University of Virginia Library

III

James's customary practice was to have the first editions of his novels appear about the same time as their final serialized installments. Nevertheless, the first American and English editions of the Spoils were not published until February, 1897, nearly four months after the serial had ended. They were delayed because James's English publisher, William Heinemann, was scheduled to bring out in the fall

of 1896 the first edition of The Other House—the novel James converted from a play after writing the Spoils—as it ended its serial in The Illustrated London News.[14] The Spoils was put off until 1897 so as not to compete with The Other House which, because of its serialization, could not be published earlier.[15] This delay in the publication of Heinemann's edition of the Spoils probably accounts for the most striking fact about the two first editions of the novel: the differences between the two texts. The Boston and London first editions have in common more than twelve hundred revisions from "The Old Things." Yet apart from national differences in spelling and punctuation, there are nearly six hundred variant readings between the two first editions that appeared within a week of each other. These variants reveal that James obviously did not revise his serial once for both editions. The even greater number of identical readings to be found in both first editions but not in the serial reveals that James did not revise his serial independently for each edition. Since the American edition follows the serial in most of the variants between the two editions, it appears that the first American edition was the intermediate text in a sequence of revisions from the serial to the first English edition. An unpublished letter to the editor of the Atlantic reveals that James did not originally intend to revise the same novel twice within four months.[16] James hoped to send Houghton, Mifflin, the American publishers of both the Atlantic and the Spoils, revised proofsheets of the first English edition that Heinemann had already contracted to publish. What appears to have happened instead is that Heinemann set up the English first edition, after it had been delayed by The Other House, from the revised sheets of the first American edition which in turn had been set up from revised sheets of the Atlantic installments.

When he revised the serial for the first American edition, James made more than fourteen hundred changes. Most of these were merely fingerings of style—minor changes in punctuation, diction, and syntax. He removed many of the Atlantic's superfluous commas, and he tightened and clarified his sentence structure by bringing subjects and

verbs closer together and by changing parenthetical or relative clauses to nouns or participial phrases. Some revisions corrected solecisms or awkwardnesses in "The Old Things," as, for example, the changing of a misplaced phrase that had described Fleda's and Owen's eyes catching sounds through a door. In general the diction of the first American edition is more exact than that of the serial. Certain non-Jamesean ambiguities were dropped—as in the plumbing image that James suppressed by changing a "flushed and overflowing Sunday" to a "flushed and huddled Sunday." In revisions that involved more than stylistic changes, James altered the ages of Mrs. Gereth (she becomes "young in the fifties" instead of "young at fifty" and she has been married twenty-six instead of twenty-four years) and Fleda's father (he becomes fifty-seven instead of fifty-five). These changes imply that Fleda and Owen are perhaps a little older in the first American edition than in "The Old Things." In the first American edition only Fleda's mother is dead and Fleda is meagerly supported by her father who collects his own kinds of old things; there is no mention of a grandfather. Fleda's impressions of Owen Gereth were subjected to an interesting series of alterations that de-emphasize Owen as a stupid boy and thus increase the plausibility of his attractiveness to Fleda. In the first chapter of the serial Fleda is described as feeling that Owen was "singularly handsome and admirably stupid" but after the first revision Owen is "absolutely beautiful and delightfully dense." Again in the first chapter, the description of Owen as a "bouncing boy" is dropped, and further on in the novel his "stupidity" is changed twice to "heaviness."[17]

The most important single change from the serial to the first American edition was the title. In changing it from "The Old Things" to The Spoils of Poynton James continued to identify the house and furnishings as the center of his novel—a center also stressed in the earlier working title, the "House Beautiful" and "The Great House."[18] The final title adds something more, however; through irony it implies that the old things of Poynton are spoils not only because

they are fruits of battle,[19] but also because they spoil all the human relationships in the novel by occupying such a central place in them. The title also suggests that ultimately the characters themselves—including Fleda Vetch—become the spoils of Poynton as they are morally affected by the old things.

Other changes in imagery made during the first revision developed images implicit in the serial.[20] An effective example of this is seen in the way James revised his description of Poynton so as to make it more specific without getting into the difficulties of making it more detailed. In "The Old Things" Poynton is described as follows:

This fine example of the Jamesean Vague was revised as follows for the first American edition: