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Complaints about the texts of standard editions of James Joyce's works are fairly common, but they are usually directed at Ulysses and Finnegans Wake rather than at Joyce's earlier works. Yet the standard American Editions of Dubliners, from the first edition of B. W. Huebsch to the Modern Library, and the standard English editions, from the first edition of Grant Richards to Jonathan Cape, are among the most unJoycean texts of all Joyce's printed works — for reasons which become apparent when the prepublication printing history of the book is considered.
The present study is based primarily on a detailed examination of the manuscript and printing history of "The Dead." This story has been selected because of its length and importance in Dubliners and because the manuscript and printed versions available for its textual study are more complete than those available for the consideration of the other stories in Dubliners. Examinations of the textual histories of other stories in the collection indicate, however, that what is true of "The Dead" is also true of them, and that generalizations made on the basis of a study of "The Dead" will be valid for Dubliners as a whole.
The main outlines of the printing history of Dubliners have been recounted by Gorman and Ellmann in their biographies of Joyce and in the bibliography of Slocum and Cahoon.[1] In 1905 Joyce offered a
Whatever mysterious machinations went on, it is most unlikely that any more than a few pages of proof were ever typeset in this first attempt at Dubliners. By the time Joyce's negotiations with Richards had reached a dead end in October 1906, the manuscript had been expanded to fourteen stories by the inclusion of "A Little Cloud" (Letter: Joyce to Richards, 9 July 1906, at Harvard). In the next year Joyce wrote the final story, "The Dead,"[3] but it was not until April 1909 that he succeeded in interesting another publisher in Dubliners. Joseph Hone of Maunsel and Co., Dublin, agreed to look at the manuscript (Letter: Hone to Joyce, 18 April 1909, at Cornell) and in September 1909 Joyce was writing to Richards that Messrs. Maunsel hoped
The book was announced by Maunsel for the Spring of 1910 and Joyce received and corrected proofs in June of that year.[4] But even as the proofs were being corrected the now-familiar pattern of attempted censorship began again. Messrs. Maunsel objected to passages in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room"; Joyce did not make the requested changes in proof; and publication of the stories was delayed (Letters: Roberts to Joyce, 7 June 1910 and 9 Feb. 1911, at Cornell). Some time before the final collapse of negotiations on Joyce's visit to Dublin in September 1912, an edition of one thousand copies is believed to have been run off — probably in July of 1912.[5] But when Maunsel finally refused to publish the book and Joyce tried to purchase the sheets from John Falconer, the printer (so that he could publish them himself under the imprint of the Liffey Press), the sheets were reported destroyed by the printer.[6] Joyce always said that his book was "burned" (See Gas From a Burner, for example) but if one thousand copies of the sheets of Dubliners were actually destroyed, the deed was undoubtedly accomplished by the easier and less wasteful process of guillotining.
Despite the destruction of the edition, this Dublin setting of Dubliners is of considerable importance to those interested in Joyce's text, for Joyce obtained — "by a ruse," he said[7] — a set of proofs from this edition, which subsequently became the printer's copy for the first published edition of his book. (See Slocum A8 and Joyce's letters to Richards of 24 Jan. and 4 March 1914, at Harvard).
Joyce's difficulties in finding a publisher continued until November 1913, when he again approached Grant Richards. Richards accepted the book for the second time late in January of 1914 (Letter: Joyce to Richards 27 Feb. 1914, at Cornell; the contract is at Yale) offering Joyce the same royalty agreement as in 1906; and Joyce accepted the
A detailed study of the textual history of "The Dead" must rest on six documents:
- A. Fragments of a holograph manuscript with printer's notations in the Slocum collection at Yale.
- B. A complete manuscript — partly typed but completed in the hand of an amanuensis — in the Cornell Collection.
- C. An almost complete set of galley sheets from the Dublin printing, in the Slocum Collection.
- D. An almost complete copy of a late stage of the destroyed Dublin edition — sewn but not bound — in the Slocum Collection.
- E. A complete set of page proofs of the Grant Richards edition, 1914, in the Slocum Collection.
- F. The first edition itself (copy used for this study is in the Slocum Collection).
The interrelationships of these six documents are fairly complex but they can be traced with considerable certainty. Document A bears the notations of the Irish printer and was the copy text for the Maunsel (Dublin) printing.[8] If it were complete there would be no need to consult document B at all. But since A is fragmentary its relationship to B must be established in the hope that B can tell us something reliable about the missing parts of A. Fortunately the relationship is not difficult to work out. B is undoubtedly a faithful (though inexact in a few instances) copy of A. The occasional misreadings of the typist, like "Malius" for "Malins" and "wooed" for "waved" can be directly related to misleading handwriting in the holograph MS. Some of the typist's and amanuensis' mistakes, such as "parent" for "gaunt" and various omissions of letters and words, have been corrected in Joyce's
The corrected holograph manuscript, document A, became the printer's text for the Dublin (Maunsel) edition (see fn. 8 above). The relationships among the various texts can be illustrated most clearly by tracing one passage through all its stages. This passage (pp. 255, 256 of the Modern Library Edition; p. 227 of Jonathan Cape, 1954) is unfortunately among the missing parts of document A, but it was corrected by Joyce in document B,[10] and apparently no red-ink changes were made in A after B was copied. The passages are designated here by lower-case letters corresponding to the upper-case designations (above) of the documents from which they are taken. The variants among these will be discussed later.
Nobody answered this question and Mary Jane led the table back to the legitimate opera. One of her pupils had given her a pass for Mignon. Of course, it was very fine, she said, but it made her think of poor Georgina Burns. Mr Browne could go back farther still to the old Italian companies that used to come to Dublin, Tietjens, Trebelli Ilma de Murzka, Campanini, the great Giuglini, Revelli, Aramburo. Those were the days, he said, when there was something like singing to be heard in Dublin. He told too of how the top gallery of the Old Royal used to be packed night after night, of how one night an Italian tenor had sung five encores to Let me like a soldier fall, introducing a high C every time, and of how the gallery boys
Nobody answered this question, and Mary Jane led the table back to the legitimate opera. One of her pupils had given her a pass for Mignon. Of course, it was very fine, she said, but it made her think of poor Georgina Burns. Mr. Browne could go back farther still to the old Italian companies that used to come to Dublin—Tietjeus, Trebell's, Ilma de Murzka, Campanini, the great Gingliui, Revelli, Aramburo. Those were the days, he said, when there was something like singing to be heard in Dublin. He told too of how the top gallery of the Old Royal used to be packed night after night, of how one night an Italian tenor had sung five encores to Let me like a soldier fall, introducing a high C everytime, and of how the gallery boys would sometimes in their enthusiasm unyoke the horses from the carriage of some great prima donna and pull her themselves through the streets to her hotel. Why did they never play the grand old operas now, he asked—Norma, Lucrezia Borgia? Because they could not get the voices to sing them: that was why.
Nobody answered this question and Mary Jane led the table back to the legitimate opera. One of her pupils had given her a pass for Mignon. Of course, it was very fine, she said, but it made her think of poor Georgina Burns. Mr Browne could go back farther still to the old Italian companies that used to come to Dublin—Tietjens, Trebelli, Ilma de Murzka, Campanini, the great Giuglini, Revelli, Aramburo. Those were the days, he said, when there was something like singing to be heard in Dublin. He told too of how the top gallery of the old Royal used to be packed night after night, of how one night an Italian tenor had sung five encores to Let me Like a
Nobody answered this question, and Mary Jane led the table back to the legitimate opera. One of her pupils had given her a pass for Mignon. Of course, it was very fine, she said, but it made her think of poor Georgina Burns. Mr Browne could go back farther still, to the old Italian companies that used to come to Dublin—Teitjeus, Trebell's, Ilma de Murzka, Campanini, the great Gingliui, Revelli, Aramburo. Those were the days, he said, when there was something like singing to be heard in Dublin. He told too of how the top gallery of the old Royal used to be packed night after night, of how one night an Italian tenor had sung five encores to Let me like a Soldier fall, introducing a high C every time, and of how the gallery boys would sometimes in their enthusiasm unyoke the horses from the carriage of some great prima donna and pull her themselves through the streets to her hotel. Why did they never play the grand old operas now, he asked, 'Norma, Lucrezia Borgia? Because they could not get the voices to sing them: that was why.'
'O, well,' said Mr Bartell D'Arcy, 'I presume there are as good singers to-day as there were then.'
'Where are they?' asked Mr Browne defiantly.
'In London, Paris, Berlin,' said Mr Bartell D'Arcy warmly. 'I suppose Caruso, for example, is quite as good, if not better than any of the men you have mentioned.'
Nobody answered this question and Mary Jane led the table back to the legitimate opera. One of her pupils had given her a pass for Mignon. Of course it was very fine, she said, but it made her think of poor Georgina Burns. Mr Browne could go back farther still, to the old Italian companies that used to come to Dublin—Tietjens, Ilma de Murzka, Campanini, the great Trebelli Giuglini, Ravelli, Aramburo. Those were the days, he said, when there was something like singing to be heard in Dublin. He told too of how the top gallery of the old Royal used to be packed night after night,
'O, well,' said Mr Bartell D'Arcy, 'I presume there are as good singers to-day as there were then.'
'Where are they?' asked Mr Browne defiantly.
'In London, Paris, Milan,' said Mr Bartell D'Arcy warmly. 'I suppose Caruso, for example, is quite as good, if not better than any of the men you have mentioned.'
Some of the differences between b-1 and c-1 are of indeterminable significance. The change from "the hotel" to "her hotel," for example, may be due to a mistake made in the preparation of B, a red-ink change in A, or a compositor's change in the preparation of C. But other differences allow us to make inferences with almost absolute certainty. The various changes in the spelling of proper names are undoubtedly due to the compositor's inability to read Joyce's holograph accurately in those instances where he could not guess at the correct spelling on the basis of his own knowledge. We have seen how the typist of document B had trouble with the proper name "Malins," reading a u for the n. The compositor of C had the same trouble here (and also earlier when he misread the Irish phrase "Beannacht libh" as "Beaunacht libh"—as it appears in galley 7). In this case he has read "Tietjeus" for "Tietjens", "Trebell's" for "Trebelli", and "Gingliui" for "Giuglini". Passage d-1, from the final Maunsel printing includes the correction of all these misspellings and some other changes of the sort which would have been made only by Joyce. "Berlin" in b and c (and presumably in the missing part of a) becomes "Vienna" in d, and "Old Royal" becomes "old Royal". Texts C and D are impressed from the same setting of type,[11] though C is in the form of unpaged slip galleys and D is in the form of numbered pages, apparently in the last stage of preparation before sewing and binding.[12] We cannot now tell how many states of this impression existed between the galleys and the final printing, but numerous corrections were made and incorporated into state D. In "The Dead" alone three hundred commas were removed between C and D; over thirty hyphens were removed, the hyphenated
When the Dublin impression of Dubliners was destroyed by Manusel's printer, Joyce, as we know, obtained a set of proofs which became the copy-text for Grant Richards' printer. The normal assumption would be that Joyce would take the last and most correct text, in this case text D. But this was not a normal situation. The text he was able to get, he got "by a ruse"; and it was certainly not text D. A glance at passages c-1, d-1, and e-1 will show that e contains the same absurd mis-spellings which we found in c, and that the third on the list of operatic cities is once again Berlin. This can mean only that the printer's copy for E must have been much closer to C than to D.
There are several reasons why we must be satisfied with saying that the printer's text in this case is close to C rather than simply inferring that C was the copy-text. Joyce and Richards in their correspondence unmistakably refer to pages rather than galley sheets;[13] and a few parts of E seem closer to D than to C (as when Mr. Browne's skin, "dark yellow" in galley 3 of C, becomes "swarthy" on p. 268 of D and remains so on p. 225 of E). In these cases we cannot be sure whether the corrections to C have been incorporated in some other set of page-proofs—a hypothetical, partially corrected C1—or whether Joyce has introduced corrections by hand in a set essentially the same as C but in pages rather than galleys. We can note, however, that wherever substantive changes occur between C and E, they are marked by a culling out of commas in the surrounding passages; and wherever D indicates that corrections should have been made in C which were not, in fact, made before E was printed, the surrounding area remains heavily punctuated in E (as in C), and the commas are finally culled out in the First Edition itself, state F.
The whole problem of punctuation in the text of Dubliners is an important and interesting one. This problem can be divided into two main aspects—the punctuation of direct discourse and the use of the comma. Joyce was habitually a light punctuator. The textual history of Dubliners indicates that he was twice forced to go through his text, once in the Irish printing and again in the English, removing what he considered an excess of editorial or compositorial punctuation, culling out more than three hundred commas from "The Dead" between C and D, and over two hundred and twenty-five between E and F, after
- a-2 (p. 18) Probably in the school they had gone to as girls that kind of work had been taught for one year his mother had worked for him as a birthday present a waistcoat. . . .
- b-2 (p. 10) same as a-2
- c-2 (galley 4) Probably in the school they had gone to as girls that kind of work had been taught for one year; his mother had worked for him as a birthday present a waistcoat. . . .
- d-2 (p. 273) same as a-2 and b-2
- e-2 (p. 230) same as c-2
- f-2 (p. 230) Probably in the school they had gone to as girls that kind of work had been taught for one year. His mother had worked for him as a birthday present a waistcoat. . . .
Here, Joyce in his manuscript avoided using the standard comma before the phrase "for one year" which would have made it clear that "for" in that case was a conjunction and not a preposition. An officious compositor in setting text C changed Joyce's sentence, wrongly breaking it after "for one year" instead of before it. Joyce corrected this change so that D reads as A and B do in this passage, but E naturally follows C. Finally the reading was emended even further in the wrong direction in F (by a compositor or editor) and so it stands in our modern editions —Modern Library, p. 238; Jonathan Cape 1954, p. 212. This is one of the corrections Joyce sent Richards in lieu of a second proof-reading, apparently having missed it—as he missed many others in his haste—on the first reading. (See Appendix.)
Joyce's views on the subject of the punctuation of direct discourse were even less orthodox than his views on the comma. He strongly objected to the use of the inverted comma or quotation marks, and expressed these views to Grant Richards in February 1906 and again in March of 1914. As Joyce's views on the subject are very strong, and since the published volume of his letters prints this passage in a somewhat garbled form, the passage is reprinted here in the notes.[14] In the
Grant Richards, however, insisted on normal English usage; thus in text E the dashes are replaced by inverted commas. We can even note in e-1 (above) how, at the end of the long first paragraph, the English compositor clumsily converted indirect into direct discourse through mistaking the dash used as colon in c-1 for a dash introducing a quotation. This stands as direct discourse in the modern English text (Cape, 1954) even though the use of the conditional past tense is clearly an indirect mode of rendering what would be present tense in direct discourse; but the modern American text (Modern Library) even more confusingly closes with quotation marks which have no mate opening the quotation anywhere in the paragraph. The main point of all this interest in the method of presenting direct discourse is that no edition of Dubliners has ever been printed which follows the usage desired by Joyce, though he was able to enforce his views on these matters in the books which followed Dubliners.
Passage f-1 (above) indicates the way in which Joyce corrected text E and also it reveals that his correction was not perfect. He rearranged the operatic passage and corrected the spelling; Berlin he again replaced, this time by Milan instead of Vienna as in d-1; and for Norma he substituted the more recondite Dinorah; but he missed the erratic capitalization of Let me like a Soldier fall and the introduction of the awkward direct discourse at the end of the first paragraph. That he did not pick up all the mistakes is not surprising. He had promised Grant Richards to return corrected proof two days after receipt (Joyce was still in Trieste at the time) and he expected to have a chance to correct
Now we may turn to ten of the improvements which Joyce had made in the Irish text of "The Dead" between C and D which he never reintroduced in the English edition, and which consequently have been omitted in all modern printings of the book. These improvements were made only in proof; and, therefore, when Joyce was unable to obtain a late state of the Irish printing he had no record of these changes. In all cases cited below, Text F substantially follows C and E, the modifications made in D having been lost when C1 became printer's text for E.
- Text F. 'Well, I'm ashamed of you,' said Miss Ivors frankly. 'To say you'd write for a paper like that . . .'
- Text D. "paper" changed to "rag" (CF. Modern Library p. 240; Jonathan Cape, 1954, p. 214)
Change 1:
- Text F. 'The fact is,' said Gabriel, 'I have just arranged to go—'
- Text D. "just" changed to "already" (ML 242/JC 215)
Change 2:
Note that changes 1 and 2 serve to make Miss Ivors a bit more outspoken in her attack and to make Gabriel's refusal of her request that he join in a trip to the west of Ireland seem a bit less impromptu.
- Text F. '. . . What row had you with Molly Ivors?' 'No row. Why? Did she say so?' 'Something like that. . . .' 'There was no row,' said Gabriel moodily. . . .
- Text D. "row" changed to "words" in all instances and "was" changed to "were" (ML 245/JC 217-218)
Change 3:
- Text F. Her son-in-law was a splendid fisher. One day he caught a beautiful big fish and the man in the hotel cooked it for their dinner.
- Text D. Her son-in-law was a splendid fisher. One day he caught a fish, a beautiful big big fish: and the man in the hotel boiled it for their dinner. (ML 245/JC 218)
Change 4:
In change 4 Mrs. Malin's personality is rendered more vividly; the mode of preparation of the fish made more specific.
- Text F. 'And do you mean to say,' asked Mr Browne incredulously, 'that a chap can go down there and put up there as if it were a hotel and live on the fat of the land and then come away without paying anything?'
- Text D. —And do you mean to say,—asked Mr Browne incredulously, —that a fellow can go down there and put up there as it if were a hotel and then come away without paying a farthing?—(ML 258/JC 229)
Change 5:
In Change 5, Text D, "anything" becomes "farthing". But note that "chap" in text F is not a relapse after a change to "fellow" in D, but a new change introduced between E and F, probably for the same reason that "farthing" was introduced between C and D—to make Browne's speech more concrete and Browne, therefore, more vivid.
- Text F. The table burst into applause and laughter at this allusion.
- Text D. "allusion" changed to "sally" (ML 262/JC 233)
Change 6:
- Text F. 'Someone is fooling at the piano, anyhow,' said Gabriel.
- Text D. "fooling" changed to "strumming" (ML 266/JC 236)
Change 7:
Both 6 and 7 seem to be attempts to find words more in keeping with the mood or tone of the passages they are in.
- Text F. 'Yes, sir,' said the cabman. 'Make like a bird for Trinity College.' 'Right, sir,' said the cabman.
- Text D. In the cabman's second speech "said" is changed to "cried". (ML 269/JC 239)
Change 8:
Another change in the interest of vividness, "cried" expresses the cabman's relief at finally getting a direction he understands.
- Text F. A ghastly light from the streetlamp lay in a long shaft from one window to the door.
- Text D. "ghastly" changed to "ghostly" (ML 278/JC 247)
Change 9:
This is a most important correction. Text B reads "ghostly", C "ghastly", probably due to a misreading of A by the compositor of C. Joyce made the correction in D but did not pick it up again in his proof-reading of E. The slightly eerie connotations
- Text F. '. . . He gave me back that sovereign I lent him and I didn't expect it really. It's a pity he wouldn't keep away from that Browne because he's not a bad fellow really.'
- Text D. the second "really" changed to "at heart" (ML 279/JC 248)
Change 10:
These ten changes represent only the obvious substantive changes made in the text of "The Dead" by Joyce and subsequently lost. Texts D and F also vary through compositorial errors introduced in E which passed unnoticed into F and thence into modern texts. The simply ungrammatical "The peals of laughter which followed Gabriel's imitation of the incident was interrupted. . . ." (ML 268/JC 238, my italics) is just an error—B, C, and D all reading "were". And there are other similar problems. A study I have now in progress of the other stories in Dubliners indicates that many other substantive changes have been lost from the text. But a textual study of "The Dead" alone is enough to establish the fact that we are reading one of our most precise and careful writers in editions which can be greatly improved, which can be made both more correct and more Joycean.
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