"Los Pepes" of Galdos in 1868 and 1887: Two Stages of His Style

Abstract

the Madrid daily newspaper La Nacitn, issued March 22, 1868, are an articulo de costumbres without special title on Los Pepes.' Under date of March 19, 1887, the very day of San Jose nineteen years later, he sent the same piece as a letter to the editor of the Buenos Aires daily La Prensa, which published it, after it had reached Argentina some six weeks later, in its number for May 4.2 But the text is not quite the same, and the number of changes made in the new redaction or adaptation of the original version are so numerous and of such kinds as to constitute important data for a study of Gald6s' stylistic criteria at the beginning and, after an interval of two decades, in the middle of his literary career. It is regrettable that Gald6s' stylistic criteria during, or at significant points in, his career of literary creation cannot yet be studied in his major works, the novelas and the Episodios Nacionales. But until the original manuscripts with their corrections, and in turn the printers' proofs with their corrections become available for comparative study with the first editions and any others not stereotyped and issued during Gald6s' life, we must be content-not very content, and only temporarily-with the study of such minor works as the present one. One oasis in the desert is the fine doctoral dissertation of Robert J. Weber, who was able to utilize Gald6s' corrected and revised manuscript of the novel Miau with some significant results.3 It was not uncommon for Gald6s, and indeed for other writers at that time (and, to some extent, even now), to send the same literary piece to two or more publications, with or without changes or significant alterations.4 One may recall, merely as signs of this practice and without attempting to exhaust the list of double or multiple publication, that La conjuracicn de las palabras, well known to galdosistas from its appearance in 1889 in a volume with Torquemada en la hoguera and other short pieces,5 had previously been published over a period of fifteen years in La Nacidn on April 12, 1868; in El Museo Canario (Santa Cruz de Tenerife) on November 15 of the same year; in La Guirnalda of May 16 and June 1, 1873; in El Oceano of June 19, 1879; in La Diana, i, nuim. 20, on November 16, 1882; in La Ilustracidn de Canarias (Santa Cruz de Tenerife) on December 15, 1882; and in La localidad (Las Palmas) on May 2, 1883; and that La pluma en el viento before appearing in the same Torquemada volume had been issued first by El Correo de Espana on May 20, 1872, pp. 7-12, and subsequently by La Guirnalda on March 1 and 16 and April 1, 1873, and by the Madrid daily El Imparcial on October 13 and 20, 1879.6 Indeed, it is now possible to reveal that the short composition Tropiquillos, first known generally when it appeared in a volume headed by La sombra in 1890,7 had been published some half dozen years before in La Prensa of Buenos Aires on December 12, 1884 and bearing Gald6s' dating of November 9, 1884.8 It may well have been published elsewhere also, since its companions Celin and Theros in the La sombra volume, which were similarly devoted to celebrating seasons of the year, did appear in other publications, and with them it has, as Gald6s himself wrote, caracter de composici6n de Almanque.'9 However, Tropiquillos is the only piece in the collec-