As documented in the Introduction to this volume, a total of four separate texts of The Reverberator were produced during James's lifetime. Leaving aside his extensive revision of the novel for publication in Volume 13 of the New York Edition of The Novels and Tales of Henry James (1908), three of these texts were produced within a year of the first documented reference to its conception in November 1887. There is no surviving manuscript of The Reverberator and no record of its submission to James's publisher in the Macmillan Archive. Chronologically, the first version of the novel to commence publication was its serialization in six monthly instalments of Macmillan's Magazine from February to July 1888. By the time that the serial had run its course, however, two book editions of The Reverberator had already appeared: on 5 June a first edition of 500 copies issued in two volumes in Great Britain, followed on 14 June by a second edition of 3,000 copies issued in one volume in the United States – both were published by Macmillan and Company. Given the close proximity of dates between the publication of these three versions of the novel, and the probability of their equally close printing dates, there is no single text of The Reverberator which holds an unques-tioned chronological primacy. The general principle of CFHJ is to select the first book edition as the copy text for this current edition, but as David J. Supino has observed, ‘[t]he printing sequence of the first edition and the second edition (American impression) is not clear, that is, whether the first edition was in fact the first book printing of this title’.

James's correspondence with Frederick Macmillan reveals that he received at least two payments covering separate instalments of the serial-ized text (recorded on 12 January and 16 April). This raises the possibility that James may still have been writing the novel during the process of serial publication, a practice common amongst earlier nineteenth-century novel-ists and one which he adopted for the much longer magazine serialization of The Tragic Muse in the latter months of 1888. At the latest, a complete version of the proofs for Macmillans's Magazine must have been in exis-tence by 16 April, when Frederick Macmillan offered terms for the novel's first volume publication and invited James to make corrections to the text before a second type-setting.