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I
The answer to the question which is the best text of a given novel of Henry James — the unrevised, first revised, second revised, third or even fourth revised — depends above all on what the given novel is. The answer, to borrow James's own words from a slightly different context in the preface to The Spoils of Poynton, is to be found in "the logic of the particular case," a logic to be found in the circumstances of composition, publication, revision, and republication. The purpose of this paper is to examine the logic of that particular case The Spoils of Poynton in order to determine the best text and to see what light a study of James's revisions of the novel throws on an understanding of the Spoils in particular and on James's habits and patterns of revision in general.
Four different texts of The Spoils of Poynton were published during James's lifetime. The original serialization of the novel under the title "The Old Things" appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1896. The first American and first English editions appeared, a week apart, in February, 1897,[5] and in 1908 the novel was published again in the New York Edition. The differences between the serial and the three editions of the novel are not merely the result of being set by
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