension seems lacking. Next in this volume will come the essay on Whewell, which again is an obvious choice. But after this and Utilitarianism come Auguste Comte and Positivism and finally the Three Essays on Religion. I cannot here enter a lengthy analysis of reasons for considering these to be properly called essays on ethics and society, but the main points of such an analysis would include the following: Mill's rejection of Comte was a moral-practical one, and that rejection led him to write the two lengthy reviews of Comte's work which make up Auguste Comte and Positivism. In our format it is not possible to think of that work as a volume in itself; the other possibilities that occur are including it with the essays on politics and society or with a volume of essays on religion and society. The former alternative is a real one: only after long consideration of the direction of thought in the essay did we place it where it is. The latter alternative is also apparently a real one: in such a volume would also appear the Three Essays on Religion. And what else? Well, any of the essays which will appear in the actual volume of Essays on Ethics and Society are possibilities, as are On Liberty and the Inaugural Address at St. Andrews. But the present arrangement weds practicability with reason, by establishing in the contents and the Introduction the connection between ethics and religion in Mill's thought. He was not, in any sense acceptable to true believers, a religious thinker at all: his belief is ethical and humanistic; whatever his admission of the theoretical case for theism and his practical acceptance of a modified
104
Principles and Methods
Manicheanism, he was a secularist and an agnostic. His Religion of Humanity was ethical in content and form or, to be more accurate, ethics was for him a substitute for religion. In large measure, the argument I have been sketching covers the Three Essays on Religion as well as Auguste Comte and Positivism; I might add only that the essay on "Nature" has a more obvious relevance to ethics than to religion and that the title of the volume, published posthumously, may well be Helen Taylor's and not Mill's. So much for inclusion: what of exclusion? To choose the most glaring examples (at least to me; non-Millomaniacs need not shield their eyes): where better could appear Mill's obituary notice of Bentham, written for the Examiner? And should one not include Mill's extensive notes to the second edition of his father's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind? Our edition is generally organized by subject and not by provenance or form; single short works and periodical essays are gathered together; why not newspaper writings and other materials? To answer a question with a question: What price consistency? And to answer my question rather than yours: Too high. Mill wrote extensively for a variety of newspapers; some four hundred and fifty leaders, letters, reviews, squibs, and articles on a wide-a very wide-range of subjects, over the whole of his publishing life. He began with letters to the editor of the Traveller on the measure of value, and ended with articles in the Examiner on land reform. This range in time and subject gives the newspaper writings a special importance: after the Autobiography and the letters, and in different ways from them, they give a fuller view of Mill's interests and activities than any other of his writings. We have therefore decided to gather them in one volume, which will appear late in the edition. Most of them, of course, are relatively short, and the scholars contributing critical introductions to other volumes are free to quote at length and in some cases
John M. Robson
105
in full those newspaper writings most relevant to their own texts. This material, one may finally say, is entitled to treatment similar to that accorded to letters; in fact, we shall include in this volume letters that are designed to be read by the public, not only letters addressed to editors, but those intended to be, and actually, published in newspapers as statements of belief and policy. Again, I have regrets about not including in the Essays on Ethics and Society Mill's notes to his father's Analysis, for many of them bear directly on his ethical views, revealing attitudes not so clearly expressed elsewhere, and they have not been seriously considered by critics. 8 Here the question is mainly one of practicability: we have found no way of including them in this volume which would be comprehensible, attractive, and economically feasible. We hope to include them later, perhaps in a miscellaneous volume, in an appropriate form. This summary of the problems connected with one volume will serve to indicate the complexities involved in subject classification, but in spite of them, and admitting that there will probably be one miscellaneous volume, we believe that arrangement by subject is more conducive to easy use than a chronological one which would make most of the volumes miscellaneous. Having established general subject areas, we follow chronological order within the volumes. There would be gains to the reader through grouping by subject, but they would be minimal, and would not outweigh the obvious gains of sequential study. (Even within groups in volumes, I might add, a chronological order would be most likely, and it is largely a matter of deciding at what point chronology should be 8 Similar remarks are relevant to his Preface, notes, and additions to his edition of Bentham's Rationale of Judicial Evidence. So far as I know, no one has discussed these in print, and yet they have an important bearing on his early Benthamism and they are significant in tracing his early legal orientation through his career.
106
Principles and Methods
introduced.) Only in one volume, that devoted to the Autobiography and related materials, is there a persuasive reason for departing from a chronological ordering. The supporting materials, with the exception of the Early Draft, were for the most part not intended for publication, and are generally useful principally as background for the study of Mill's life. They might be thought of, in other contexts, as appropriate for appendices, and are likely in this edition to be printed after the main text. The only other volume where a strong case can be made for departure from chronological order is that devoted to Mill's newspaper writings. Here the diversity of materials might well suggest "chapters" on, say, Irish agriculture, reform of laws relating to family life, French politics, and so on. One can argue, however, for a simple chronological order, because most of these subjects cohere in temporal batches and so aid in establishing the interesting patterns which only a successive record can give. (The rationale is similar to the almost universally accepted one supporting the chronological printing of correspondence.) But a final decision has not yet been made. One other problem of order merits a few words: the relation between numbering of volumes and the printing sequence. For the pre-McLuhanite there is something distressing in not issuing Volume I first, Volume II second, and so on. But-at the risk of adding another structure to the global village-I would assert the obvious reasons for not doing so. First, when all the volumes are on the shelf, few readers will pay any heed to the order of publication. 9 Other principles may then take precedence. One could, of course, simply number the volumes in the order of their appearance; there is perhaps little to be said against this practice for a collected edition of disparate and discrete works, but there is even less 90£ course it is necessary in the introductory material and notes to avoid confusing future readers. For example, references to Mill's works that have not already been published in our edition are to the version which we shall use as copy-text.
John M. Robson
107
to be said for it. The current Yale edition of Samuel Johnson's works seems to have been started on this principle ( or lack of principle), with slightly unfortunate results. Second, while it is theoretically possible to dragoon editors into producing their separate volumes in an established sequential order-and in the case of correspondence there are special incentives to do so-the talents and effort required are better saved for more important matters. It is true that, if planning is done well enough ahead, and barring what Mill called complicating circumstances, one can start individuals with temporal and financial handicaps to ensure a properly staggered finish, and not a photo-finish ( which given the financial exigencies of scholarly-press printing in the twentieth century would be unfortunate). But in our case this solution was from the outset impossible, for the first volumes ready for publication were the Earlier Letters. We could, of course, have labeled them Volumes I and II, but we did not know-and we still do not know-how many volumes of Later Letters there will be. Since their publication was probably five years in the future, we should have had to take a stab in the dark in numbering the volumes which would be issued before all the volumes of Later Letters were ready. Instead, we looked carefully at the material most likely to be prepared before the letters were all published, developed a plan for the numbering based on coherence and utility, took a gamble that academic and/or financial ruin would not overtake us before our edition got into its 'teens, and labelled the Earlier Letters Volumes XII and XIII. Each of the slots up to those numbers was assigned, but we felt we had left a margin for alteration. 10 The 10The margin was early needed: when the Essays on Economics and Society were finally estimated for printing, it was found that the volume had grown appreciably since earlier estimates were made, and that scheduled Volume IV had twinned and was now Volumes IV and V. This blessed event pushed back other members of the family, and Volume XI lost its place, moving back into the unnumbered limbo behind the Later Letters. As we had not planned to publish it before the Later Letters, there is no practical disruption, but the lesson is a sobering one.
108
Principles and Methods
planning did not, of course, end there: tentative tables of contents were prepared for the remaining volumes, unnumbered except in my hypothetical list, and the collection of texts began. The file on these gradually grows as the edition proceeds, and as opportunity offers I do preliminary editing work on them (always, I may say, making dated notes as to what I am doing and have done, for sometimes years may intervene between one spell of work and another). One incidental note: on the dust-jackets of the first two sets, we made the mistake of listing as "in preparation" only the already numbered volumes (that is, those up to Volume XI). The result was a confusion among reviewers and others who assumed that there would be only eleven volumes (some saw that the Earlier Letters were XII and XIII, but went no further in their reasoning). I received some brisk notes asking if we intended to ignore-or were perhaps ignorant of-certain of Mill's writings not obviously included in our list. It was, as I have said, a mistake of ours. After the problems of general comprehensiveness and order of materials are settled, the next and crucial question is: What shall go in each volume? Admitting the need for some flexibility in certain cases, we established the following pattern. Centrally and of most importance, of course, is the text, to which I shall turn in a moment. Next, because of the established and well-expressed opinions and needs of the principal users, a critical introduction. This decision follows from the considerations mentioned above in dealing with the arrangement of materials: apart from isolated individuals who will own and read the whole edition, users will read-and perhaps buy-separate volumes. Our responsibility, as we see it, is to enable them to read the text in an informed context, historical, analytical, biographical. Since no one individual known to us could cover the whole range of Mill's works in an expert and knowledgable way, we have approached scholars in separate disciplines to provide
John M. Robson
109
these introductions. No rigid guide-lines are laid down; our general request is simply that enough detail be included to explain, inter alia, such problems as might be obscure to modern students. Another decision is included in, though not entailed by, this one. We have decided against informational notes, for reasons which I can here only mention. These are (a) the self-explanatory nature of Mill's prose and his habit of giving context to allusions, 11 (b) the other elements added to the text ( especially the critical introduction and the appendices), (c) the number of levels of type on the page ( the text, Mill's notes to the text, and our variant notes), and (d) the bulk of the volumes. On balance, with some regrets, we feel that informational notes are not essential. A third element, dictated by modern approaches to editing and the previous void of knowledge, is a textual introduction, explaining the principles and methods followed, and dealing with miscellaneous problems. Here we made at the outset an important decision: there is a single textual editor for the whole edition, excepting the letters. Since the choice fell on me, I can say nothing of authority or value on the wisdom of the special decision, but generally I believe the policy to be wise. It maintains a uniform practice over the whole edition, with variations suggested not by individual predilections but by the materials themselves. Given the wide range of these materials, there is a need for constant direction, and the channelling of information through one man precludes overlap and saves effort. To put the worst face on both sides, narrowness is preferable to confusion. 11This quality in Mill, and the other elements added to our text, make us feel safe on the conservative side of Kenneth Allott, who says in the Preface to his edition of Arnold's Poems (London: Longmans, 1965): "An annotated edition of a Victorian poet is still perhaps something of a novelty, but the feeling that we can read the Victorians without the props to understanding recognized to be necessary when we read (let us say) an Augustan poet is very largely an illusion" (xiv).
110
Principles and Methods
Finally, we decided on certain elements in appended sections. These are, first, supplementary materials useful to an understanding of the text; second, a bibliographic appendix; and third, an analytic index. Of these only the second, somewhat of an innovation, needs comment. The entries in these bibliographical appendices contain names and titles usually found in an index proper. (We also give the titles in referential footnotes to the text, as is the common practice.) We thought it desirable to separate out this information so that it would have special prominence, and so that we could add details relevant to Mill's knowledge and use of his sources. In addition-and this is a heavy weight around my neck-we decided to collate Mill's quotations against his sources to do justice to the authors, to enable close students to study his rhetorical use of quoted material, and to isolate some curiosities in his and his age's attitudes. When these entries are gathered together in the final volume of the edition, further research on his reading will be facilitated. A minor value is the inclusion here of information leading to a study of his library, which has never been properly examined. Now I must turn to the central issue, the choice and treatment of texts, on which depend the value and reputation of the edition. At least, that would seem to most of us here to be the proper view. But I must argue again that for an author like Mill (if there are any other authors like Mill) such is not necessarily and always the academic view, and is certainly not the public view. Perhaps I can illustrate best by saying merely that until the 1960s there was, to my knowledge, only one valuable discussion of the text of any of Mill's works, and that was concerned solely with selected substantive variants. To this day, with the exception of the work of Professor Stillinger and Dr. Anna Mill, and the published volumes of the Collected W arks, there is virtually nothing. And yet there has been no public outcry! Why not? Simply because those most professionally con-
John M. Robson
111
cerned with Mill's works are very little worried about such problems. Most philosophers-I choose them as being at least as capable of defending themselves as anyone else-would find nothing disturbing and little of interest in being told that the very widely used Everyman edition of Utilitarianism is a reprint from the first edition, with some normalization of spelling and punctuation, a few typographical errors, and no indication of which edition it represents; or that there are variants between the first edition and the prior periodical version, and between it and the two later editions in Mill's lifetime. From the standpoint of the serious (i.e., bibliographically oriented) literary scholar, such an attitude is archaic, diseased, and generally pernicious. The moral to me is clear. We know that the voice from Charlottesville is talking eminent good sense-but I hear voices in Chicago that have considerable force in some circles; 12 I also get messages from London, Oxford, and both Cambridges that come from high-placed, usually reliable spokesmen. Even in Toronto there are opinions to which I should-and sometimes must-listen. And there are other places and other voices. We all know that in situations where there is a superfluity of phenomenal evidence almost any hypothesis can be proved right; the virtue of our situation is that there are so many authorities in conflict that we can in part ignore each of them (I nearly said safely ignore them). The edition must go its own way; our concern is that it go that way wittingly. What I am getting round to, of course, is the question of copy-text and its treatment. Having listened to all the voices, we had three questions to answer: (1) Which text best represents what Mill wrote? (2) Which text represents Mill 121 did not intend to refer to Professor Weinberg when making this remark but, without attempting to bind him to our conclusions, I may comment that the considerations raised in his paper obviously are relevant to our decisions. One of the Chicago voices is identified in the next note as that of George J. Stigler.
112
Principles and Methods
at his best? (3) Which text did Mill think best? For earlier works, on which editors have refined and sharpened bibliographic principles, only the first of these is of major significance, though the other two have of course been considered. In what I shall be saying, I shall restrict myself to Mill, though I believe some of my comments are relevant to other nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors. The enormous complexities which can arise when all of these questions are considered carefully are wittily and depressingly sketched out by James Thorpe in his recent article, "The Aesthetics of Textual Criticism," PMLA, 80 (1965), 465-82. But all the complications do not arise with Mill; in fact very few do. To begin with the third question-Which text did Mill think best?-we know, both by direct statements and by very strong implication, that for all his major revised works he preferred the final edition to any earlier one. We cannot, of course, prove that all the substantive variants were made by him or with his approval, but one would have to hold a conspiracy theory of publishing history to think that more than a few of the thousands in the Principles of Political Economy and the System of Logic, the most heavily revised, were not physically made by him. To my mind, there can be no question but that he believed the last edition which he supervised gave his most significant thoughts their most significant form. The second question-Which text represents Mill at his best?-is much harder to answer. There has been no determined effort to show that, say after his wife's death in 1858, or his electoral defeat a decade later, Mill's mental grasp failed, but it could be established that his interest in some subjects lessened, and so argued that sometimes his later editions do not re8ect the best thought of the time. 13 It has been 13The point is raised with reference to Marshall's Principles by George Stigler in his review of Guillebaud's Marshall, Journal of Political Economy, LXX (1962), 285n: "Actually, there is nothing sacred about the last edition-a good deal could be said for choosing Marshall's third edition,
John M. Robson
113
suggested to me, for example, that the 3rd edition (1852) of his Principles is more abreast of contemporary thought, and more intrinsically interesting, than the 7th (1871). And in the introduction to her collection of Mill's essays, Gertrude Himmelfarb presents an interesting, if not to me convincing, argument for the printing of the earlier versions of the essays in Dissertations and Discussions ..14 It might also be argued that the over-all impact of certain works, depending on formal and rhetorical structure, varies from edition to edition, and that earlier ones are stronger on these grounds than later ones. No definite principles can be established here, and though a sampling of informed opinion might indicate some desirable choices, subjectivity is likely to remain in command of judgment. Even in his most heavily revised works, however, Mill cannot be thought to have produced essentially different books through rewriting. Though some of the changes are complex, there are few of the intricacies involved that are found in, to choose similar examples, Godwin's Political Justice and Marshall's Principles, 15 or, to choose dissimilar ones, Yeats's written at the height of his powers, as the standard edition. In general, I would argue for selecting as the base the edition which most influenced other economists. Thus in the case of Malthus' Principles, the first edition is the proper base, not the posthumous edition reprinted in the London School series." This review raises other interesting points about the treatment of texts from the economic historian's point of view. Those who question our decision not to record accidental variants might also look at Professor Stigler's review of Mill's Principles in our edition in the Journal of Political Economy, LXXIV (1966), 90-1, where, after having some good-natured fun with our method of recording substantive variants, he says: "A study of a random sample of twenty pages suggests that less than eight changes in 100 need be reported in a garrulously candid edition." He elsewhere suggests that the choice might be made by comparing the decisions of two independent scholars. For a questioning voice on our own committee, see Vincent W. Bladen's review of Guillebaud's Marshall, American Economic Review, Lil (1962), 1127-9. 14 Essays on Politics and Culture by John Stuart Mill (New York: Doubleday, 1962), xii. 15 See William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. F. E. L. Priestley, 3 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1946); and Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, ed. C. W. Guillebaud, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1961).
114
Principles and Methods
poems and Hardy's Return of the Native. 16 Although the successive editions of Mill's Principles form what Greg, following McKerrow, called "substantive editions,'' 17 they are not what might be called, as in the case of Yeats's poems, "substantive works." In the absence, then, of objective standards, there seem to us to be no sufficient grounds for rejecting, as copy-text, the last edition known, or reasonably assumed, to have been revised by Mill. Now comes the question generally considered primary by · Gregs' words, "may be sup. ed1tors: wh.1ch "extant text, " m posed to represent most nearly what the author wrote"? It may appear that we have ignored Greg's wisdom and warnings, and that we trifle with his authoritative condemnation of "some eccentric editors who [take] as copy-text for a work the latest edition printed in the author's lifetime, on the assumption, presumably, that he revised each edition as it appeared. The textual results,'' he thunders, "[are] naturally deplorable." 18 My explanation-some may think "defence" is the proper word-is based on the following considerations. First, the pejorative words, "on the assumption, presumably," in Greg's statement do not apply in our case, and without them much of the force of the condemnation fails of application. Second, the differences between printing and publishing practices in the Renaissance on the one hand, and the nineteenth century on the other, suggest a proper divergence in editing procedures, a divergence as justified as that between procedures in editing classical and Renaissance texts. Third, the nature of Mill's corpus suggests a procedure different from that which is obviously proper in some imaginative works, and might be proper in most. As I have said elsewhere, with reference to Mill's Principles, there "can surely be few who believe in plenary economic inspiration."19 To elaborate this explanation would take a long time, but 16See Thorpe, 479, 476. 17"The Rationale of Copy-Text," Studies in Bibliography, III (195051), 23n. lBibid., 21, 23n. 19Textual Introduction to the Principles, Collected Works, II, lxxx.
John M. Robson
115
some points call for elucidation. What most concern us, it will be obvious, are substantive changes of the kind that occur in "revised" and not merely "corrected" editions. Every responsible editor as a matter of course takes into account corrections, and one would not now consider seriously a scholarly edition which did not note substantive variants in some form or other. This is not the issue. What has come particularly to mark a careful treatment of copy-text has been the handling of accidentals. Here it is that I shall utter heresy, cheered only by the support of the loyal band who make up our editorial committee, and by the memory that Cardinal Manning believed Cardinal Newman to be guilty of ten distinct heresies.20 The well-established position is that, so far as accidentals are concerned, the further one departs from the manuscript, the further one departs from the author's intention. One can hardly challenge this position, although the caveat should be entered that one might better say the author's original intention. But let us see how this principle can be applied to Mill's works. For Mill's unpublished manuscripts and those, such as the manuscript speeches published without authorial supervision, there is no problem other than that of deciding just what Mill intended by certain marks on paper-often not an inconsiderable problem, but not here relevant. For those printed works for which there is no manuscript, and only one authoritative version, we do the best we can, correcting ( with notation) where correction seems called for, but not normalizing (except for certain spellings in certain cases). 21 An important group of essays will serve, however, as a test case: those selected by Mill for inclusion in his Dissertations and Discussions. Typically here there are no extant manuscripts; in all probability marked-up copies of the periodical versions served as press copy for Dissertations and Discussions. Such copies are not 20See E. E. Reynolds, Three Cardinals (London, 1958), 245. 21 For example, in the clerical transcriptions of Mill's oral evidence before Parliamentary Committees.
116
Principles and Methods
extant, 22 and so we are left with the first version, and with the version in Dissertations and Discussions-or more precisely, with three versions in Dissertations and Discussions for those essays in Volumes I and II, two for those in Volume III, and one for those in Volume IV. Enter the heresy: we have felt justified in taking not the periodical version, but that in the three-volume edition (1867) of Dissertations and Discussions as our basic copy-text, following it in accidentals as well as substantives. We might even be accused of "undue deference to the copy-text," or of accepting "the tyranny of the copytext,"23 in adhering (though at least with notation) to certain readings in the revised versions. Simply, and assuming a recollection, if not an acceptance, of the arguments above, we have held that the version in Dissertations and Discussions is given sufficient authority by Mill's approval of it. There can be little doubt that the normalization that occurred in the revised versions is a result of both Mill's and the printing-house's actions; I am convinced that he also had a hand in the altered punctuation. That he is solely responsible is an untenable view, but the irregular variations in accidentals in the periodical versions indicate as strongly as anything could that what is found in them seriously differs from Mill's intention through editorial and compositorial practices and carelessness. I should myself like to go back beyond the Ur-text to the ideal Platonic text that never found concrete embodiment, but we have not found it practicable-nor do we think for our purposes it is necessary-to make as detailed a study of printing-house and compositorial habits and practice as would permit a more informed guess about responsibility for particular accidentals and patterns of accidentals. Electronic aids may eventually make such a study practicable, but we have not stayed for an answer to a question which we believe is in Mill's case rela22Mill's privately bound collections of his periodical essays are in the library of Somerville College, Oxford. There are a few authorial corrections in some of the essays, but there is no indication and very little likelihood that these specimens served as press copy. 23Greg, 28, 26.
John M. Robson
117
tively unimportant. Even with the weak rampart of italicized conditions, this is surely as bare a statement as our worst enemy could wish-but we stand by it. In such heavily revised works as the Principles and the Logic we are on stronger practical grounds. An increasing distance between the manuscript and the final edition crept in accidentally (as it were), and there is a corresponding tendency, not surprisingly, to normalization. Again responsibility must be divided, and again most of it is undoubtedly to be laid at the feet of the printing house. But whatever one's reactions to these facts, there are great difficulties in preserving the earlier form of the accidentals in such a heavily revised work. An electronic eye may find otherwise, but to the human eye there is (in general) a uniformity in accidentals between the substantively revised and unrevised portions of the later editions, a uniformity which does not exist between later revisions and earlier revised and unrevised passages. To place revised passages in the context of a text unrevised as to accidentals would produce a different kind of eclecticism, one perhaps theoretically justifiable, but one most certainly not pleasing. And to adopt the practice of some strict students, and alter editorially the accidentals in the revised passages to conform to those in the earlier versions of unrevised passages seems to my conservative mind a large liberty. Finally I should mention that, accepting as we do the authority of the substantive revisions, it would be an enormous labour, financially and physically, to decide among the thousands and thousands of accidental variants in the major texts. 24 2 4Not to labour the point, I might refer to the admirable appendices to The Scarlet Letter in the Hawthorne Centenary Edition (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962) prepared by Professor Bowers. One of these lists the variants between the 1st and 2nd editions, seventy in all. The bulk of these, some thirty-eight, involve punctuation changes, but, choosing examples more conducive to short treatment, I shall mention only changes in hyphenation and spelling. There are two cases where a hyphen was deleted, leaving two words; one where a hyphen was added to two words. In the Principles our collation revealed eighty-seven of the first type of change, involving fifty different words. Of the second type there are 131 examples, involving ninety-three different words. In addition, there
118
Principles and Methods
Our general rule, then, in the light of all these considerations, is to use the final edition supervised by Mill as the copytext. Of course, when there is any special indication of Mill's intention concerning accidentals, it is taken into account.25 There are also individual cases, such as that of On Liberty, where exceptions may be made. For unknown reasons-the most likely explanation to my mind is that Mill believed it impious to meddle with the text which, more than any other, he thought of as his wife's as much as his-he did not follow his usual practice of revision as On Liberty went through the four editions in his lifetime. No firm decision has yet been reached, but it is likely that we shall here adopt the first edition as copy-text. Otherwise, as I have said, we stick to our rule and, if I may be excused one quotation from Professor Bowers, "All the cards are on the table, face up." 26 To which I would only add that although our flush may be red, we believe it to be straight. A NoTE ON METHOD In accepting the final edition in Mill's lifetime as the copytext we have concluded that, for our purposes and by and large, earlier versions are important for the substantive readings only. Also-and most heretical of all-we have concluded that, again for our purposes, no regular and systematic comparison of exempla of one edition (even the final one) is are twenty-seven cases (nineteen different words) of a hyphen added to what was originally one word, and nine cases (eight words) where a hyphen was deleted, leaving one word. In The Scarlet Letter, excluding typographical errors, there are five spelling changes that may indicate authorial intent; in the Principles there are 223 (involving eighty-five words). One illustration: the earlier "developement(s)" is altered to the later "development(s)" five times in the 2nd ed., four times in the 3rd ed., and once in the 4th ed. We feel guilty neither about adopting the final form, nor about failing to record in the edition the places at which the changes occur. Boggle is too weak a word to express my mind's reaction to the thought of recording the punctuation variants. 25An example is Mill's review of Newman's Political Economy (see Collected Works V, 440), where inked corrections in Mill's offprint have been adopted in our text. 26"A Preface to the Text," The Scarlet Letter, xlvii.
John M. Robson
119
necessary. Thus I have had recourse only occasionally to a Hinman Machine, and usually I compare copies from one edition only when obvious difficulties occur. The great goal of an editor is to make future editions unnecessary. No one can ever have full confidence that he has succeeded (or that he should have succeeded), but if there were any point in a wager with futurity, I should be willing to risk a good deal on the proposition that if our edition is found wanting, it will not be because we have failed to preserve the accidentals from the manuscripts or first editions, or passed by the onerous duty of considering states within editions. Our methods of collating and recording reflect these conclusions and beliefs. For works that went through many editions, our initial procedure is an oral collation. The copy-text (of course uncorrected) is read aloud while an appropriate number of reader-listeners follows one edition each. When a variant occurs, it is immediately recorded, each reader checks his version again, and then the reading resumes. For the Principles, with seven editions, this procedure ( with three listeners) was repeated twice: the 7th edition was read against the 6th, 5th, and 4th, and then against the 3rd, 2nd, and 1st. Rather than go through the whole work before looking at the earlier editions, we broke the progress at the end of each Book (there are five in the Principles); I was thus able to work further on the early Books while the main collation was proceeding. The variants are entered in the following form (I choose examples from the Principles): 421.28. devoted to] 65,62,57,52,49,48 destined for (421,411,411,411, 419,403)
The first two numbers indicate the page and line numbers in the 7th edition; the subsequent words give the reading in the 7th edition, followed by a square bracket. The next set of numbers signifies the editions in which the variant occurs (65 1865), and is followed by the variant reading. The final numbers, in parentheses, give the page numbers of the reading in the earlier editions.
=
Principles and Methods
120
If the passage was altered twice, the entry takes this form: 292.9-10. and (until lately) bakers and butchers] 62 even bakers, and (until lately) butchers (285)] 57,52,49,48 even bakers and butchers (285,285,289,277)
(I have found it useful in the collation, especially when two series of collations are necessary, to include more information than will appear in the printed version; in this example, for instance, the word "butcher" which is repeated in all forms is unnecessary in the final text, but helps to fix the end of the variant during collation.) If a passage was deleted, a typical entry would read: 301.13 the occupation of] 57,52,49,48 omit (295,295,298,287)
In our edition, of course, the variants do not follow the form used in the collation; in the example just quoted, for instance, the word "omit" represents what the readers found during collation, and served as a directional guide during the subsequent collations; it is awkward, however, resulting as it does from the editions having been read in the reverse order from that in which they were written. A plus sign indicates more clearly the process of composition, and therefore, recognizing that the final page numbers serve only as a checker's and proofreader's guide, and that the first two numbers are replaced by footnote indicators in the edition, the last example reads in our text simply: a--a+62,65,7l
The notation will be explained in a moment, but first the remainder of the collation must be mentioned. With the variant sheets, I go to the manuscript for collation by eye, adding entries as appropriate, and then go through the collation again (making a microfilm copy of the manuscript at that time for subsequent checking). Then, the variant sheets being complete, the text is read onto tapes. We early adapted the proofreading-by-tape method of the University of Toronto Press, and have found it handy and reliable (always admitting
John M. Robson
121
the need for visual checking); its only major disadvantage is the large number of tapes needed for a long work. These tapes are heard through at least once by a reader with examples of all editions, and the variant sheets, beside him. Then further checks are made by Professor Priestley, the copy editor, and myself, working by eye back from the variant sheets through each edition in tum. For works with fewer editions, the process is similar, but less complicated. To begin, I read the copy-text onto tape (or have someone read it whose voice I know well, and who has been instructed in the methods). I then listen with one other edition before me, recording the variants in the form indicated above, repeating the process for each edition. Then I have someone else (the original reader, if possible, when I have not read it) go through the same process, while I check through eye collation. Finally the check back through variants is made. The system of recording variants in the printed volumes is outlined fully in each volume (see, for example, Vol. II, pp. lxxxi-lxxxiv), but a few remarks on its origins and workings are relevant. Consistency here has undeniable advantages, and we decided to base the system on the most difficult cases; although many of the essays could have been treated in a simpler way, our method works as pleasingly and efficiently as any other would. Initially there were two related decisions to be made: Should the text contain indicators showing where the variants occur? And should the variants be given in footnotes or at the back of the text? Our conviction that a scholarly study of Mill requires a constantly available comparison of readings, and the complexity and number of the variants in the Principles, led us to opt for indicators on the page and for footnoted variants. We experimented with several varieties of indicators, aiming at a minimum interruption of the text, a maximum of accuracy, and a method that would operate without editorial comment once the principles were established. We had trial
122
Principles and Methods
settings made of the three most promising methods, remembering always that a method must wed a typeface; study of these led us to adopt Times Roman as the type and the following method of indicators ( which, I should like to add, originated with Professor Woodhouse): italic superscript letters enclose passages that were rewritten or added after the manuscript (or first edition when there is no manuscript); a single italic superscript letter indicates a passage not present in the final edition. The exact placing of these superscripts is essential for clear reading, and so explicit directions must be given to the printer. For example, when a variant begins with a punctuation mark, the first superscript must be closer to the punctuation mark than to the preceding word, for otherwise the superscript, "sitting on the shoulder" of the final letter of the word, will be taken as signalling the end of a variant. Single superscripts must be centred exactly between unchanged elements (including punctuation), for similar reasons. Special treatment, described in each text, is given to variants in Mill's footnotes, which are dated by me unless they appear in all editions. The variant footnotes repeat the superscripts, give edition indicators in chronological order showing which editions the variant is found in, and record the variant itself. Only in rare cases is there editorial comment (in square-bracketed, italic type), usually suggesting that the variant may have originated in the printing process. Like any method, this one becomes less satisfactory as complexities increase, and there is a point beyond which it does not operate to the reader's advantage. 27 In such cases we have chosen to print earlier versions in full in appendices (see Appendices A-D in Vol. III of the Collected Works). 2 7The limit is probably reached with the overlapping variants 784>--4 and 791°- 0 in Vol. III, the accuracy of which was questioned by one friendly British correspondent. I believe that I convinced him that the recording is accurate, but I admit that it is difficult to follow. A public complaint, based on a less complicated variant, is registered by Professor Stigler in the review mentioned at p, I 13n above.
NINETEENTH-CENTURY EDITORIAL PROBLEMS: A SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY Warner Barnes
THESE READINGS ARE TAKEN chiefly from a list I gave to the editors of the Iowa Mark Twain edition in the summer of 1963 at the time of our first editorial conference. I have included several articles published since ( chiefly about Hawthorne) to bring the list up to date. As stated above, this bibliography is selective. No list of twenty-three articles on this topic could be comprehensive, and no doubt many readers, even perhaps those most sympathetic with the aims of the new bibliography, will wonder why some articles are recommended and others omitted. Material from other eras besides the nineteenth century is included because it bears upon bibliographical theory or its methodology is pertinent. Exposure to the articles will not make one an authority on textual criticism; only experience will do this. What the bibliography will do, I hope, is provide a beginning for those who wish to inform themselves of the theories, techniques, and methods of research in the area. The annotations are, in the main, summaries; my comments are placed in square brackets. RussELL K. "Some Textual Problems in Yeats," Studies in Bibliography, IX (1957), 51-67. One does not have an established text of Yeat's poems merely because one possesses the latest dated edition. Not only is there
ALSPACH,
124
Selective Bibliography
the problem of "early" and "late" Yeats, but curious exceptions exist to negate the assumption that the poet was always "cutting out the dead wood." A variant edition should include not only all substantive, but all accidental variants as well. For if it is argued that only those accidentals be included which affect the meaning or rhythm, who is to be judge? Two revisions given "to Freudians for free," and several other examples, support this view. BAENDER, PAUL and WILLIAM B. Tonn, Rules and Procedures for the Mark Twain Edition. Iowa City, 1965. A syllabus explaining to the uninitiated how to edit a nineteenthcentury text. Included are directions in preparing the format of typescripts, special rules of style, abbreviated titles of reference for Twain's works, the policy governing spelling, hyphenated compounds, punctuation, restoration and correction of substantives, selection of the copy-text and preparation of final copy. Separate discussions indicate procedure in the preparation of the historical (explanatory) notes and the textual notes. Paradigms illustrate editorial treatment of anterior and posterior material to the text. A particularly valuable appendix is that of optional and idiosyncratic usages in Mark Twain. [The syllabus has been adopted by the William Dean Howells Edition and has furnished suggestions for the Washington Irving Edition.] BEARE, RoBERT L. "Notes on the Text of T. S. Eliot: Variants from Russell Square," Studies in Bibliography, IX (1957), 21-49. The necessity of investigating all the stages of any author's works is illustrated through a collation of the substantive and accidental revisions of a number of Eliot's poems and plays. Collation indicates that he eliminated punctuation marks during the process of revision in order to achieve a poetic concentration. Does, then, an author approach his literary work with the same "intention" in one draft as another? "At what point does a modern poem, or play, or novel . . . cease to be in a state of becoming and reach a state of being?"
Warner Barnes
125
T. "Current Theories of the Copy-Text with an Illustration from Dryden," Modern Philology, LXVIII (1950), 12-20.
BowERS, FREDSON
The uncritical use of the last edition in the author's lifetime as copy-text is now thoroughly discredited or should be. The conservative view as stated by McKerrow was that he would select as copy-text the edition closest to the author's manuscript and would incorporate in this basic text the substantive alterations from any revised edition. W. W. Greg differs from McKerrow chiefly in differentiating the authority of the substantives (actual wording of the text) from the accidentals (spelling, punctuation, and capitalization) and argues that only those substantive variants which are true authorial revisions should be selected; those which are manifestly errors should be rejected. In addition, not differentiating substantives from accidentals may lead to the formulation of a mechanical theory of accepting the corrupt accidentals of a later edition merely because the edition contains an author's revised substantives. To do so is to fall under the "tyranny of the copy text." Greg's formulary will yield a text which comes as close as possible to the original as well as the final intentions of the author. [This is the clearest statement of the theories of the London and Charlottesville schools.] T. "A Preface to the Text," The Scarlet Letter. Columbus, 1962. Reprinted in each volume of the Hawthorne Centenary Edition, the preface discusses the procedure for the series as a whole, outlines the various sections of the textual apparatus, and discusses the establishment of the copy-text. Each text will be a "critical unmodernized reconstruction," meaning that it is not a facsimile reproduction of any one document, but may be emended by evidence of another authoritative document or corrected by editorial decision. This practice is based upon Greg's classic theory of the copy-text in which a double authority for substantives and the accidentals is established, and what results is as close an approximation as can be obtained to Hawthorne's final intentions. The textual apparatus usually contains the following sections: variants in the first edition, editorial emendations, textual notes, historical collations, word division and special lists. All proofs are read at least five times by three or more editors. BowERS, FREDSON
126
Selective Bibliography
BowERS, FREDSON T. "Textual Introduction," The Scarlet Letter. Columbus, 1962. In the absence of any manuscript, copy-text for the volume is the first edition. Normalization of accidentals to correspond to Hawthorne's known practices is not attempted, for the basis of each text must be its "own preserved documents." The second edition contains 226 pages of reset type in which there are 62 substantive variants from the first edition. A bibliographical analysis of the typography suggests the changes are not Hawthorne's, and other evidence points out that he did not attempt (for economic reasons) to change the house style of the accidentals imposed upon his text by the printers. As the text passed from edition to edition the amount of corruption increased and by 1950 over 900 errors were to be found in the successor to the parent edition. BowERS, FREDSON T. "Textual Criticism," Aims and Methods of Scholarship in the Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. James Thorpe. New York, 1963, 23-42. "The recovery of the initial purity of an author's text and its revision (in so far as this is possible from the preserved documents), and the preservation of this purity despite the usual corrupting process of reprint transmission is the aim of textual criticism." For editors of nineteenth-century works, problems which must be considered include: documentary evidence, copytext, collation of variants, treatment of press variants, emendation, positive errors, resolution of ambiguities, the uniformity of texture, problems of revised editions, and the determination of textual transmission. A definitive edition is completed by an appropriate introduction and textual apparatus. In fact the text and the apparatus necessarily complement each other. In both, the editor's responsibility is to "place all his textual cards on the table face up." BowERs, FREDSON T. "Textual Introduction," The Blithedale Romance and Fanshawe. Columbus, 1964. Copy-text for the volume is the holograph manuscript at the Morgan Library, not the first edition, for there are almost 2,000 instances in which the accidentals of the two differ. The former not the latter should have authority for "one would scarcely wish to argue that Hawthorne made hundreds of such proof alterations in The Seven Gables sheets and ignored the new system he had
Warner Barnes
127
embraced and returned to his former ways in the manuscript of The Blithedale Romance only to alter them again in proof." Textually this evidence is of the utmost significance, for Hawthorne's style is essentially parenthetical, and an obvious correlation exists between his use of punctuation and the expression of his ideas. This cannot be seen in the printed book where the accidentals are not the author's, but those imposed by a printer's house style. Forty-nine substantive variants exist between the manuscript and first edition. Twenty-eight are authorial revisions, ten represent his corrections in proof, and eleven are printer's errors which are rejected. BowERS, FREDSON T. "Some Principles for Scholarly Editions of Nineteenth Century American Authors," Studies in Bibliography, XVII (1964), 223-8. In establishing the text of a nineteenth-century book "Greg's theory rules supreme" and no gain comes of modernizing or merely reprinting any single document. Machine collation will not only discover significant textual variants [several examples from the Hawthorne Centenary Edition are included], but the analysis of seemingly minor typographical points may enable an editor to accept variants as authorial or reject them as compositorial. Essential features of a critical apparatus include: variants as revealed by machine collation, editorial changes in the selected copy-text, and the historical collation (the substantive alterations from the established text found in a group of significant later editions). "This will serve as an object lesson to reveal the untrustworthy nature of various commonly esteemed editions .... When scholars editing American literature will bring to their task the careful effort that has been established as necessary for English Renaissance texts, say, then the editing of texts will become a respectable occupation at long last and not a piece of hack work for the paperbacks." BowERS, FREDSON T. "Textual Introduction," The House of the Seven Gables. Columbus, 1965. Copy-text for the volume is the holograph manuscript at the Harvard Library, not the first edition. Again there are thousands of differences between the accidentals of the two documents. It could be argued that by adopting the manuscript for copy-text one
Selective Bibliography
128
risks losing the changes in accidentals which the author may have made in the proofs, but this is preferable to reprinting all of the changes imposed upon the manuscript by the house style of the printer. Excluding thirty-four slips in the manuscript, there are sixty-eight substantive variants between the manuscript and the first edition. Sixteen appear to be Hawthorne's revisions in proof and fifty-two are printer's errors which are rejected. BRuccou, MATTHEW J. "Concealed Printings in Hawthorne," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, LVII
(1963), 42-9.
Books printed from stereotype or electrotype plates are apt to have several reimpressions within a given edition, and there is always the possibility that significant emendations or corruptions may be concealed in them. Methods of determining reimpressions include measurement of the gutter margins, resetting as revealed by machine collation, and the analysis of progressive type-batter. Complete tables of textual variants and typographical differences of Hawthorne's texts are provided. Although the investigator "runs the risk of becoming involved in a kind of bibliographical solitaire in which there are no textual stakes," he may "hit pay dirt" and discover a change such as that in The Marble Faun in which Hawthorne's description of Kenyon's introspection, "a very cold heart to which he had devoted himself," becomes in the second impression, "a very cold art to which he had devoted himself." BRuccou, MATTHEW J. "A Mirror for Bibliographers: Duplicate Plates in Modern Printing," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, LIV (1960), 83-8. Virtually all trade books have been printed from stereotype, electrotype, rubber, or plastic plates, but little cognizance has been taken of these implications. Duplicate sets of plates may be manufactured, but only one set will contain authorial corrections, and for a later printing the publisher may inadvertently select the set without corrections. At times the two sets of plates may be scrambled and a hybrid text produced. A popular book reprinted scores of times over many decades will become corrupted with compositor's errors introduced by the casting of new plates when the originals become broken. [Examples are included from Sinclair Lewis and Scott Fitzgerald.]
Warner Barnes
129
GrnsoN, WILLIAM, et al. A Statement of Editorial Principles: Center for Editions of American Authors. New York: Modem Language Association of America, 1966. [This is not meant to be a definitive statement of procedure for all the editions of American authors now in progress or planned, but rather is a general series of suggestions along which specific guidelines for a particular edition may be developed. Correspondence, a bibliography of selected readings, and a list of the editorial personnel of the various American editions are included.] GREG, W.W. "The Rationale of Copy-Text," Studies in Bibliography, III (1950), 19-36. [This article is the basis of the theoretical assumptions and editorial procedure in modem bibliography, and is now regarded as a classic in its field. The author's views have never been publicly refuted.] HARKNESS, BRUCE. "Bibliography and the Novelistic Fallacy," Studies in Bibliography, XII (1959), 59-73. The novelistic fallacy is that critics, scholars, and, worst of all, bibliographers who refuse to accept an unauthorized text of a poem or play will accept a badly printed novel containing hundreds of errors. [Examples of misprints in commonly used editions of Melville, Conrad, and Fitzgerald document the case.] HAYMAN, DAVID. "From Finnegan's Wake: A Sentence in Progress," Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA), LXXIII (1958), 136-54. Exposing the critical fallacy of relying only upon the first draft of an author's manuscript to interpret his work, this study reveals how Joyce successively revised a single sentence from Finnegan's Wake through thirteen stages over a period of fourteen years. Each revised draft gives a new insight into his work. HILL, HAMLIN. "Toward a Critical Text of The Gilded Age," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, LIX
(1965), 142-9.
When Mark Twain left America for Europe in 1873, his collaborator on The Gilded Age, Charles Dudley Warner, corrected
130
Selective Bibliography
the proofs for the American edition and deleted some passages written by Twain to which he objected. But in Europe Twain read proof of the English edition and retained his own preferences. Additional variants from the manuscript, the publisher's prospectus, and from concealed printings of the editions create a large number of alternative readings. Evidence based upon key readings in the manuscript and the prospectus give preference to the English readings, many of which have never appeared in any American edition.
LAWRENCE, DAN H. "Bibliographical Novitiate in Search of Henry James," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of
America, LIi (1958), 23-33.
[The problems, challenges, errors, and rewards of the beginner attempting descriptive bibliography for the first time are recalled. What evolves is a methodology in the compilation of data necessary to anyone attempting editorial work in the nineteenth century.]
MERIWETHER, JAMES B. "Some Notes on the Text of Faulkner's 'Sanctuary,'" Papers of the Bibliographical Society of
America, LV (1961), 192-206.
After the American edition had been set in type, Faulkner rewrote much of the book by revising large sections of the galleys. In doing so he introduced seventy-eight errors, but only twenty were ever corrected. Of these, fourteen were reported to the author by his publisher's editorial staff and he acquiesced in their correction. The changes include alterations in punctuation, dialect, and the passage of time. Whether these represent typing errors or constitute a feature of the author's style remains unresolved, but they are representative of the kinds of problem of which the textual critic must be aware. In the English edition 325 words were bowdlerized. The English reviewers reacted differently to the novel than their American or Continental counterparts, and this publishing history may help to suggest reasons for differences in the critical reception of an author from country to country.
Warner Barnes
131
MERIWETHER, JAMES B. "The Dashes in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, LVIII (1964), 449-57. The replacing of profanity by dashes in those editions of Hemingway's novel printed in England has affected the theme, characterization, and tone of one of his most significant books. This kind of censorship points out the need for almost every important novel in the last half-century to be re-edited by using all an author's manuscripts, typescripts, proofs, and editorial correspondence. THORPE, JAMES. "The Aesthetics of Textual Criticism," Publications of the Modern Language Association of America
(PMLA), LXXX (1965), 465-82.
Aesthetically, textual criticism is limited to works of art as opposed to works of chance, or works of nature. The textual critic is therefore limited to the linguistic intentions of the author, for the integrity of a work of art ends at the point where authorial intentions seem to have been fulfilled. Portions of a work tending toward a collaborative status present special problems. When a literary work exists in several versions, the author has in fact written separate works and there is no way simply to choose "the best." In short the linguistic intentions of the artist must be protected and preserved by the textual critic in order that the literary work as an aesthetic unity may maintain "an integrity of completeness." ToDD, WILLIAM B. "Problems in Editing Mark Twain," Books at Iowa, I (April, 1965), 3-8. The difficulties of editing a nineteenth-century author like Mark Twain for whom there is a surfeit of material providing thousands of substantive textual variants demand a different editorial approach from that required for editing an author like Hawthorne, for whom collation uncovers only several hundred. Convenient sigla for representing variants in an enormous number of manuscripts, typescripts, galley and page proofs, and up to as many as forty different editions are outlined. Copy-text will be the
132
Selective Bibliography
first printing, not the manuscript, for unlike Hawthorne's carefully fashioned fair-copy holographs, Twain's manuscripts are essentially drafts, written in his own peculiar shorthand; then this form was cancelled, amended, extended and gradually refined to the form perfected in print. "Throughout the edition then, through the entire mass of variants before and after original printing, our constant endeavor will be to represent Twain, not as our present inclination might suggest, but as he in his own time would have us do it, with warts and all." Tonn, WILLIAM B. Procedures for Collating Twain's Minor Works. Iowa City, 1965. An appendix to the Baender-Todd syllabus, this explains the method of sight-collating large numbers of books by teams of readers, and furnishes a keyed code for the specific number of editions which must be collated for each minor work. Particularly valuable is a schedule indicating how books containing material for more than one editor may be exchanged so that the required number of readers needed by each editor will progressively decrease.
MEMBERS OF THE CONFERENCE, 1966 Peter R. Allen, University College, University of Toronto John D. Baird, Princeton University Warner Barnes, University of Iowa Jerome Beaty, Emory University G. E. Bentley, Jr., University College, University of Toronto C. T. Bissell, President, University of Toronto R. K. Biswas, York University Fredson T. Bowers, University of Virginia 0. M. Brack, Jr., University of Iowa W. J. Cameron, McMaster University David R. Carroll, University College, University of Toronto Kathleen Coburn, Victoria College, University of Toronto Thomas J. Collins, Talbot College, University of Western Ontario Beatrice Corrigan, University of Toronto E. J. Devereux, University College, University of Western Ontario Donald D. Eddy, Cornell University M. S. C. Elliott, York University David Esplin, University of Toronto Library J. A. Finch, Cornell University Rev. Robert J. Fink, St. Michael's College, University of Toronto D. F. Poxon, Queen's University H. B. de Groot, University College, University of Toronto A. Graham Falconer, University College, University of Toronto W. Craig Ferguson, Queen's University H. K. Girling, York University Mrs. H. K. Girling, York University Robert J. Glickman, University of Toronto Victor E. Graham, University College, University of Toronto Eugene F. Grewe, University of Detroit Phyllis Grosskurth, University College, University of Toronto
134
Members of the Conference
Donald S. Hair, Talbot College, University of Western Ontario William F. Halloran, University of Wisconsin Francess G. Halpenny, University of Toronto Press Edgar F. Harden, Simon Fraser University A. J. Hartley, McGill University Esther R. Houghton, Wellesley College Walter E. Houghton, Wellesley College J. R. de J. Jackson, Victoria College, University of Toronto Jean C. Jamieson, University of Toronto Press Marsh Jeanneret, Director, University of Toronto Press E. A. Joliat, University College, University of Toronto B. W. Jones, Carleton University Roma A. King, Jr., Ohio University Basil D. Kingstone, University of Windsor Carl F. Klinck, Middlesex College, University of Western Ontario Richard L. Kowalczyk, University of Detroit J.E. Launay, McGill University Clifford Leech, University College, University of Toronto John Leyerle, Director, Medieval Centre, University of Toronto Dwight N. Lindley, Hamilton College Douglas Lochhead, Massey College, University of Toronto Alec Lucas, McGill University John McClelland, Victoria College, University of Toronto Norman MacKenzie, Queen's University Kenneth MacLean, Victoria College, University of Toronto R. D. McMaster, University of Alberta Irving Massey, State University of New York at Buffalo Tom Middlebro, Carleton University E. Jane Millgate, Victoria College, University of Toronto Michael Mill gate, Yark University Francis E. Mineka, Cornell University P. Moes, Scarborough College, University of Toronto Mary E. Moeslein, St. Michael's College, University of Toronto Peter Morgan, University College, University of Toronto C. J. Myers, Dalhousie University
Members of the Conference
135
Robert O'Kell, Indiana University W. J. B. Owen, McMaster University S. Pantazzi, University of Toronto Library Morse Peckham, University of Pennsylvania F. E. L. Priestley, University College, University of Toronto John M. Robson, Victoria College, University of Toronto S. P. Rosenbaum, Erindale College, University of Toronto Alexander M. Ross, Wellington College, University of Guelph C. Earle Sanborn, Talbot College, University of Western Ontario Charles Richard Sanders, Duke University R. J. Schoeck, St. Michael's College, University of Toronto R. M. Schoeffel, University of Toronto Press Edward Sharples, Wayne State University Ernest Sirluck, Dean, School of Graduate Studies, University of Toronto D. I. B. Smith, University College, University of Toronto Juliet Sutton, University of Alberta Robert H. Tener, University of Calgary Alan Thomas, University of Toronto Clara Thomas, York University Miriam Waddington, York University John A. Walker, University College, University of Toronto Bernard Weinberg, University of Chicago Milton Wilson, Trinity College, University of Toronto Michael Wolff, Indiana University E. Wright, Laurentian University
INDEX Note: incidental references to countries and c1nes have been omitted. Titles are indexed under their authors' names. Adventures of Thomas Hickathrift 85 Age 56 Aitken, Margaret Carlyle 79 Allott, Kenneth, ed. Arnold's Poems 109n Alspach, Russell K., "Some Textual Problems in Yeats" 123-4 Altholz, Joseph L., The Liberal Catholic Movement in England 44 Altick, Richard, The English Common Reader 45 American National Foundation for the Humanities 54 Annual Register 42 Answers 43 Anti-Teapot Review 56 Arnold, Matthew: Complete Prose Works 7, 101, Culture and Anarchy 101n, ''England and the Italian Question" 101n, On the Classical Tradition, 101n, Poems (ed. Allott) 109n Arrow 54-5 Arthur's Seat 91 Artizan 55 Ashburtons, correspondence with Carlyles 79 Association des Bibliophiles de !'Original 67n Bagehot, Walter, collected ed. of 7 Baender, Paul, and W. B. Todd, Rules and Procedures for the Mark Twain Edition 124, 132 Balzac, Honore de: 60-76 passim; critical editions of single works 60-1, reasons for paucity of, over-abundance and nature of materials 61-5, traditional concept of critical edition 61, 65-71, proposal for new ap-
proach to 72-6; Fume ed. as copy-text 67, 73; "realism" of 70; working habits 61-5, 70-1, 75; writings, Comedie humaine 61, 65, 70-1, 75, L'Eglise 60-1, Etudes philosophiques 60, 65, Eugenie Grandet 61, Jesus-Christ en Flandre 60, Oeuvres completes (Societe des etudes Balzaciennes) 67n, Romans et contes philosophiques 60, 65, Scenes de la vie parisienne 64-5, Scenes de la vie privee 65, Scenes de la vie de province 65, Le Secret des Ruggieri 64, 66, 68-9, 74-5 Bass Rock 91 Beare, Robert L., "Notes on the Text of T. S. Eliot" 124 Bentham, Jeremy: 102-4; Rationale of Judicial Evidence 105n Bestermann, Theodore, ed. Voltaire letters 82n Bevington, Merle M., The Saturday Review 44 Bibliographer 38 Bissell, Claude T. 4, 97 Bladen, Vincent W., review of Guillebaud's Marshall 113n Blatum Bulgium 91 Bliss, Trudy, ed. Carlyle letters 78n Blunt, Reginald, ed. Carlyle letters 78n Bowers, Fredson T.: 111; ed. Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter ll 7nl 18n; textual introductions, to Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance and Fanshawe 126--7, to Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables 127-8, to Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter 125-6; other writings, "Current Theo-
138
Index
ries of the Copy-Text" 124-5, "Preface to the Text" of The Scarlet Letter 118n, 125, "Some Principles for Scholarly Editions" 127, "Textual Criticism" 126 Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopaedia 86 Britain, relations with Germany 57-8 British Contraversialist 55 British Museum: 51, 54; catalogues of 51-5 British Union-Catalogue of Periodicals 50, 52, 56 Brotherton Library (Leeds) 100n Brown, James 91 Browning, Robert 80 Bruccoli, Matthew J. "Concealed Printings in Hawthorne" 12, 128, "A Mirror for Bibliographers" 128 Buller family, papers of 7, 84 Butt, John 79n-80n, 82 Calder, Grace J., ed. Carlyle letters 78n Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature 45, 52 Campbell, Ian M. 84 Canterbury Tales 81n Carlyle, Alexander (brother of Thomas) 78 Carlyle, Alexander (nephew of Thomas): 79; controversy with Froude 78, 93; ed. Carlyle letters 77-8, 93 Carlyle, Jane: 77-95 passim; attitude to correspondence 78n, 80-1; handwriting 87-8. See also Thomas Carlyle Carlyle, John 87-8 Carlyle, Margaret (Aitken), 93-4 Carlyle, Mary: 79; controversy with Froude 78, 93 Carlyle, Thomas: 77-95 passim; attitude to silence 95; as editor of letters 78, 90, 92-3; handwriting 87-8; writings, Cromwell 78n, essay on thunder and
lighting 85-6, Frederick the Great 78n, letters on mathematics 84-5, 88-9, Schiller 78n, Sterling 78n, trans. of Sismondi's article on political economy 86; and Jane: earlier eds. of letters 77-8; complete ed. of letters 77-95; need for and value of 77-81, 84-6; problems in editing of, completeness of ed. 83-4, forgeries not important 87, inclusion of "snippets" 86-7, index 90, 94-5, legibility 87-8, notes and other apparatus 89-94, paragraphing 89, spelling 89, two correspondents 83, underscorings 89, use of foreign languages 88-9; size of 77 Chanson de Roland 65, 67 Chantilly collection of Balzac 66 Chapelbrook Foundation 52, 59n Chartism 55 Child's Companion and Sunday Scholar's Reward 56-7 Child's Magazine 57 Child's Magazine and Sunday Scholar's Companion 57 Chronique de Paris 64 Cicero, text of 6 7 Cincinnati Public Library 58 Clark, G. Kitson, The Making of Victorian England 41n Clive, John, Scotch Reviewers 44 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 82n, 102-3 Collins, Wilkie: 58; "The Unknown Public" 42 Columbia Teacher's College 57 Compositors: 10, 14, 116; errors 28-30, 33, 118n, 126, 128; spelling habits 10-11; working habits 9n, 11, 15-17, 22, 28-30, 34. See also printing Comte, Auguste 103 Conrad, Joseph 129 Copeland, C. T., ed. Carlyle letters 78n Council for Library Resources 59n
Index Crain, William L.: ed. Balzac's Le Secret des Ruggieri 64n, 66, 68-9, 75, why unpublished though "perfect" 66, 68-9; with E. P. Dargan et al., Studies in Balzac's Realism 70n Crane, Stephen: 20; writings, Maggie 27-8, Red Badge of Courage 27-8 Crook, D. P., American Democracy in English Politics 44 Dargan, E. Preston: "A Balzac Acquisition" 64n, "Remarkable Collection of Balzac" 64n, with W. L. Crain et al., Studies in Balzac's Realism 70n, and B. Weinberg, The Evolution of Balzac's "Comedie humaine" 66n, 70n Darwin, Charles 45 "Death-bed Marriage" 59 Decker, Thomas, First Part of the Honest Whore 20 Deering, Dorothy 59n De Vinne, T. L., Modern Methods of Book Composition 9 Dickens, Charles: 46, 58, 80; Pilgrim ed. of letters of 79n-80n, 82, 99n Disraeli, Benjamin 56 Dryden, John 124 Dumfries and Gallaway Courier 84-5 Dunn, Waldo H., ed. Carlyle letters 78n East India Co. 99 Editing: analytic techniques, use of re nineteenth-century texts I 936, 127 collation 21-4, 81n, 88, I IO, 119-20, 125, 127-8, 132, by machine ll-12, 20-1, 24, ll9, 127-8; possible use of electronic 24, II6-7; by tape 120-1 comparison of American and British editions 30-4, 129-31
139
copy-text 20, 25-35, 67, 74, IOln, II0-19, 125-7, 131 group projects 6-7, 97-8, 124 of letters 77-95, 96n, 106-7, accuracy of text in 87-8, inclusion of "snippets" 86-7, 99, methods of 81-4 manuscripts, Balzac's 66, 74, Carlyle's 77-95 passim; Crane's 28-9, Hawthorne's 13, 20, 28-30, 33-5, 127, Mill's 97, 99-100, II 5, II 7, Twain's 131, publisher's styling of 13, returned with proof 13-14, typescript 19, 28-9 methods, comparison of re hand and machine set texts 9-36 passim, relation of audience and purpose to 71-6, 98, IOI, 108, IIO-ll, 113n, 121, relation of form to 73-6, 113-14, 121-2, 124 Toronto Conferences on 3-5, 7-8 variants, discovery and interpretation of 11, 18, 20-4, 29-33, 65, 67-71, 110, 112, II5-l7, 125-31, in journals 7-8, 58, recording of 65-9, 72-6, I 13n, II 5, II 9-22. See also printing editions cited concerning method or principle: Arnold 7, IOI, 109n, Bagehot 7, Balzac 60-76, Carlyle (letters) 77-95, Crane 27-8, Dickens (letters) 80n, 82, 99n, Godwin I 13, Greville, 91-2, Howells 124, Irving 82, 124, Johnson 107, Marshall II 2n-l 13n, Melville 12, Mill 82n, 96-122, New Testament 82n, Shakespeare 26-8, Twain 124, 131-2 electronic aids to scholars 8, 24, 54, ll6-I7 Eliot, George 58, 82n Eliot, T. S.: text of 124; The Waste Land (quoted) 36 Ellegard, Alvar: "Darwin and the General Reader" 45, "The
140
Index
Readership of the Periodical Press in Mid-Victorian Britain" 45 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 78, 82n, 91 England, Victorian, characteristics of 5, 40-3, 55-6 English Historical Review 43 Enoch Pratt Library 58 Ewart Public Library (Dumfries) 84 Examiner 104 Faulkner, William, Sanctuary 130 Fielding, Henry, Joseph Andrews 17, Tom Jones 11 Fielding, Kenneth J. 80n Fitzgerald, F. Scott 128-9 Flower, R., "The Autographed MS of Mill's Logic" 100n Foreign Review 84 Fraser, William 84 Froude, J. A.: 79, 93; ed. Carlyle letters 77-9, 93 Garnett, Richard, ed. Carlyle letters 78n Gaskell, Elizabeth C. 58 Gawain, Sir 94 Germ 46 Germany, relations with Britain 57-8 Gibson, William, et al., A Statement of Editorial Principles 128-9 Gladstone, William E. 55-6 Godwin, William, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice 113 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 78 Goodwin, Michael, ed. Nineteenth Century Opinion 45 Graham, John, Jr., ed. Carlyle letters 78n Graham, Kenneth, English Criticism of the Novel 44 Greg, W. W.: 125, 127; "The Rationale of Copy-Text" 114, 116n, 129 Greville, Charles 92 Griggs, Earl L., ed. Coleridge letters 82n
Guillebaud, C. W., ed. Marshall's Principles 112n-l 13n Haight, Gordon, ed. George Eliot letters 82n Hainds, J. R., N. MacMinn, and J. McCrimmon, eds. Bibliography of the Published Writings of J. S. Mill 100-1 Hale, 0. J., Publicity and Diplomacy 57 Halfpenny Journal 59 Halsband, Robert: "Editing the Letters of Letter-Writers" 82; ed. letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 82n Hardy, Thomas: 58; Return of the Native 114 Harkness, Bruce, "Bibliography and the Novelistic Fallacy" 129 Hawthorne, Nathaniel: 123, 131; consul at Liverpool 30; handwriting 30; manuscripts 13, 20, 28-30, 33-5; proofreading habits 18, 30, 34; writings, Blithedale Romance 9n, 1316, 28-30, 126, Centenary ed. 13, 17, 22, 82, 117n, 125-8, Fanshawe 11, 17, 126, House of the Seven Gables 9n, 12-17, 22, 28-30, 126-8, Marble Faun 12-13, 18, 20-1, 24, 28, 30-5, 128, Scarlet Letter 14, 20-6, 117n-118n, 125-7 Hayek, F. A. von 97 Hayman, David, "From Finnegan's Wake" 129 Hemingway, Ernest, A Farewell to Arms 130-1 Hill, Hamlin, "Toward a Critical Text of The Gilded Age" 129 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, ed. Essays on Politics and Culture by J. S. Mill 113 Hinman, Charlton: 10; Collating Machine 11-12, 20-1, 24, 119, 127-8 History of Jack the Giant-Killer 85 Hobart and Robbins, printers 1516, 18, 30 Holmstrom, John, and L. Lerner,
Index George Eliot and her Readers 44 Horner, text of 67 Hort, F. J. A. 82n Houghton, Esther R. 4 Houghton, Walter E.: Clough 46, "Reflections on Indexing Victorian Periodicals" 48-9, The Victorian Frame of Mind 46; ed. Wellesley Index 4, 6, 37, 43-7 House, Madelyn, ed. Dickens letters 82n Household Journal 59 Howells, William D., ed. of 124 Huxley, Leonard, ed. Carlyle letters 78n
Irving, Washington, ed. of 82, 124 James, Henry 130 Jeffrey, Francis 84, 91 Johnson, Samuel, Yale ed. of 107 Johnston, James 91 Joyce, James, Finnegan's Wake 129 Lang, Cecil, ed. Swinburne letters 82n Langer, W. L., Diplomacy of Imperialism 57-8 Lawrence, Dan H., "Bibliographical Novitiate in Search of Henry James" 130 Lenox County Post Office 30 Lerner, Laurence, and J. Holmstrom, George Eliot and her Readers 44 Lewis, Sinclair 128 Lewis, W. S., ed. Walpole letters 82n libraries, holdings in: British Museum 51, 54, Brotherton, IO0n, Univ. of California 58, Univ. of Chicago 64, 66, Cincinnati Public 58, Columbia Teacher's College 57, Univ. of Edinburgh 87, Enoch Pratt 58, Ewart Public 84, Harvard Univ. 58, 127, Univ. of Illinois 58, Indiana Univ. 49, 58, Johns Hopkins Univ.
141
100n, Library of Congress 50, 52, London School of Economics 97, IO0n, Univ. of Minnesota 58, National Library of Scotland 78n, 79, 87, Newberry 54-5, New York Public 58, 78n, Pierpont Morgan 61, IO0n, 126, Somerville College II6n, Stanford Univ. 58, Univ. of Western Ontario 57, Yale Univ. 100n Library of Congress 49-50, 52 Lindley, Dwight N., ed. Mill letters
96n
literary criticism, relation to textual editing and bibliography 24-5, 28, 3 5-6, 40, 70-6, IO 1, 113, 128-9, 131 London Reader of Literature 59 London School of Economics 97, IO0n Lovenjoul. See Spoelberch de Lovenjoul MacKellar, Thomas, American Printer 9 MacMinn, Ney, J. R. Hainds, and J. M. McCrirnrnon, eds. Bibliography of the Published Writings of J. S. Mill 100-1 Malthus, Thomas: 86; Principles of Political Economy 113n Manly, John M., ed. Chaucer 8ln-82n Manning, H. E. II 5 manuscripts. See editing Marshall, Alfred, Principles of Political Economy 112n-l l3n, 113 Marchand, Leslie A., The Athenaeum 44 Maurer, Oscar, "Froude and Fraser's Magazine" 44, "Leslie Stephen and the Cornhill Magazine" 44 McCrirnrnon, J. M., N. MacMinn, and J. R. Hainds, Bibliography of the Published Writings of J. S. Mill 100-1 McKerrow, R. B. II, 114, 125 McLuhan, Marshall 106
142
Index
Melville, Herman: 129; new ed. of 12 Meriwether, James "The Dashes in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms" 130-1, "Some Notes on the Text of Faulkner's 'Sanctuary' " 130 Metcalf and Co., printers 14 Mill, Anna J., John Mill's Boyhood Visit to France 100, ll0 Mill, Harriet Hardy (Taylor) ll2, ll8 Mill, James, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind 104-5 Mill, John Stuart: 55, 96-122 passim; ethical views of 102-4; evidence before parliamentary committees 100, ll 5; legal bias 105n; reading and library 100, ll0, ll6n; collected ed. of 96-122; history of 96-8, 107-8; method of collation in llB-19; problems in editing of, appendices 106, 109-10, 122, arrangement of materials 101-6, audience 101, 108, 110-11, completeness 98-101, contents of vols. 1056, 108-10, copy-text ll0-19, introductions 105-6, 108-9, manuscript materials 100, ll5, nature of materials 98-105, 109, notes 109, notes to works of others 104-5, proofreading ll9-21, publishing sequences 106, 108, size of vols. 105-6, 108-10, unity of approach to text 109; purposes and aims in 98, 101; size and range of 98, 101; writings, Auguste Comte 103-4, Autobiography 100, 104, Autobiography and Related Writings (tentative title) 99, 106, Biblio"Bentham" 102-3, graphy of Published Writings of Mill 99-101, botanical 99-100, "Coleridge" 102-3, "Death of Bentham" 104, debating speeches 100, Dis-
sertations and Discussions 967, 113, ll5-16, Earlier Letters 82n, 98, 107-8, Early Draft of Autobiography 100n, 106, early lecture notes 100, early treatise on logic 100, Essays on Economics and Society 98, 107n, ll 8n, Essays on Ethics and Society (tentative title) 102-5, Essays on Politics and Culture 113n, Inaugural Address 103, Indian affairs 99, 102, journals 99-100, Later Letters ( tentative title) 99n, 107, "Newman's Political Economy" ll8n, newspaper 99, 104-6, notes to Bentham's Rationale 105n, notes to James Mill's Analysis 104-5, On Liberty 102n, 103, ll8, Principles of Political Economy 98, 100, 112-14, ll7, ll7n-ll8n, 119-22, "Professor Sedgwick's Discourse" 102, "Remarks on Bentham's Philosophy" 102, System of Logic 100, ll2, ll 7, Three Essays on Religion 1034, trans. of Plato 100, Utilitarianism 102-3, ll 1, 'Whewell" 103 Mind 43 Mineka, Francis E. The Dissidence of Dissent 44, ed. Mill letters 7, 82n, 96n, 97-8, 99n, 107 Mitchell, Robert 91 Mitchell's Newspaper Press Directory 52 Modern Language Association, Center for Editions of American Authors 82 Montagu, Mrs. Basil 84 Montagu, Mary Wortley 82n Morley, Edith J., ed. Carlyle letters 78n Murray, Thomas 91 National Library of Scotland 78n, 79 Nesbitt, George L., Benthamite Reviewing 44 Newberry Library (Chicago) 54-5
Index Newman, Francis, Lectures on Political Economy 118n Newman, John Henry 46, 115 New York Herald Tribune 83 New York Public Library 58, 78n New York Times 83 Nobbe, Suzanne H., ed. Carlyle letters 78n Norton, Charles Eliot, ed. Carlyle letters 77-8, 93 Obbign, Charles: 58-9; "Sir Aubrey's Triumph" 59, "Winning a Coronet" 59
Pearls from the Golden Stream 6 periodical literature, Victorian: 3759; bulk of, 37-8, 43, 47-8; use of, 37-46, 55-9, characteristics that make u.o. important 40-3, difficulties in u.o. 39, 41, 45-52, 54, 56-9, proposals for facilitating u.o. 37-9, 4754, 59 Phytologist 99 Pierpont Morgan Library 61, IO0n, 126 Pierpont Morgan Library, 19241929 61 Pochman, Henry A., ed. Washington Irving 82 Pollard, A. E. 45 Pommier, Jean, ed. Balzac's L'Eglise 60, 66 Poole, William F., Index to Periodical Literature 43, 48, 52 Pope, Alexander: letters of 82n; Twickenham ed. of 79n Post Office Directory 52 Priestley, F. E. L.: 97, 121; ed. Godwin's Political Justice I 13n printers: distinction between p. and publishers 12-13, as machiner of sheets only 14; in Boston 11, 13-16, 18, 30, in London 304. See also editing, printing printing: "house style" 13, 116-17, 126-7; methods of, hand 9-11, I 7, machine 20-36 passim; plates 11-12, 21-2, 34-5, 128, gutter margins 11, 128, repair
143
of ll-12, 128, type batter 11, 128; press-figures I I; proofreading practices 14, I 7-19, 21, 120-1, 125; running titles I 0- l I. See also compositors, editing, printers publishers. See editing, universities Rabelais, Gargantua et Pantagruel 65 Ray, Gordon N., ed. Thackeray letters 82n Rees, John C. 122n Reynolds, E. E., Three Cardinals 115n Ritchie, D. G., ed. Carlyle letters 93 Robson, John M.: "A Note on Mill Bibliography" IO0n; ed. Mill's Principles IO0n, 114n, 121 Routledge and Kegan Paul 97 Rusk, Ralph L., ed. Emerson letters 82n Ruskin, John, Stones of Venice 5 St. John-Stevas, Norman, ed. Bagehot 7 Saturday Review 57-8 Schmitt, Bernadotte, England and Germany 58 Schoeck, R. J., ed. Editing Six· teenth-Century Texts 3 Scudder, Townsend, ed. Carlyle letters 78n Shakespeare, William: 20; Hamlet 26-7, 2 Henry IV 26-8, King Lear 26-7, Merry Wives of Windsor 26-7, Othello 26-7, Richard III 26-7, Romeo and Juliet 26-7, Troilus and Cressida 26-7 Sherburne, George, ed. Pope letters 82n Sismondi, Jean, essay on political economy 86 Slater, Joseph, ed. Carlyle letters 78n Smith, Logan Pearsall, ed. Carlyle letters 78 Socialism, British 55 Somerville College (Oxford) 116n
144
Index
Speck, William A., ed. Carlyle letters 78n Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, Vicomte Charles de 66, 72 Stang, Richard, The Theory of the Novel in England 44 Stigler, George: 11 ln; review of Guillebaud's Marshall 112nl 13n, review of Toronto ed. of Mill's Principles I 13n, 122n Stillinger, Jack: "The Text of Mill's Autobiography" IO0n, 110; ed. Early Draft of Mill's Autobiography IO0n, 106, 110 Stokes, Gail 58n Strachey, Lytton, ed. Greville Memoirs 91-2 Sunday School Magazine 57 Super, R. H., ed. Complete Prose Works of Arnold 7, I0ln Swinburne, Algernon 82n "Sybil Lee" 59 Tanselle, G. T. 12 Taylor, Helen 97, 104 Taylor, Janetta 79n-80n Tennyson, Alfred, "Ulysses" (quoted) 38 Thackeray, William M. 80, 82n, 84 Thorpe, James: "The Aesthetics of Textual Criticism" 112, 114n, 131; ed. Aims and Methods of Scholarship 126 Thrall, Miriam M. H., Rebellious Fraser's 44 Thurston, Torry and Co., printers 14 Ticknor and Fields 13-14, 30-1 Times, The 42 Times Literary Supplement 83 Times Tercentenary Handlist of English and Welsh Newspapers 51-3, 56 Tit-Bits 43 Todd, William B.: 11; "Problems in Editing Mark Twain" 131, Procedures for Collating Twain's Minor Works 132, and P. Baender, Rules and Procedures for the Twain Edition 124, 132
Traveller 104 Turner, R. K. Jr. 10 Twain, Mark: 18, 131; The Gilded Age 129-30; Iowa ed. of 1234, 131-2 Union List of Serials 50, 52, 54, 56-7 universities: California 58, Cambridge 111, Chicago 64, 66, 70, 111, Columbia Teacher's College 57, Cornell 98, Duke 77, Edinburgh 79n-80n, 84, 87, Harvard 58, 111, 127, Hull 80n, Illinois 58, Indiana 49, 52, 58, Johns Hopkins IO0n, Leeds IO0n, London 111, London School of Economics 97, I00n, Minnesota 58, Oxford 111, 116n, Stanford 58, Toronto 3-8, 111, 120, Western Ontario 57, Yale I00n; publishing of editions by presses of Duke, 79, Edinburgh 79, Iowa 123-4, 131-2, Ohio State 82, Toronto 4, 8, 96-7, Yale 107 Voltaire 82n Walford, Cornelius, "Outline of a Scheme for a Dictionary of Periodical Literarure" 37-8 Walpole, Horace 82n Ward, W. S., Index and FindingList of Serials 4 5 Warner, Charles Dudley 129 Webb, R. K., The British Working Class Reader 45 Weinberg, Bernard: llln; and E. P. Dargan, The Evolution of Balzac's "Comedie humaine" 66n, 70n Weintraub, Stanley, ed. The Savoy 45 Welsh, John 93-4 Welsh, Maggie 78 Werdet, Edmond, Portrait intime de Balzac 61
Index Westcott, Bishop Brooke Foss and F. J. A. Hort, ed. New Testament, Greek 82n Wilson, D. A., Life of Carlyle 77, 93 Wilson, Rachel, chapter in Dargan and Weinberg, The Evolution
145
of Balzac's "Comedie humaine" 70n Woodhouse, A. S. P. 97, ll2
Yeats, Willaim Butler, poems of 113-14, 123-4 Young, G. M., Portrait of an Age 41