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Notes
I do not wish to suggest that a change can be assigned to author or compositor merely according to whether or not it is an improvement, for the kind of change I find no satisfactory way of assigning is the one where improvement is most obvious. This is the correction of a mistake or in felicity—usually of a slip in grammar or a violation of idiom. Should we, to choose examples from Goldsmith's Essays, assign the correction of "one of his legs were cut off" or "I would desire . . . to imitate that fat man who I have somewhere heard of" to the author or the compositor? All we could say, if the corrections first appeared in a revised edition, would be that Goldsmith probably changed the readings if he noticed them and that the compositor changed them without hesitation if Goldsmith left them uncorrected. Actually Goldsmith let the first reading stand through two revisions and passed over the second while revising the sentence in which it appears; the compositors of two authorized editions left the readings unchanged; and they were corrected only in a pirated edition. An editor will almost inevitably admit into the edited text the corrections of mistakes and infelicities if these corrections first appear in revised editions, but in so doing he may be following the compositor as frequently as the author. Indeed we may set it down as a rule that the more obvious the change, the more impossible to assign it either to author or compositor.
All the early editions of The Deserted Village have the same collation: 4°, A2 a2 B-G2. In the second edition all of a, B, and G and probably E2r are from the same setting as the first. In the third edition a-G are from the same setting as the second with no alterations in the text, but the evidence, as far as it goes, suggests that the sheets for the two were not continuously impressed: both have the same press figure on E2r, but in the second edition either E1 or E2 is a cancel; and G1v has a figure in the third but not in the second edition. In the fourth edition all of C and D, F2v, and probably F1r are from the same setting as the third. In the fifth edition all of a and B and E1r and E2v are from the same setting as the fourth. In the sixth edition all of D and F are from the same setting as the fifth. It may be noted that the third edition of The Traveller is all from the same setting of type as the second except for F2r-v.
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