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Notes
Permission to publish this account of the proofs is gratefully acknowledged courtesy of Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf's nephew, as well as the Lilly Library, Indiana University, and the Library of the University of California at Los Angeles.
In a letter of 2 September 1982 Rita Spurdle of the Rights Department at the Hogarth Press informs me that many of the early Hogarth records were destroyed in World War II and that there is no correspondence at Hogarth between Woolf and her printers at R. & R. Clark regarding the proofs of Mrs. Dalloway.
For this collation I have used copies of the first American edition (A1) in the Rare Books Department, Perkins Library, Duke University, and in the Manuscripts Department, Lilly Library, Indiana University. Copies of the first Hogarth edition (E1) were checked in the Rare Books Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and in the Boston Public Library. For descriptions of the various editions, excluding the second American edition (A2), see B. J. Kirkpatrick, A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf (24-29).
An entry for printing and binding copies of Mrs. Dalloway appears for 28 March 1925 in an R. & R. Clark account book, now at the National Library of Scotland. This entry cannot be taken as evidence, however, for receipt of corrected proofs, despite the fact that there is a charge made for "Alt[eration]s and proofs." Nor does it suggest that Woolf was sent second proofs to correct. She did receive word from New York that the corrected first proofs (provided by Hogarth) had been received, and she wrote in her diary on 19 April that Harcourt thought the novel was "wonderful" (III.9). No mention of second proofs is made in her letters and diary for this period, and because the first Harcourt edition follows so closely the corrected first proofs Woolf had sent, it is safe to conclude that after mid-March she made no further revises for that edition. Letter (16 September 1982) from I. G. Brown, Assistant Keeper, Department of MSS, National Library of Scotland.
Harcourt continues to issue Mrs. Dalloway in photo-offset reprints of A1 (1925). A new second edition (A2), re-set and published in 1981, fails to correct the error as well as the omission: cf. 94.3/4 and 186.26/27, where no divisions are indicated.
Woolf's typescript for the Harcourt proofs contains errors of its own—"spoilt" for "spoil"; "wiat" for "wait"—both of which are silently corrected by Harcourt (A1 226.7, 18). Neither of these, however, appears in Shields' list (166), while the one change she does cite from this revised passage—"Holmes and Bradshaw like that sort of thing."—is obviously a printer's error where "like" appears for "liked" (Apr reading). Thus, this is not one of Harcourt's "corrections" of Woolf's revised proofsheets, as Shields asserts (166).
Although all of Woolf's emendations on Apr appear in purple ink, there are pencilled corrections on Apr, all of which were made by a Harcourt editor. An unpublished letter (20 May 1925) from Alfred Brace to Roscoe Crosby Gaige explains that "the pencilled corrections are ours [i.e., Harcourt's], but the corrections in ink throughout are in the author's handwriting." In addition to galley marks and other directions to the Harcourt printer, the following pencilled changes occur on Apr: 'a' alt. to 'A' (71.1); hyphen insrt. aft. '2great' (159.10); 'S' alt. to 's' (232.1). Moreover, at Apr 178.2, a circle is drawn in pencil around a quotation mark followed by a period, presumably so that the punctuation would be standardized, as indeed it was (A1 178.7). The letter from Brace to Gaige is now at the Lilly Library, Indiana University.
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