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Editorial Problems are Readers' Problems
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Extract
Victorian Literature, particularly fiction, offers both rich materials and complex problems for textual scholarship. The nineteenth is the first century for which multiple authorial manuscripts, proofs, and revised editions abound. There are major editorial projects underway for Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, and perhaps more, to say nothing of the Mill and Disraeli projects. But the variety of mistakes made so far in these editions makes one wish to pull the whistle rope – stop the train and survey the course.
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NOTES
1. The Eliot, Dickens, and Brontë editions are published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford; the Thackeray edition is in preparation for publication by the University of Tennessee Press; the Mill edition and the Disraeli project are underway at the University of Toronto Press.
2. Geoffrey, and Tillotson, Kathleen, eds., “Note on the Text,” in Vanity Fair (Boston: Riverside Press, 1963), p. xli.Google Scholar
3. “Between Two Worlds: Editing Dickens,” in Editing Nineteenth Century Fiction, ed. Millgate, Jane (New York: Garland, 1978), p. 26.Google Scholar See also Monod's, and Ford's, George edition of Bleak House (New York: Norton, 1977).Google Scholar
4. Monod, , “Between Two Worlds,” p. 30.Google Scholar
5. Monod reports the variants in the Norton Bleak House. I am taking issue here with his line of reasoning, not his method of reporting variants.
6. Jack, Jane and Smith, Margaret, eds., Jane Eyre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. xv.Google Scholar
7. The Brontë editors may argue that they have adopted something like the second of these alternatives, but they do not list the manuscript variants and their description of the kinds of variants is too brief to give any idea of the manuscript punctuation.
8. Haight, Gordon, ed., The Mill on the Floss (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. xxx.Google Scholar
9. See Greg's, W. W. “The Rationale of Copy-Text,” Studies in Bibliography, 3 (1950–1951), 19–36Google Scholar, and many subsequent discussions summarized and commented on by Tanselle, G. Thomas in “Greg's Theory of Copy-Text and the Editing of American Literature,” Studies in Bibliography, 28 (1975), 167–229.Google Scholar
10. Tillotson, Kathleen, ed., Oliver Twist (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. xlv.Google Scholar