University of Virginia Library

COOPER AND HIS COLLABORATORS:
RECOVERING COOPER'S FINAL INTENTIONS FOR HIS FICTION

BEGUN in the late 1960s, "The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper" (www.
wjfc.org) is a critical scholarly edition subscribing to the guidelines of
the Modern Language Association Center for Scholarly Editions (and to those
of its predecessor, the Center for Editions of American Authors.) As editorial
policy, the Cooper Edition (CE henceforth) has followed a conservative interpretation
of the prevailing theory and practice used to edit American
fiction in the last half century. Specifically, CE has subscribed to the rationale
of Walter Greg, as practiced in the editing of nineteenth-century American
texts by Fredson Bowers, G. Thomas Tanselle, and others, by invoking the
crucial importance of the "author's final intentions"—identifying and preserving
what the editors believe the author finally intended for every aspect
of the form and substance of the work at hand. As evidence of Cooper's
final intentions, CE has taken holograph witnesses (extant authorial manuscripts
and revisions) as well as variants which collateral evidence (based on
Cooper's known practices in the extant holograph revisions) suggests are
likely to be authorial. CE scholarly texts are thus eclectic: CE editors chose
variants they judge to be authorial from texts subsequent to the copy-text to
create a text ideally embodying Cooper's final intentions.

In the 1980s, these governing procedures for CE practice concerning the
authority of final intentions, especially the distinctions between accidentals
and substantives, were strongly challenged. Cultural and language theorists,
from the New Critics through the post-modernists, had questioned on social
and psychological grounds the capacity of individual authors to exercise full
autonomy and control over their texts. Such theorists argued that overpowering
relationships to other authors, to readers, to broad cultural movements
and constraints, and to the body of language itself demanded a revision of the
assumption that authors consciously understood and controlled "final intentions"
in their works. Jerome J. McGann's A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983) brought these arguments home

to the editorial community by showing from Byron's oeuvre and elsewhere
that authors (especially poets) often produced multiple versions of texts for
different occasions. Further, McGann argued forcefully that authors submitting
manuscripts to compositors expected and often welcomed their interventions
to perfect intentions indifferently realized in the manuscript delivered
for composition. McGann's demonstration that Byron expected professionals
in the printing shop or friends copying his manuscripts to normalize lapses
and inconsistencies in his spelling and grammer rendered the concept of identifying
and following authorial final intentions deeply problematic.[1]

This essay approaches the still-continuing debate about final intentions
in the belief that the argument is best engaged not with theories or generalities
but by illuminating the discussion through examining what is known
about the practice of a specific author. My aim here is to examine these questions
of final intentions and of the role of authorial collaborators through
reviewing what we have learned about Cooper in the course of editing the
twenty volumes of "The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper." Cooper did
not set out as an author consciously to enlist collaborators, in the printing
shop or elsewhere. Rather, through hard-won experience in seeing his manuscrripts
through the press, he came to realize and value the roles compositors
and others inevitably played in getting his words before the public. His challenge
was to understand these roles and then to supervise, as closely as circumstances
permitted, the inevitable limited collaborations that ensued. The
issues are: How and where did collaborators (licensed and otherwise) succeed—or
fail—in realizing Cooper's final intentions for his works? More specifically
for editorial purposes, when manuscripts of Cooper's work in his
own hand are extant, should CE scholars use as copy-texts such holograph
witnesses? Or should they turn to first editions for which Cooper is known
to have read proof and which may benefit from the improvements of his
collaborators?

Cooper and His Copyists

Fortunately for Cooper editors, Cooper in one invaluable letter briefly
overcame his customary reluctance to discuss his processes of composition.
When responding on 12 April 1835 to a flattering request from the then
Princess Victoria for an autograph of his work, Cooper wrote to the intermediary
Aaron Vail (U.S. chargé d'affairs in London) that he chose to honor
the princess' request by

The work of several Cooper editors (see especially James P. Elliott, The
Prairie, and Thomas and Marianne Philbrick, The Red Rover) confirms the
broad lineaments of Cooper's description here of his habitual practice of writing,
proofing, and publishing in the 1830s and beyond. Two points concerning
his disclosures about his inscribing the text, collaborating with an amanuensis,
and overseeing the resulting corrected copy through the press, need to
be made more explicit.

First is the role of the amanuensis. Cooper indicated to Vail that he corrected
the fair copy before it passed "into the hands of the printers." But he
does not state that he made such corrections against the original manuscript
itself. Doubtless in the commerce of his family circle he easily could have responded
to queries from his copyists about passages they had difficulties with;
but without a zealous comparison of their version with his original, he would
not have caught plausible substitutions his copyists made, consciously or by
accident. Thus the amanuensis fair copy represents a close collaboration of
author and family members, but one that, in the absence of a careful comparison
with the original, began the process of introducing variants into those
final intentions Cooper had expressed when he completed the manuscript.

As was his practice, first with his nephew William and later with his wife
and daughter, while traveling in Europe (1826 to 1833), Cooper preferred to
have someone in his family circle make a fair copy for the press of his own
first draft. Cooper, as we shall see, had problems enough with the New York
printers who set the six novels (through Last of the Mohicans) which he published
before leaving for Europe and which established his early fame. But
at least with the New York printers and publishers, he had the benefit of
personal associations and frequent visits to the city. However, for the seven
new novels and Notions of the Americans written during the European sojourn,
he had to endure printing and publishing variously in Paris, Dresden,
Florence, and London.

Cooper doubtless decided that the necessity of entrusting to non-English-reading
printers the setting of his manuscripts made it prudent to oversee
the re-copying of the original by someone who could unpack his own dense
and crabbed writing into a script easier for compositors new to his hand to

set proof from. Early and late, Cooper's handwriting is difficult. Writing with
paternal advice to his son Paul on 9 November 1843, Cooper urged him to
"attend to your hand-writing. I am a living proof of the importance of such
an accomplishment" (L&J, 4.426). After Cooper began journeying in earnest
on the Continent, attendance in person at the printing shop became inconvenient
(though he continued insisting on reading and returning proofs);
providing a fair-copy manuscript to foreign printers became all the more
worth the extra labor.

Apparently anticipating the need for a confidential amanuensis while
abroad, Cooper had made arrangements for his brother William's son, William
Yeardly Cooper (1809-1831), to accompany the family in Europe.
William faithfully carried out the copyist duties for Prairie, Red Rover,
Water-Witch, and part of Bravo until his terminal illness and untimely death
on 1 October 1831, after which Cooper's wife Susan and daughter Susan assumed
the duties of copyists. Cooper subsequently tried unsuccessfully to
persuade his niece Elizabeth Caroline DeLancey to join the Coopers in Europe
to take on William's tasks (L&J, 2.159).

Only one chapter, a late one not in William's hand, survives of the
amanuensis copy of Bravo, but the CE scholarly texts of Prairie and Red
Rover (both 1827) and The Water-Witch (1830; in preparation) disclose William's
practices as collaborator with his uncle. James P. Elliott has studied
William's role in detail in his 1985 edition of Prairie, the Cooper title with
the most material, in more varied forms, available for critical editing. Eliott's
analysis substantiates Cooper's 1835 comments to Aaron Vail concerning his
practices of composition.

The extant witnesses for Prairie demonstrate that Cooper lightly revised
his manuscript, presumably before William's recopying. In his copying,
William made numerous small changes, doubtless both intentional and
from misreadings. William guessed at words he could not read (Cooper's
"deserted swale" becomes "detested swell" in William's version); he dropped
phrases and simplified or made parallel phrases and constructions; and he
often imposed his own grammar and pointing, altering his uncle's characteristic
rhetorical pacing.[3] Further, when he admitted defeat in reading an
authorial word or phrase, William left a blank—for which often as not, his
uncle, when revising William's copy, provided wording different from the
original manuscript. In short, while William's fair and large hand made the
labors of the Paris printers of the novel far easier than Cooper's would have,
he made many small changes in accidentals and substantives that found their
way into the first and subsequent editions.

Thomas and Marianne Philbrick, the editors of the CE text The Red
Rover, for which William's amanuensis copy survives, report very similar
findings about William's practices as copyist. They identify 740 substantive
variants introduced by the amanuensis, of which Cooper caught almost half

(360) and restored his holograph final intentions. But for 380 other readings,
William's version passed into the first edition and persisted until critical
editorial scrutiny caught such errors as William's "stopping," "resumed,"
"superiors," "rain," and "accompanied" for, respectively, the author's "stooping,"
"returned," "seniors," "vain," and "unaccompanied."[4] Only (as Cooper
rightly speculated to Vail) when the diligent CE editor became one of those
"who take the trouble to compare them" (the various witnesses) did we gain
"an insight into the secrets of authorship" in terms of Cooper's collaborations
with his amanuensis (L&J, 3.145).

The second point from Cooper's letter to Vail requiring comment is the
author's practice of not referring to the original manuscript when reading
proofs. Except under the most unusual circumstances, Cooper read and corrected
the printer's proofs set from his own manuscript or from the fair copy
(in the case of Bravo, printed by Richard Bentley in London). As is known
from those few cases where proofs survive (Prairie and Afloat and Ashore), he
corrected errors as he saw them, and made changes in areas always of concern
to him (for example, the proper registration of dialect.) But, as with the fair
copy, he did not correct the proofs against either his own or the amanuensis
copies. In accordance with Richard Bentley's interpretation of the legal obligations
for obtaining British copyrights, Cooper's manuscripts were sent to
Bentley, who kept them. Thus they were not available to Cooper when he
read the proofs set from them. Indeed, he made clear to Bentley that in setting
Bravo, "[i]t is not necessary to send back the copy [of "nearly all of the manuscript
of second volume"], as I scarcely ever refer to it . . ." (L&J, 2.93).

In summary, the first printed text of Bravo was subjected to two transcriptions
of the author's extant manuscript, the fair copy and the first proofs, both
of which Cooper read and revised—but not against his own final intentions
inscribed in his manuscript. The experience of the CE strongly confirms
Cooper's speculations—those CE editors who have "take[n] the trouble to
compare" extant manuscripts with the printed texts Cooper proofread have
indeed found that the latter "differ materially from the manuscript."

Cooper and His Printers

Having examined Cooper's characteristic degrees of control over his
closest collaborators, his family copyists, let me turn to a more detailed discussion
of his relationship with the printers of his first proofs. Except on rare
occasions where time or distance precluded review, Cooper always examined
and corrected the first proofs himself. For Cooper, the interventions of the
printers such review disclosed were ones he alternatingly welcomed and abhorred.
Unfortunately, his letters disclose far more concern with these collaborators'
missteps than with their improvements.

Writing to his first publisher, Andrew Thompson Goodrich, on 2 July

1820, Cooper concluded a letter filled with the anxieties of a first author with
the plea to "Hasten the first proof sheet [of Precaution], as it may suggest
some alterations in the Chapters and I hourly expect the "Union" in, and
must go to Sag-Harbor as soon as I hear of her arrival" (L&J, 1.46). Most curious
is this conjunction of concerns about his two immediate commercial
prospects: authorship and whaling. At this stage in his career, Cooper knew
a good deal more about the commerce of the sea than that of publishing. But
in his extensive correspondence with Goodrich, we see Cooper beginning to
learn the technicalities of composition, proofreading, and publishing the
hard way—on the job.

After several months of intense struggle with Goodrich, the best Cooper
could do to close the gap between the holograph final intentions and printed
text for Precaution was to include an errata sheet. But from his experience
with seeing his first manuscript through the press (discussed below), Cooper
developed practices to execute textual revisions that he used throughout his
career. He learned from Precaution how to define for publishers and their
compositors specific and delimited roles as collaborators in trying to construct
his final intentions for his major works. As we shall see, the unanticipated
demand for his second novel, The Spy (1821), provided Cooper with an opportunity
Precaution did not offer—to make significant revisions after the
first edition for three distinct new editions (two in 1822 and one in 1831).
Through 1831, his correspondence discloses that he revised, at least once,
every novel he wrote. His correspondence does not always indicate all the
editions he revised; editors must undertake extensive collations of all texts
possibly under his control to determine which contain variants likely to be
authorial. Although Cooper revised for subsequent editions only three ( Pathfinder,
Deerslayer, and The Two Admirals) of the twenty-one novels he wrote
after 1831, for many of these titles manuscript and other pre-publication
materials exist to aid the Cooper editor in determining the author's final intentions
for both substantives and accidentals.

Whatever romantic notions persist about the circumstances of Cooper's
writing Precaution, his correspondence with Goodrich about seeing the novel
through the press is grimly realistic. As a body, these letters show Cooper beginning
to develop his career-long expectations and demands for the kinds of
cooperation he wanted from the printing shop. Once the proofs began to arrive,
Cooper was appalled with the errors he soon detected. Cooper's first
extant response of 4 July 1820, in his characteristically conversational prose,
begins with polite but firm correction:

The substance here of the first sentence echoes throughout the thirty years
of Cooper's career that lay ahead with respect to the dual appeal for collaboration
with his various publishers: make "any little suggestions" that may improve
the work's success but correct the faults that "rest with the printer." To
guide this collaboration, Cooper exhorted his publishers and printers to take
care where he had not, especially to understand the idiosyncrasies of his writing
and orthography:

Cooper's first encounters with printers led him to pledge to take more
care with his writing and especially the punctuation ("I have paid more attention
to the pointing, and think it will be easier work as they proceed," 12
July 1820, L&J, 1.49). To aid his collaborators in the printing shop, in the
same letter to Goodrich he sent them "the spelling of the names—which written
off plainly on bits of papers will prevent the mistakes which occur sometimes
in the manuscript, creepin[g] into the proof sheets—."

These early letters to Goodrich—like several later concerning Precaution
and many about his subsequent publications—disclose Cooper's clear sense
of how he wanted his publishers and printers to collaborate. His role was to
acknowledge his own lapses and identify general problems (like consistency
of names). Their obligation was to locate and correct these lapses, as well as
to correct any other authorial oversights they detected.

Reading more proofs brought more problems and more appeals for care,
along with practical advice on difficulties compositors were likely to encounter
in an orthography Cooper was unwilling or unable to change: "I
like the frequent use of the dash—and believe they have ommitted [sic] it in
one or two cases where I was at pains to insert it. They must observe however
that I never use the period but close most of my sentences with the dash. This
of course is not to be printed so—" (17 July; L&J, 1.50).

Cooper concluded a second letter to Goodrich of 17 July with the expectation
he would soon be able to submit manuscript for the second volume of
Precaution. He anticipated that in his final review of the remaining manuscript
of the volume he might overlook "grammatical errors, and some words
may be omitted as I read it over very rapidly from necessity. If any such meet
your notice you will please alter th[is?] and I can see the proof afterwards . . ."
(L&J, 1.51). Two days later, he informed Goodrich of the necessity of leaving
Angevine (the farm near Mamaroneck that Susan Cooper's father gave them

in 1817) to attend to other business (including the newly returned whaling
ship). In his absence he pressed Susan into the role of proofreader, making
clear to Goodrich that her corrections should also be incorporated into what
he hoped was the increasingly correct text of Precaution.

However, three letters at the end of August convey his anguish at finding
the proofs of the second volume riddled with errors, most vexingly in passages
where he had already provided corrections. A letter (27? August 1820) details
Cooper's concerns with errors in the first volume, which Goodrich had presented
to Cooper as "ready for the public eye." In addition to numerous gaffes,
Cooper protested vehemently about the misuse of articles, since "the judicious
use of the articles and the qualifying words—is one of the characteristic
distinctions between American writers and the English[,] also of the affected
sentimental and plain good sense" (L&J, 1.56).

Eight more letters follow in September with more evidence of specific
passages requiring correction, resulting in Cooper's finally assenting to and
composing a detailed errata notice:

And finally in an almost stream-of-consciousness blending of concerns
about printers' errors, timely publication, and other business and personal
matters, Cooper wrote to Goodrich in mid-month:

When the two volumes of Precaution were finally printed and bound in
mid-October, Cooper confessed he could "honestly own I am pleased with my
appearance" (19-20 October?; L&J, 1.66), diplomatically blaming the faults
on his own casual approach to authorship rather than on Goodrich. But seeing
his first work through the press was a painful lesson in collaboration. His
volcanic outburst to Goodrich of 25 August records his bitterness with how
"they" (the printers) perverted his work with their unwanted interventions,

to the point where their collaboration destroyed his efforts. Indeed, with
mock solemnity, he invited Goodrich's printers to write their own book rather
than intrude on his:

(Ironically, Goodrich's printer was the highly-respected Cornelius van
Winkle, author of an important book on collaboration in the printing shop,
the 1818 The Printer's Guide, or an Introduction to the Art of Printing, Including
an Essay on Punctuation, and Remarks on Orthography.)[5]

Precaution was a modest success, but Cooper had, as early as his third
letter to Goodrich of 28 June 1820, begun work on a new work, The Spy,
which he reports "my female Mentor [doubtless his wife Susan] says . . . throws
Precaution far in the back-ground" (L&J, 1.44). Not until the second American
edition of 1839 did Cooper appear to return to his first novel to effect a
revision. While his last letters to Goodrich on Precaution disclose, on balance,
his pleasure with getting his first work through the fires of collaboration with
his printers, he entrusted his next two works—the ones that established his
career and reputation—to the more experienced New York firm of Charles

Wiley. The first editions of both The Spy (1821) and The Pioneers (1823) sold
very well, and popular demand in both cases led promptly to new typesettings.
And both novels were among the eight novels Cooper revised in the early
1830s for the Bentley Standard Novels series. These opportunities to prepare
revised editions for Spy and Pioneers provided Cooper with a new set of challenges
in collaborating with more experienced and professional firms to revise
early texts to embody his final intentions.

However, the first editions of The Spy and The Pioneers, published by
Charles Wiley of New York, are almost as error-laden as Precaution; indeed,
Pioneers also required an errata note. For better or worse, no correspondence
between Cooper and the publishers survives regarding the lapses of these first
Wiley editions. Fortunately, Cooper's second and third novels proved to be
sufficiently popular successes that the market immediately demanded new
editions for both. As the CE critical editions show, in both cases Cooper
worked hard and fast in these new editions to repair the blunders that had
escaped his notice in proofing the first editions.[6]

After the enormous success of Spy at home (and its pirating in London),
Cooper pursued the potential British market for Pioneers vigorously, and
initiated practices that continued for much of his career of sending his London
publishers corrected proofs of his American first editions. To John Murray,
the first London publisher to issue a Cooper novel by arrangement with
the author, Cooper sent the following instructions for collaboration on the
first British edition of The Pioneers:

From a collaborator's point of view, this combination of license to correct
and of caution to respect "one mans style" must have been perplexing,
doubtless even more so to London publishers with an established British
house style than to Goodrich (who received similar entreaties to correct
Cooper's lapses without interfering with his meaning.) Three weeks later,
Cooper sent the remaining text (in "two complete sets and part of a third")
for Murray's next volume, with a detailed commentary on how to respond to
authorial revisions made on the various proofs:

Clearly Cooper expected his new London publisher to exercise a prudent,
limited collaboration in preparing the novel for British audiences. In 1831,
Cooper returned to both Spy and Pioneers to prepare revised texts for the
"Bentley Standard Novels" series. He continued to count upon his British
publishers, now Colburn and Bentley, to instruct their printers to rectify
errors Cooper missed in preparing these early novels for re-issue in texts he
revised with more care than at any other occasion in his career. "I return the
whole of Spy, corrected," he wrote to Colburn and Bentley from Paris on 12
April 1831. "The proof-reader must be careful, and consult the sense, for it
is possible in the haste which you have exacted I may have made one mistake
in correcting another. The book was full of faults and I am amazed to see how
many had crept in through the carelessness of the printers, though Heaven
knows, there were enough of my own" (L&J, 2.67-68).

The interleaved text Cooper prepared for the Standard Novels revision
of Spy is extant, and provides scholars with the best evidence we have of the
kinds and degrees of changes Cooper made while revising the novel he deemed
the most in need of "a severe pen."[7] The interleaved revisions include hundreds
of changes, ranging from full pages through the smallest details of the
text (often involving the heightening or consistent registration of dialect).
Cooper even attended to punctuation changes, providing a good case study
of how authors can revise accidentals as well as substantives. In the first paragraph
alone of the revised Spy, he deleted six commas, presumably to pick up
the narrative pace. On the front of the interleaved copy, Cooper further instructed
the British printers as follows: "note Bene—No attention will be
given to the spelling, except in words of local use, the names, or those which
are evidently intended to be corrupt. The proof reader will take care of the
others."[8] In other words, in making his revisions Cooper sanctioned the
British compositors and proofreaders to correct errors in common words that
missed his attention, but to respect any changes he made in formal names or
in dialect ("words of local use . . . or those which are evidently intended to be
corrupt.")

This "note Bene" on the manuscript revisions for Spy captures Cooper's
expectations for his collaborators in the printing and proofing stages: correct

those errors you believe are authorial oversights but preserve those unconventional
forms that you believe are intended as such. However, the achievements
of Cooper's collaborators in this regard were often indifferent. As the
textual commentaries of many of the CE texts show, Greg and Bowers were
correct in arguing that successive re-composition of texts such as Cooper's
tended to move unconventional forms, especially dialect, towards conventional
ones.[9]

The CE texts of Spy and Pioneers also disclose that the Bentley compositor
followed Cooper's interlineated corrections with remarkable fidelity
(dialect aside), occasionally correcting errors Cooper had missed. Subsequent
letters to Bentley concerning the three historical novels set in Europe show
Cooper's appreciation of their workmanship. Concerning The Bravo, set in
Venice, Cooper admonished Bentley's staff in early June 1831 to respond
appropriately to both American and Italian forms:

Here as in all other London editions, Colburn and Bentley consistently followed
British usages in the spelling variants Cooper cited, with no known
protest from him.

Even after his return to the United States and residency in Cooperstown,
Cooper continued to entrust Bentley's staff with the difficulties of printing
from his manuscripts, as shown in his letter of 6 July 1837 concerning his
naval history:

Cooper again praised the Headsman (1833) proofreader when sending
the manuscript of Homeward Bound on 17 October 1837:

Cooper and John Fagan

In the productive final decade of his career beginning in 1840, in which
Cooper wrote sixteen of his thirty-two novels, for the most part the author

relied on his own handwriting to produce clear enough copy for his printers.
Manuscripts from this last decade show an author determined to make his
hand easier to read. During revision, Cooper often reshaped letters and, crucially,
by writing on lined folio sheets he avoided overcrowding his lines of
script (except at the unlined tops of pages where he often reverted to his old
habits of packing the lines in!). And from at least 1838, Cooper began to rely
more on a new form of publishing, involving his adapting of a fairly new
printing technology: stereotyping of standing type to enable printing (and
reprinting) from metal copies of hand-set type-pages without the expense of
recomposition. In his professional career, Cooper probably came to trust no
one in the publishing business more than John Fagan, who regularly made
stereotype plates for the Philadelphia firm Carey, Lea, and Blanchard. Carey
and Lea had published Cooper's last novel completed in America before his
departure to Europe, The Last of the Mohicans, in 1826 (which, according
to Robert Spiller, Fagan stereotyped.)[10] Upon Cooper's return to the United
States in 1833, Carey became his favored American publishers until their collapse
in the 1840s and his shifting of business to New York publishers in 1844.
Even after Cooper no longer used the Philadelphia publishers, he counted on
Fagan to oversee the typesetting and to prepare the stereotyped plates for
all his works from Home as Found (1838) to Ways of the Hour (1850).

As James Franklin Beard notes, "[t]heir relationship was a particularly
close and happy one, especially after Cooper began [with Afloat and Ashore]
the practice of financing the stereotyped plates of his books and leasing them
to publishers or booksellers for stated periods" (L&J, 4.446). For example,
Cooper counted on Fagan to deal with a minor problem of inscription that
vexed him through his career—keeping the spelling of his characters' names
consistent. As he wrote to Fagan on 4 March 1845 of his new book Satanstoe:

Instructions of such complexity betoken a collaborator who had earned
Cooper's trust. Perhaps this trust was in part born of economic necessity.
Having in Fagan a trusted collaborator probably assisted Cooper materially
in the 1840s when he was publishing typically two books a year (and for each
receiving half or less the income his earlier fiction had generated).

Further evidence of Cooper's close working relationship with Fagan
comes from the CE text of the two volumes of Afloat and Ashore (1844),
edited by Thomas and Marianne Philbrick. The editors have shown
that Fagan not only corrected Cooper's manuscript readings (and inevitably
introduced errors in the process); he also freely made small stylistic
changes and queried Cooper both on dubious readings and passages where he
disagreed with Cooper's intent. Fagan's copy-editing in preparation for initial

typesetting and subsequent stereotyping often effected Cooper's desire to
save the author from grammatical lapses. Without any known protest from
Cooper, Fagan subjected Cooper's manuscripts to careful and detailed copy-editing
involving hundreds of small, silent changes of Cooper's holograph, in
both accidentals and substantives. But by consulting the extant manuscripts,
the editors have identified over 1,100 substantive variants between the manuscript
and the first American edition where neither Fagan nor Cooper noted
the corruptions of Cooper's final intentions as inscribed in his manuscript.[11]

Not only did Cooper entrust his new books during this period to Fagan,
he counted on Fagan to see through the press the eleven revised texts he
prepared, at the end of his life, for the "Author's Revised Edition" issued
1849-51 by George P. Putnam. The first book in the series was the much-revised
Spy, for which Cooper admitted continued concern with printers
errors:

Cooper's implied license here, to "let nothing unintelligible pass," is for
him an extraordinary show of confidence in a collaborator who over the years
clearly he had grown to rely on implicitly—a collaboration far different from
his first with Andrew Thompson Goodrich in 1820. In the absence of textual
witnesses, however, assessing Fagan's role versus Cooper's own in making the
comparatively few revisions CE editors consider substantive in the Putnam
texts is difficult at best.[12]

Conclusion: What Cooper Intended His Collaborators To Do

The answer to the first question posed early in this paper should be fairly
clear: "How and where did Cooper and his collaborators (licensed and otherwise)
succeed—or fail—in realizing Cooper's final intentions for his works?"
From Goodrich to Fagan, Cooper expected those professionals in printing

and proofreading, with whom inescapably he had to collaborate, to distinguish
between his errors and oversights (which they were to set right) while preserving
faithfully what he told John Murray was "one mans style" (clearly his
own) which "seldom agrees with anothers" (L&J, 1.86). Cooper pressed into
collaboration even artistic friends like Horace Greenough, to whom on 17
February 1830 he sent a manuscript letter (to the Edinburgh Review, never
published) with the injunction "to read, for typographical and grammatical
errors, and when these are corrected, I shall want to see a proof myself" (L&J, 1.404). Typographical and grammatical errors—or, as indicated elsewhere,
inconsistencies in proper names or even (to the trusted Fagan) anything "unintelligible"—he
expected his collaborators to correct. But concerning substance
and style, he was firm. From Precaution on (when he distinguished
between British and American conventions in using articles) he brooked no
interference with his final intentions with respect to substantives. Even suggestions
for "improvements" from the trusted Fagan the Philbricks have
shown in Afloat and Ashore often met with peremptory rejection.[13]

In short, he intended his collaborators to perform the services of copy-editors,
but no more. As he specified on 18 June 1839 to Richard Bentley, he
preferred his English publisher to print from corrected American proofs, not
the manuscript British copyright law required Bentley to have: "So many
improvements in style &c are made in going through the press, that I greatly
prefer sending the sheets [along with the manuscript]" (L&J, 3.393). He required
typesetters and proofreaders to correct any minor errors, but also to
capture his final intentions for style and substance as he inscribed them. As
he wrote to wife Susan on 22 May 1850 when attending to business in New
York, including proudly seeing daughter Susan's Rural Hours through Putnam's
press, "I . . . hav[e] got the printer cornered, so that he must do his
duty" (L&J, 6.80). No where in his extant correspondence is there evidence
he entertained collaborative suggestions of any more substance, except perhaps
for dutiful references to accepting the advice of his "female Mentor,"
wife Susan, in general ways in his early fiction.[14] After he was established
as an author, he rarely changed his mind about the shape of his projects. (At
least one example of altering his original intentions does exist: after cajoling
Bentley for several years about a pet experiment, to write a novel with ships—

not humans—as characters, he backed off from this radical project in The Two
Admirals by introducing human actors as well as the fleets they command.[15]

The second question raised in this essay was: "For editorial purposes,
when manuscripts of Cooper's work in his own hand are extant, should CE
scholars use as copy-texts such holograph witnesses? Or should they turn for
copy-texts to first editions for which Cooper is known to have read proof and
which may benefit from the improvements of his collaborators?" This question
is crucial for framing the debate about recovering authorial intention.
Using the holograph where extant as copy-text grants final authority to the
author alone, at the expense of losing any improvements the author may have
desired and expected from professional collaborators. Using as copy-text any
authorial version (subsequent to the extant holograph) upon which collaborators
have made sanctioned or unlicensed revisions potentially captures those
collaborators' improvements but at the price of introducing non-authorial
variants.

To establish a text that most fully represents Cooper's intentions at all
stages of his engagement with his text, CE editors exercise critical judgment
to identify those post-copy-text variants certain or likely to be authorial
and incorporate them into the copy-text (always the holograph if available),
rejecting variants not believed to have authorial sanction. To use again
Cooper's words to Aaron Vail when forwarding the manuscript for Princess
Victoria, the CE critical editors have "take[n] the trouble to compare them"
(the manuscripts with subsequent authoritative witnesses) and have thus
seized the "opportunity of getting an insight into the secrets of authorship."
These "secrets" enable the CE to identify Cooper's final holograph intentions,
as disclosed by the extant witnesses closest to his hand, while also preserving
those variants in subsequent witnesses which the editors deem likely to be
authorial.[16]

With respect to editorial policy for authorial final intentions, one other
issue needs to be discussed. Authors may well revise a text for audiences different
from the original one and with a different intention in mind. In such
cases, the revision could well be considered a new work whose variants should
not be conflated with the text of the first edition.

The question for Cooper thus is: when he revised earlier texts, did he
consider himself to be perfecting his initial intentions? Or was he creating
a new work as well as a new text? The best evidence on this issue is the text
he revised most in his life, The Spy. His two revisions accomplished within
months of the December 1821 first edition for the most part correct egregious
errors, which (as with Precaution) doubtless resulted from both his and the
printers' lapses. When the author returned to the work in 1831, he not only
provided much more extensive rewrites of many passages, but (as he did for
all the Bentley Standard Novels texts) he added footnotes identifying specific
historical references. His immediate audience for these notes was obviously
British, and one might argue that because of this new audience and context,
the Bentley text thus is a sufficiently different work such that its variants
should not be conflated with the text of the first edition.

However, in writing to Bentley on 14 March 1831 (L&J, 2.60-61) about
the project for the new texts for the Bentley series, Cooper emphasized continuity—rather
than an esthetic disjuncture—with the earlier texts. He called
Bentley's attention to his earlier attempts in "revising the books," which he
had already done in "[a]ll the American editions" which were "cursorily revised
down to Pilot." For Spy he looked forward in a new Preface to putting
down the claims of "an impudent rogue in America, who pretends to be the
original of the Spy . . . I should not dislike an opportunity of stating what
gave rise to the conception of the character—." Cooper's emphasis falls on
making the Bentley revisions the embodiment of his final intentions coincident
with those original objectives that failed in execution because of earlier
editions "full of errors." Arguing that "it is harder work to read these things
than it is to write them," Cooper somewhat disingenuously asked "Do the
public care enough about these things? How much will you give a volume,
or rather a book, for new prefaces, notes and hints explanatory." But Cooper
immediately added that the "new prefaces, notes and hints explanatory" must
be shared with his American audiences: "In every case, I must condition for
the privilege of giving the same notes and prefaces simultaneously to Messrs
Carey and Lea, for with me, it is a point of honor to continue rigidly as
American author."

As I have argued elsewhere,[17] Cooper's intention with the notes here is
to open up the historicity of The Spy, which was part of his initial conception.
("The task of making American Manners and American scenes is an
arduous one," but clearly one he accepted with energy as he wrote to Goodrich
when Spy was draining his imaginative energy away from Precaution;
see L&J, 1.44). In each text of Spy he revised after the first, he realized these
intentions with language of increasing precision as well as with notes explicating
his original intentions because of what, for his readers, increasingly
was becoming American recollection rather than immediate experience. But
the record shows he viewed his labors as progressively refining and clarifying

his original aims, rather than creating (as Byron clearly did) variant texts reimagined
for new audiences.

One letter from late in Cooper's life nicely captures Cooper's recognition
of his need for collaborators in the process of getting his words before his
public. Often the extant letters of Cooper's last several years disclose an
author more willing than earlier to let his guard down. These letters show
Cooper communicating with chatty, human affection to family members and
with conversational warmth to those colleagues—principally John Fagan
and, in more guarded ways, Richard Bentley—with whom years of collaboration
had yielded a measure of trust. Let me conclude with one of the
happiest examples of such letters, a mock-humorous, tongue-in-cheek but revealing
letter to the New York Typographical Society, a professional organization
that literally embodied Cooper's dependence on collaborators from the
printing shop. Writing on 5 January 1850, twenty months before his death on
14 September 1851, Cooper made his last recorded comment on his collaboration
with those professionals who saw his various inscribed final intentions
into print. Declining with regret an invitation to the annual dinner in January
1850 of the printers' society to celebrate the first career of Benjamin
Franklin, Cooper wrote:

After a long paragraph celebrating "the increasing list of American
writers"—who owe their existence in part to their collaborations with the
sponsors of the printers' dinner—Cooper assured the members of the New
York Typographical Society that

After a long career as recorded in the letters presented here of being bedeviled
by links between the author and the printer that often failed to "return

with every error corrected," Cooper's jovial salutation recognized at
last that, with respect to communicating his final intentions, author and
printer were, of necessity, "mutually necessary to each other, and the circumstance
should produce and perpetuate good feeling between us." Given the
difficulties Cooper's crabbed manuscripts and exigent but often vague demands
imposed on the society of typographers for three decades, his final
acknowledgment of mutual need was not only just but also generous.

APPENDIX

Observations on the collaboration between Cooper and John Fagan, reprinted
with the permission of Thomas and Marianne Philbrick from their
Textual Commentary for their CE edition of Cooper's 1844 novel Afloat and
Ashore (AMS Press, 2004).

The surviving proof sheets of Afloat and Ashore . . . provide a revealing glimpse
into the relation of author and printer in the production of mid-nineteenth-century
American texts in general and, more specifically, they supply an extensive demonstration
of the process by which Cooper and Fagan collaborated to produce the
novels of the writer's last twelve years. For the first time the entire sequence of steps
that led from the author's manuscript to the printed pages of the first American
edition can be followed in detail. It now becomes clear that Fagan's compositors not
only corrected obvious errors in the manuscript and introduced the usual number of
errors of their own but freely initiated stylistic "improvements," many of which, in
the absence of the proof sheets, would be virtually impossible to distinguish from
Cooper's revisions. Moreover, the proof sheets display Fagan's important role in the
process, for it was he who initially proofread the typeset copy, comparing it to the
manuscript and catching many of the compositors' errors and innovations (but missing
many others), and it was he who acted as a copy-editor by querying phrasing that
he regarded as infelicitous and proposing changes for the author to consider. Finally
the proof sheets afford a full picture of Cooper's role, as he responded positively or
negatively to Fagan's queries, corrected some of the errors that had eluded Fagan's
proofing, and continued the revision of his text that he had begun with his manuscript
alterations—all the time, it would seem, working without further reference to
the manuscript.

The text that resulted from this process, the basis for the first American edition
and for all subsequent printings of Afloat and Ashore, is a highly imperfect one. As
the proof sheets reveal, in Part 1 alone more than 600 substantive departures from the
author's manuscript, consisting of compositorial errors as well as innovations, escaped
the scrutiny of Fagan and Cooper. Some of those printers' variants merely blunt the
edges of Miles Wallingford's narration, as when (at 1.226.26-27) Emily Merton's
"bright, blue, English eye" becomes her "light, blue English eye," or muffle the tones
of a character's speech, as when Marble, asserting that he has enough needles and
thread to "set up" a slop shop, is made to say that he has enough to "supply" one (at
1.435.17). But many other such variants do serious damage to Cooper's meanings, as
when the compositor drops whole lines of the manuscript (at 1.459.14-17 and 1.471.79)
or misreads "into the colony" as "in the valley" (at 1.16.22), "even more" as
"comrade" (1.23.6), "gleaned" as "gained" (1.66.4), "sly" as "shy" (1.166.5), "hint"
as "point" (1.181.16), "more" as "men" (1.278.25), "sheers" as "shores" (1.359.27),
"Callao" as "called" (1.383.27), "minx" as "miss" (1.475.16), "artlessness" as "restlessness"
(1.515.17), and even "south" as "north" (1.231.1).

In setting the text of Afloat and Ashore from Cooper's manuscript, Fagan's compositors
applied what would seem to be a house style in the treatment of capitalization,
spelling, and punctuation. Thus at the same time that the compositors correct
a good number of the mechanical errors in AMS, in many more instances, though
with varying consistency, they obscure Cooper's acceptable, if at times unconventional,
accidental forms. For example, the printers regularly capitalize his lower case
"state" (in reference to the American political division) and use the lower case for
his capitalized "Street" (as in "Wall Street"); they print his "favor" as "favour" and
his "any thing" as "anything"; and they often normalize his characteristic treatment
of the comma, by which it functions only sporadically in its familiar grammatical role
of signaling such things as the distinction between restrictive and non-restrictive
clauses but persistently as an indicator of the pauses that a speaker might make, almost
in the manner of phrase-marks in a musical score.

The styling of Cooper's text by the compositors extends to his words and word-order.
They frequently tinker with his prepositioned idioms, as when they change
"edifice in stone" to "edifice of stone" at 1.16.26; they update his verb forms, as when
they change "sprung" to "sprang" at 1.50.17; they fuss with his connectives, as when
they change "Then" to "Besides" at 1.212.24 or "for" to "as" at 1.413.4; and they rearrange
his adverbs, as when they change "got subsequently" to "subsequently got"
at 1.52.16.

But beyond such piddling refinements and wholly apart from the hundreds of compositorial
misreadings of AMS is a large class of substantive variants in the uncorrected
proof (subsequently referred to as PR) that can only be seen as attempts by
the printers to re-write Cooper. These variants have nothing to do with styling, nor
are they forms that have any visual resemblance to those of AMS. Rather, they are
free inventions, apparent efforts to improve upon the author. Thus AMS "named"
becomes "called" in PR (1.50.26), "in that day" becomes "at that time" (1.55.12),
"steeples" becomes "spires" (1.55.22), "senses" becomes "soul" (1.60.10), "square-built"
becomes "square-rigged" (1.62.11), "direct" becomes "enclose" (1.68.17), "portion" becomes
"part" (1.77.25), "threshing" becomes "good threshing" (1.78.18), "passage"
becomes "voyage" (1.80.21), "oddities" becomes "peculiarities" (1.81.1), "the tale"
becomes "it" (1.82.12), "in the spring" becomes "early in the spring" (1.82.17) and
"as soon as" becomes "at the time" (1.92.4). These examples are drawn from just two
of the thirty chapters of Part 1, but they are representative in kind of this whole class
of variants.

All of the extant proof of Afloat and Ashore except that for the first seven paragraphs
of the Preface to Part 1 is marked with notations—corrections, queries, and
occasional comments—made distinctly in black ink and written in a hand that is
clearly John Fagan's. Fagan's copy-editing (hereafter referred to as FPR) performs a
number of different functions. For one thing, it corrects many printer's errors, most
of them typographical, such as the use of the wrong font, the misalignment of type,
or the setting of an inverted letter. Some of those corrections, as when FPR supplies
AMS text that the compositor has dropped, could only have been made by reference
to the manuscript. The many occasions on which Fagan overlooked compositorial
departures from AMS, however, suggest that he did not read the proof against the
manuscript but only consulted the manuscript when he encountered obvious anomalies
in PR.

In addition to making corrections, Fagan continues in proof the process of styling
that the compositors had initiated in PR, attending to spelling, capitalization, and
punctuation and making a few minor substantive changes on his own authority, such
as replacing PR "as much as" with "so much as" at 1.115.27-116.1, PR "quick" to
"quickly" at 1.357.15, and PR "sung" to "sang" at 1.370.16. But nowhere does FPR
embody the bold substantive changes to Cooper's language that PR so frequently
(and silently) does. Rather Fagan almost always poses substantive changes as proposals
or queries, at times only underlining the forms that he regards as questionable and at

others both underlining the form and suggesting an alternative in the margin along
with the abbreviation "qr." The queries that he addresses to the author range from
such small matters as changing PR "dove" to "dived" at 1.362.5 (a proposal that
Cooper rejected) to issues of plot and character: at 1.453.14-16, for example, he marks
Miles' joke about the width of Neb's grin during the battle with the Malay pirates
and then comments marginally, "This remark seems scarcely to consist with the
gravity of Wallingford" and at 1.455.13 he underlines Miles' mention of the Bay of
Naples, querying, "Will Wallingford see Naples?" Although Cooper usually responds
to Fagan's stylistic queries by revising the text, he never makes changes in response to
Fagan's comments on his narrative, and some he strikes out with a thoroughness that
suggests a degree of fury.