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March/April 2004
Will the real text please stand up!By Leah Cohen, Acquisitions and Bibliographic Services Mary Jane Edwards discovered early in her career—researching and teaching 19th- century Canadian literature—that there was almost no reliable documentation to be had! "It got to the point, in fact, where I couldn’t teach early Canadian prose works because the available editions were shortened versions of American editions that were already adaptations of the first, usually English, editions," explains Professor Edwards. As she humorously tells it—one of her colleagues told her to stop complaining about the works and start fixing them up. That led to the beginning of the Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts (CEECT) at Carleton University. Dr. Edwards is the Principal Investigator and General Editor for the Centre. How then can one uncover the original text? Aside from the issue of adaptations, every copy has the potential to be slightly different from the other within the same edition, especially during the period of hand-press printing. One goal of the scholarly editor, then, is to ascertain the characteristics of an "ideal copy," the one the publisher intended to publish. To do that, one must look at as many copies within the edition as possible and scrutinize them to see evidence of what happened to the text during the process of composition, proofing, and printing. Since this involves rough handling of rare books and manuscripts, they are usually microfilmed at the same time and in a standardized fashion. Still, microfilming, as a means of reproducing texts is not wholly reliable: the original requires constant consultation. "What I discovered with The Golden Dog (Le chien d’or) by William Kirby is that when you microfilm the manuscript (especially one that has been revised several times by crossing out words and/or writing over them), it may actually be the first draft rather than the last version the author wrote that you actually see on the film. I have had to go back to Kirby’s manuscript several times to make sure that we have replicated his last revision, not his first draft," explains Professor Edwards. Some may wonder how seemingly minor discrepancies like these can affect the meaning of the content. To that end, Professor Edwards draws upon the example of Roughing It in the Bush by Susanna Moodie. "Since Roughing It was being produced in London, proofs were not sent back and forth across the Atlantic. Instead, a Mr. Bruce, a friend of Mr. Moodie, saw the book through the press and made 'corrections' that often had to do with punctuation. What happened, I think, was that as Bruce proofed the copy, he imagined a high-Victorian lady rather than one who had left England in 1832, before Queen Victoria came to the throne, and who had roughed it and nearly died in the bush. So, every time Susanna wrote, ‘And I didn’t like this’ and ended the sentence with a period, Bruce changed the period to an exclamation mark. As a result, Mrs. Moodie sounds more emotional and becomes the more hysterical woman whom Margaret Atwood portrays in The Journals of Susanna Moodie. If you go back to the first state of each sheet in the first edition, and use its less dramatic punctuation, the Moodie persona becomes a much more humorous, matter-of-fact, mature pioneer woman who survived giving birth to children in the bush and living there under almost unbearable conditions. The CEECT edition won’t entirely change how people perceive the Susanna Moodie persona—there is all that secondary literature telling you that she was hysterical, etc., but if you read our edition, I think that you’ll get a picture of a woman who coped." If punctuation can alter meaning, all the more so adaptations. The actual content of a published book could be quite fluid in the 19th century since there was no international copyright. "In the case of Roughing It in the Bush, an American publisher picked up a copy of the first English edition, cut it, and published it in 1853. Out went, therefore, all references to the Rebellion of 1837-38—Americans won’t care about these political events—and all of John Moodie’s practical information about how to immigrate to Canada. (Richard Bentley, the English publisher, asked Mr. Moodie to add concrete facts on Canada so that the book would appeal to potential immigrants.) What was emphasized as a result was the experience of a woman in a bush settlement in America rather than the specific Upper Canadian context in which Susanna and John were really functioning. That’s fine, except that this American edition was the one that became the main edition for all Canadian reprints. So what you got was a Roughing It in the Bush filtered through a different political context." Risks of Digitization As a scholarly editor, Professor Edwards is keenly aware of the risks of relying on digitization exclusively. "There is a tremendous psychological pressure on archivists and librarians to say, ‘We’ve got all our material digitized, and, therefore, we don’t need the hard copy, so we’ll just throw it out.’ There is a misperception that there is no need to see the real thing. That’s happened already with the British Library’s collection of American newspapers. Fortunately, I have not yet run into this at Library and Archives Canada, but presumably such a policy could be implemented." "It’s wonderful to have databases like Literature Online (LION) as a first portal for identifying literary quotations. But LION’s methods of replicating texts by having them typed into the database offshore and not proofreading them carefully make its texts impossible to rely on for close analysis. There is a need to see the real thing. That is why it is so important for the Library to keep on collecting retrospectively as well as getting all the new books that fall within its mandate." |
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