University of Virginia Library

Notes on Cancellation in Scott's Life of Napoleon
by
B. J. McMullin

The idea of writing a biography of Napoleon was suggested to Sir Walter Scott in late May 1825 by his bookseller-partner Archibald Constable, who proposed that 'the Author of Waverley' produce such a work—to be in four volumes—for his projected 'Miscellany'.[1] A mere two years later (28 June 1827) appeared the nine volumes of The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, Emperor of the French. With a preliminary view of the French Revolution. By the Author of "Waverley," &c.,, a publication long known to be peppered

with cancels—indeed, Ruff has identified 125 of them.[2]. The cancels were occasioned for the most part by the need to correct matters of fact—dates, points of the compass, the names of protagonists, the geographical relationship of combatants, and so on—and, less often, of grammar (notably errors in agreement). Not all errors, however, were corrected by this process of extensive cancellation, for each volume has in addition an errata slip; and Ruff records that the second edition, also dated 1827, contains 28 further cancels. Scott erred in matters of fact essentially because of the circumstances in which Napoleon was written; it is the purpose of this essay (i) to recount those circumstances and then (ii) to add notes supplementary to Ruff's on the cancels.

(i)

The proposal that the biography be included in 'Constable's Miscellany' was apparently not long pursued, and the earliest subsequent references to it regard it as constituting a separate publication, to be issued in three volumes. Even before Scott had started writing, Ballantyne produced estimates for printing the work in four volumes post octavo and three volumes demy octavo, but a decision was made in favour of three volumes post octavo, a compression to be achieved by increasing the size of the type page.[3] By early September 1825 Scott had begun reading and making notes,[4] and by early October he had completed volume 1 except for revising and adding authorities (Letters 9:231; to Ballantyne, 7 Oct. 1825). At this stage Scott believed that the work would run to five volumes, having decided that the first volume should be 'entirely preliminary a sketch of the Revolution'.[5] As writing progressed, Scott's estimate of the number of volumes that the work would occupy increased. By late April 1826, when he had completed volume 2, he believed that 'from the materials that pour in it cannot be comprised in less than six volumes' (Letters 10:22; to Ballantyne, 26 April [1826]). By mid-September, when volume 5 was nearly complete, he had realised that 'the work must necessarily extend to seven volumes. I cannot squeeze it into six' (Letters 10:105; to John Gibson, junior, 15 Sept. [1826]). In March 1827 he was referring to an eighth volume (Letters 10:177; to Ballantyne, [21 March

1827]), in May to a ninth (Letters 10:212; to Maria Edgeworth, 15 May 1827). Scott's changing estimates of the extent of the work were duly reflected in advertisements for it—Ruff cites those from The Edinburgh Weekly Journal: 11 January 1826, 5 volumes; 8 November 1826, 7 volumes; 11 April 1827, 8 volumes; and finally, 27 June 1827 (the day before publication), 9 volumes.

Great though the task was of writing a biography of Napoleon, it did not occupy Scott's entire attention in the two years in which he was at work on it. In November 1825 he began Woodstock (Letters 9:217; to Ballantyne, [6 Nov. 1825]), published 28 April 1826, and by June 1826 he had started on Chronicles of the Canongate (Letters 10:52; to Ballantyne, 8 June 1826), published October 1827. In addition he oversaw the preparation of the six-volume Miscellaneous Prose Works, published October 1827, and apparently did further work on the subsequently abandoned edition of Shakespeare. Scott's capacity for churning out page after page seemingly at will is renowned. At one stage while working on Napoleon he even described himself as 'a perfect Automaton. Bonaparte runs in my head from 7 in the morning till ten at night without intermission'.[6] As long as he remained in good health Scott seems to have found writing not only easy but also pleasurable. But an added goad to maintaining a feverish pace was provided by the financial disaster of January 1826—when Constable, the printer James Ballantyne and Scott himself were all ruined by the failure of Hurst Robinson (the London booksellers)—for Scott's response to the financial mess was to attempt to recoup the losses by the exercise of his pen. Henceforth the writing of Napoleon is frequently associated with financial recovery: 'I have little to add excepting that I am instantly turning my thoughts to Napoleon. Labour of that kind is to me as it always has been pleasure and if I can extricate my unpleasant affairs by it surely it will not be wanting' (Letters 9:487; to Ballantyne, 26 March 1826). (In fact Scott received from Longman for Napoleon 10,500 guineas—i.e. £11,025 [Letters 10:113; to John Gibson, (8 Oct. 1826)].)

Despite the general pleasurability of the task, towards the end Scott had come to resent the time devoted to Napoleon. Writing to Morritt, he lamented that 'Napoleon has been such an absolute millstone about my neck not permitting me for many a long day to think my own thoughts to work my own work an[d] a fortiori to write my own letters' (Letters 10:226; to John B. S. Morritt, 16 June 1827). In the same letter he expressed himself unconcerned about the work's reception: 'I am now finishd . . . and as usual not very anxious about the opinion of the public as I have never been able to see that much anxiety has any effect in mollyfying the minds of the readers while it renders that of the author very uncomfortable'. And yet earlier he had described it as 'the only work of mine the popularity of which I somehow anticipate with confidence' (Letters 10:22; to Ballantyne, 26 April [1826]).

Napoleon, a work of history rather than purely of imagination, was a 'Brickwork' which could not be 'carried on without straw' (Letters 9:193; to Ballantyne, 27 July 1825). On the one hand Scott had to travel to inspect

official records and to tap the memories of those with first-hand knowledge—hence his trip to London and Paris in October-November 1826. In London his objective was to see the correspondence in the Foreign Office relating to Napoleon's final years on St. Helena (Journal 177, 27 July 1826, and 217, 19 Oct. 1826). Of his visit to Paris he reported to Ballantyne: 'I cannot say I have gaind much new information by my researches but I have cleard up many doubts and got much light on Bonapartes character of which I think I have got a very clear view by dint of conversing with friends and foes. So I have no reason to regret my coming here [London] or my trip to Paris' (Letters 10:124; to Ballantyne, 11 Nov. 1826). On the other hand appropriate source materials had to be assembled at Abbotsford. At the outset Constable undertook to supply volumes that Scott needed, including seventy-seven volumes of Le Moniteur universel (the official French government journal, 1789-1869), extending from June 1789 to December 1823; these he obtained in September 1825 from Paris (Archibald Constable 3:314). From time to time Scott expressed a need for specific volumes. In September 1825 it was for 'the Memoires of Segur . . . who was Master of Ceremonies to Buonaparte' (Letters 9:220; to Constable, [9 Sept. 1825]) and 'Made. de Genlis Memoirs— also Made. de Staels personal memoris—in the original, translations are such butcherly work' (Letters 9:224; to Constable, 22 Sept. 1825). In September 1826 it was for Southey's History of the Peninsular War (Letters 10:105; to John Gibson, junior, 15 Sept. [1826]), a work the first two volumes of which he had received by 5 October (Letters 10:110; to John Gibson, [5 Oct. 1826]) and which he read during the visit to London (Journal 217, 19 Oct. 1826). Occasionally writing was actually held up for want of a particular volume— in September 1826 'Denon's Egypt' (Letters 10:72; to Ballantyne, [8 July 1826]).

Other problems beset Scott too—for example: 'I have got Nap: d---n him into Italy where with bad eyes and obscure maps I have a little difficulty in tracing out his victorious chess-play' (Journal 135-136, 25 April 1826). And when Lady Scott died, 14 May 1826, Scott sought solace in writing. In the period 1-11 June he wrote the final 52 sheets of volume 3 (the equivalent of about 200 pages of print [Journal 137, 26 April 1826]). He admitted to his journal that it was 'an awful screed' and fully expected there to be inaccuracies in it (Journal 157, 12 June 1826). The topic of inaccuracies is a recurrent one. After Ballantyne had dined with him in March 1827 Scott noted: 'There must be sad inaccuracies, some which might certainly have been prevented by care, but as the Lazaroni used to say—"Did you but know how Lazy I am"' (Journal 287, 11 March 1827). Many of Scott's difficulties with Napoleon were in the event transferred to Ballantyne for resolution. When Ballantyne expressed pleasure with the manuscript of volume 1 Scott enjoined: 'Pray be careful in noticing repetitions of expression of which I am but too guilty' (Letters 9:277; to Ballantyne, [6 Nov. 1825]). Once printing started, Ballantyne became all too aware of the difficulties that the text presented: 'By the by, I have been reading over, critically, what has been printed; and I find the tautologies and inaccuracies very numerous indeed. Yet every

one sheet costs me 5 hours labour, if it costs me five minutes' (quoted in Letters 9:493, fn. 1). Scott's reply seems to convey both the speed with which he was working and perhaps a casual attitude to the resultant text: 'As for inaccuracies I really correct as attentively as my eyes will permit though as for spending five hours on a proof Sheet why I never spend two in writing the copy' (Letters 9:493; to Ballantyne, 28 March [1826]). In the end Scott appears to have anticipated publication with a certain resignation: 'I wish it may answer your expectations. It will disappoint unreasonable people on both sides and what I care much more about it will be found I fear in some particulars less accurate than I could wish. At the same time I think the errors will be chiefly verbal or literal. My eyes do not serve me so well to correct proofs as they did formerly' (Letters 10:159; to J. G. Lockhart, 15 Feb. [1827]).

Essentially, then, Scott erred—in matters of fact especially—because of the speed at which he was writing and the handicap of working at a distance from some of his primary sources. These difficulties were compounded by the effects of personal calamities experienced during the writing and what might be described as an ambivalent or changeable attitude towards the task in hand.

(ii)

William Ruff has already documented the extent of the cancels in Napoleon and discovered the reasons for implementing most of them. The major source of Ruff's information was a collection of 'leaves-to-be-cancelled' in the British Library (610.g.14) accompanied by a printed notice reading: 'The Publishers of the LIFE OF NAPOLEON BUONAPARTE, by the author of "Waverley", beg, in an especial manner, to direct your attention to the Cancels, about which the Binders have printed instructions in the book. 41, St Andrew Square, Edinburgh, 30th June 1827.' (Needless to say, a copy of the printed instructions would be an invaluable piece of evidence in reconstructing the early bibliographical history of Scott's Napoleon.) According to Ruff, 'This volume contains 131 leaves plus a few duplications; all but eight of the leaves have corrections in ink. The handwriting may be Robert Cadell's; it is not Scott's.' I take it that Ruff means that 123 [vere 124?—one cancellandum is not included in the collection] of the leaves are cancellanda with manuscript emendments to make them conform with the corresponding cancellantia and that the other eight are not emended and agree with the corresponding leaves in the volumes as published. Yet he goes on to say: 'If I could not find the cause of a cancel by looking in this volume, I have gone to the first American edition of the Life. In every case it shows the text before any passages were cancelled. . . . This American edition . . . was undoubtedly printed from proof sheets, not from the completed and bound volumes'. This use of the American edition would have been particularly ingenious in the absence of the British Library volume of cancellantia; it is not obvious, however, what it contributes to the enquiry that is not already clear from the other volume, and Ruff does not in fact claim that his looking was fruitful.

In the following notes I have not sought to repeat Ruff's investigation but, by examining two sets of the British edition in the Poynton Collection in the Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne, have attempted to shed some light on the printing-house management of the process of cancellation. The two sets are distinguishable by their binding: 'copy 1' is uncut in original boards; 'copy 2' is cut, in contemporary half calf, lacking all half-titles.

(1) Stop-press correction. Ruff records in the British Library collection of cancellanda six (not eight) aberrant leaves—i.e. leaves which agree with the corresponding leaves in all copies of the British and American editions with which he compared them. The explanation for the presence of these six leaves is that not all corrections were made after the printing of the sheet (or forme) containing them had been completed: some were effected in the course of the run by stopping the press, cancellantia being subsequently printed from the same setting of type for insertion only in those copies of the sheet containing the variant forme which had been worked off prior to the correction being made at press. The agreement of the American edition with the British in these six instances is to be explained simply by the American being set at these points from an exemplar of the British proof sheet which had already been corrected at press.

The two Poynton sets do not constitute a very large sample, but they do reveal a handful of examples of a correction being made at press in one copy and via cancellation in the other. The relative extent of stop-press correction is presumably suggested by the British Library collection of cancellanda, though since the collection is not absolutely complete and since there is a possibility that those corrections known hitherto only in the form of cancellantia may also exist made at press one might expect an examination of other sets to reveal further examples where the corrected reading is found variously on (a) an integral leaf (i.e. as a stop-press correction) or (b) a cancellans leaf.

Ninety per cent of the cancellans leaves contain a correction in only one of their two pages. One would therefore suppose that approximately half the corrections were made in a page forming part of the white-paper forme of the original impression, the other half in a page forming part of the reteration forme. A larger sample might therefore be expected to reveal—in instances where a correction was made first at press and then via a cancellans—two varieties of cancellantia: (b) (i) with both pages of the cancellans in the same setting as in (a), the correction having been made in the whitepaper forme; (b) (ii) with the page not containing the correction in a different setting from that in (a), the correction having been made in the reteration forme, thus requiring the page from the white-paper forme to be reset.

(2) Printing the cancellantia. Given the existence of form (a) of at least some leaves, the printing of the cancellantia cannot have been a straightforward business, in that in such instances the numbers required must have varied according to the stage within the impression at which the stop-press correction

had been made. There is also the possibility that cancellantia the need for which was recognized early enough could have been imposed for printing along with the preliminaries, though of course the preliminaries could equally well have been produced in various ways independently of the cancellantia. Despite these unknowns, a number of demonstrable observations can be made about the printing of the cancellantia:

(3) The second edition. As Ruff reports, the second edition of Napoleon comprises vol. 3 from gathering F onwards and vols. 4-9 in their entirety in new settings, vols. 1 and 2 and the beginning of vol. 3 being made up of sheets of the first edition. The presence of re-issued sheets is accounted for by the decision to reduce the first edition total from 8000 to 6000, a decision made, in April 1826, when printing had already started on vol. 3 (Journal 318, 21 June 1827). The two additional cancellantia reported by Ruff in the re-issued sheets of vol. 1 (T3 and X4) presumably resulted from Scott's reaction to the

appearance of the first edition: one day after publication he noted in his journal: 'Detected two gross blunders though which I had ordered for cancel' (Journal 319, 29 June 1827). However, since the decision to cancel was taken so soon after publication it is possible that the two cancellantia appear in the small number of copies of the first edition not yet distributed.

(4) Notes on individual volumes. In the following notes attention is drawn to points in which one or both of the Poynton copies differ from Ruff's record or are otherwise noteworthy (all references to leaves are to cancellantia unless otherwise stated; any cancellans not explicitly mentioned is found in the same setting, disjunct, in both copies).

Vol. 1 * 1 exists in two settings. In copy 1 the leaf is not signed and is set from the same fount as the rest of the Advertisement; the first line ends 'Work, have,'. In copy 2 the leaf is signed '*' and is set from a different fount from the rest of the Advertisement; the first line ends 'Work,' (thereafter the two settings are out of step for the whole of the first paragraph). Given that the copy 2 setting is from a different fount it is probably the later, and the 'signature' * is probably no more than one of the conventional methods of denoting a cancellans. If such is the case, the volume should properly collate i 2 2i 4 (-2i4) . . . , not i 2 * 1 2i 2. . . . 'VOL. I.' in direction line, A8r. Press figures: T6v-15, Y5r-18.

Vol. 2. F5 and F6 are conjugate in copy 1, disjunct in copy 2. There is an additional cancellans, Z1, in copy 2; it is in the same setting as Z1 in copy 1 (where Z1 and Z8 are conjugate). In copy 1 cancellandum K3 is intact; the slash made to mark it for replacement has been carefully repaired. Q7 (one of Ruff's aberrant leaves) is a cancellans in copy 2; it agrees in setting with Q7 in copy 1, where it is conjugate with Q2. The other aberrant leaf, b1, is in the same setting in both copies (it is a singleton, and the verso is blank). 'VOL. II.' in direction line, E1r, K3r (copy 2), K7r, R3r, S4r, Z2r, 2A5r, 2B6r. Press figures: F6r-20, O5v-10, S4v-6, Z2v-1.

Vol. 3. In copy 1, i2 (title leaf) is conjugate with i1 (i1 lacking in copy 2). B2 in copy 1, though the cancellans, has been salshed (presumably in error) and the slash carefully repaired. In both copies K5 is not a cancellans, but contains the corrected reading. M6 and M7 are conjugate in copy 1, disjunct in copy 2. Y3 and Y4 are conjugate in both copies. T2 (one of Ruff's aberrant leaves) is conjugate with T7 in both copies. Copy 1 contains a 6-line errata slip. Sheet number, 4, missing from A4 in copy 1, though the leaf is in the same setting as A4 in copy 2. 'VOL. III.' in direction line, A4r, L2r, M6r, M7r, R5r (leaf lacking in copy 1), X8r. Press figures: G4v-2, L2v-9.

Vol. 4. 'VOL. IV.' in direction line, E2r (leaf lacking in copy 1), R8r. Press figures: P3v-9, R1v-3, R8v-16, S6v-2.

Vol. 5. P8 and Q1 are conjugate in copy 1, disjunct in copy 2. X2 (one of Ruff's aberrant leaves) is in the same setting in both copies; though X7 is a cancellans in both copies, X2 almost certainly formed part of the original sheet. 'VOL. V.' in direction line, A2r, I5r, T8r. Press figures: F3v-8, N7v-14, Q1v-2, S3v-10, 2C7v-4.

Vol. 6. A2 and A3 and R8 and S1 are conjugate in both copies. In copy 1 Y8 is in fact the cancellans for volume 5, Y8 (where the cancellation has also been made). 'VOL. VI.' in direction line, A2r, C7r. Press figures: M6v-5, Q7v-6, U4r-13 in copy 1, 14 in copy 2 (U4 in same setting in both copies).

Vol. 7. H3 and H4 and 2A5 and 2A6 are conjugate in copy 1, disjunct in copy 2. A4, C3 and E3 (among Ruff's aberrant leaves) are in the same setting in both copies; all form an integral part of their sheet. Copy 1 contains a 3-line errata slip. In copy 2 B7 is attached to a stub, but the inner margin is narrower than usual, suggesting perhaps that the leaf was excised in error and then reinserted (it is in the same setting as B7 in copy 1, and B7 is not included in the British Library collection of cancellanda). 'VOL. VII.' in direction line, A2r, B8r, C1r, H3r. Press figures: 2A7r-14, 2A7v-12, 2G3v-7.

Vol. 8. R6 is set in duplicate. 'VOL. VIII.' in direction line, A4r ('VOL. VII.' in copy 2), L1r, R6r (both settings). Press figure: R6r (copy 2)-10.

Vol. 9. Y1 exists in two settings, distinguishable by lines 13 and 14 of Y1v ending respectively 'have' and 'to' in copy 1 and 'steps' and 'life,' in copy 2.

The evidence afforded by the Poynton sets of Scott's Napoleon may have helped shed some light on the process of cancellation in that publication, but it does not allow a resolution of all the problems associated with that process. Clearly further sets need to be examined before the printing history of the work can be reconstructed with some certainty.

Notes