University of Virginia Library

IV

Even if his resemblance to the "passionate corrector" Dencombe is accepted, it is difficult to see why, within four months of revising it for the first American edition, James again revised The Spoils of Poynton for the first English edition. It is unlikely that he had forgotten his recent revision, and there is no evidence, as with The Ambassadors,[21] that the circumstances of publication led him to revise even part of his serial independently for the London edition. Whatever the reason, James kept almost all the changes he had made for the first American edition, and in addition he made some five hundred more revisions. Less that a fifth of these affected changes James had

already made in his first revision. Only occasionally in these revisions of revisions did James return to readings found in the serial—as when he omitted a passage, added only in the first American edition, comparing Owen's behavior at Maggie's to his "cheerful slowness" at Ricks. Most of the alterations made in the second revision of the Spoils closely resemble the kinds of changes James made in the first. He continued, for instance, to remove extra commas and tighten his syntax. Changes in diction tend, as in the first revision, towards greater accuracy and specificity. Mrs. Gereth tries to "rub up" a glimmer in Owen's mind instead of attempting to "invoke" it, and Fleda feels not simply Owen's "lips" on her face, but his "warm lips." The most extensive addition to the first English edition is only a sentence spoken by Mrs. Gereth to Fleda on the latter's ignorance of the brutes that men are; the interpolated remark adds another detail to the treatment that Fleda receives from Mrs. Gereth after revealing her love for Owen.

The greater consistency of its punctuation and the increased precision of its diction make the first English edition of the Spoils something of an improvement over the first American edition. Beyond this, the second revision corrected a number of typographical errors in the first American edition, while introducing only a very few new ones of its own. There is, in short, no sound bibliographical reason why it should not be preferred over the Boston edition, and it is not surprising that James used the London edition as the basis for his third set of revisions of The Spoils of Poynton that he made for the New York Edition of his works.[22]