Editing Different Versions of Romantic Texts

Abstract

Scolarly editing has undergone a crisis in recent years and two of the crucial contributions to the debate over that crisis have been Jerome McGann's A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, and the Oxford Complete Works of William Shakespeare.[1] This paper will discuss some of the issues raised by McGann and by the Oxford Shakespeare. In doing so, it will draw on experience gained by the present writer as the General Editor of the Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of James Hogg, and as the editor of Scott's Old Mortality for the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels.[2] Among other things, McGann's Critique discusses the editorial problem of the punctuation of texts of the Romantic period. The problem may be stated briefly. Many authorial manuscripts have survived from the early nineteenth century, but if these manuscripts are compared in detail with the first editions of the relevant texts, this often reveals extensive differences in punctuation and similar matters (the so-called 'accidentals' of the text). In these circumstances, ought an editor to follow the punctuation of the manuscript or the punctuation of the first edition? This question has generated much debate among editors: some have supported one view with energy and even passion, while others have taken the opposing side with equal vigour. McGann's comments are very much to the point: What separates these views may seem small enough, and perhaps it is true that only a pedant would or should be concerned about such matters. As so often happens, however, a close study of the meaning of this difference of opinion uncovers a series of fundamental questions which educators, students of culture, and teachers of literature are always concerned with. Imbedded in that small difference are large assumptions about the very nature of literary artifacts. (p. 6) Thirty years or so ago, the consensus among editors seemed fairly strong and secure. Fredson Bowers and his followers took the view that, in cases of the kind under discussion, editors should almost always follow the accidentals of the author's manuscript. It can be argued that the Bowers view rested upon an assumption, inherited from the Romantics, that a canonical text is, as it were, the inspired utterance of the Poet-as-Prophet. This assumption tended to encourage a further assumption: that the inspired utterance suffered progressive corruption as it passed through the hands of rude mechanicals: copy-editors, printers, publishers, and the like. On such a view, it was natural to believe that the editor's role was to do everything possible to restore the inspired authorial utterance to its pristine, uncorrupted purity, and, inevitably, the author's fair-copy manuscript seemed like a gift of manna from heaven for those undertaking this task of restoration. In his Critique McGann argues against the old Bowers assumptions. According to McGann, when an author's work begins its passage to publication, 'it undergoes a series of interventions which some textual critics see as a process of contamination, but which may equally well be seen as a process of training the poem for its appearances in the world' (p. 51). McGann thus opens out the possibility that a text need not be seen as the sole property of an inspired 'Author'. Rather, for McGann, it can be more useful and more accurate to think of a text as a fruit of a joint, co-operative effort involving the work of many people. In this joint effort, according to McGann's view, people like compositors, proof readers, and publishers have their various parts to play in training the text for its public appearances. Until they have done their work, it can be argued, the text is not fully completed, and for this reason McGann suggests that the editor of a modern edition ought normally to choose to follow the accidentals of an early printed edition rather than the accidentals of the author's manuscript. McGann's line of argument fits the novels of Sir Walter Scott particularly well, as an examination of the genesis of these texts will show. …