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2. Copy-text
For most of the items in these volumes, the selection of copy-text is Hobson's choice: that or none. As indicated above, Mill did not reprint any of his newspaper writings in the three volumes of Dissertations and Discussions that appeared in his lifetime, and only a few appeared in other versions. In only 19 cases are there competing versions: 10 appeared in part in other writings of Mill's (3 of these in the posthumous fourth volume of Dissertations and Discussions, and 1 of these also in a pamphlet and a printed version of a lost manuscript), 5 appeared in more than one newspaper, 2 have surviving manuscript versions, and 2 exist in both English and French versions. These last we included in both versions; the others, almost all of them different in kind, are printed with notes indicating the variants, and with explanations of the choice of copy-text (almost invariably the newspaper version, for that is the volumes' mandate).
One matter troublesome to our consciences that will be a nightmare to editors of twentieth-century newspaper writings is that of editions. In the 1830s the Examiner (our principal source) often, but apparently not always, went through two editions, which are not clearly marked as such. We have tried to compare the two versions, without finding anything but occasionally different page numbers for Mill's articles. (One of the letters published in Earlier Letters from the Examiner had the signature "M" removed in the second edition.) But collections of nineteenth-century newspapers, even the indispensable British Library collection, seldom include different editions, and location lists are at best embryonic if not unconceived; it would be an immense task, well beyond our powers, to locate all possible existing editions of the issues in which Mill's writings appear.[19] And—once again let me show the traitorous flag—I wager that our main audience will not judge us wanting in this respect.
In these circumstances, the editor's task is much lightened. But of course some emendations are called for in the interests of accuracy, consistency, and easy reading.[20] The texts are flawed in most of the ways typical of their genre: characters are dropped or broken, sorts are mixed or lacking, compositors are (by inference) inexperienced or careless, and Mill's hand has (again by inference) been misread. Also, some conventions of the genre and the period are not consistently followed in the originals, and if reproduced would be annoying to readers in the late
- 1. Dropped and misplaced characters, including misplaced or absent word space (e.g., we do not list the corrections of "discharge sthe" to "discharges the"; "o fchildren" to "of children"; or "allthose" to "all those").
- 2. Missing or misplaced French accents, including those on proper names. This is a more contentious matter, but Mill's French was, though not perfect, very good, and undoubtedly better than that of most compositors, who, moreover, seem often not to have had the types (or enough of them) to hand. (In this context, one may mention that the habit of setting names in small caps meant that accents usually could not be indicated.) And there is inconsistency in nineteenth-century practice, which also differs in unpredictable but disturbing ways from twentieth-century usage.
- 3. French proper names. Once more Mill's knowledge suggests that at least many of the variant spellings were introduced by compositors, though one cannot know, and occasionally more than one spelling was acceptable. Our decision was to avoid the annoyance rather than keep the anomalies, so, for instance, we always give Louis Paul Courier (never Courrier), Casimir Périer (not Casimer or Pérrier), Jacques Laffitte (not Lafitte), Odilon-Barrot (not Odillon or Barrott), and (to illustrate what are more clearly compositors' errors) Cormenin (not Cormerin), and Cauchois-Lemaire (not Cauchors-Lemaire). We also cut through the hyphen knot in French forenames by printing them as separate names.
- 4. Initial majuscule / minuscule changes. These were made sparingly and only to make individual passages (not the volumes as a whole) consistent, on the grounds that Mill's hand is not infrequently ambiguous in this regard for some letters, and that the change in these specific words cannot be seen as emphatic.
Other emendations not signalled in the apparatus result only from the desire for easy reading without any implication of error in the copy-text. For example (and most of these apply throughout the edition, not merely in these volumes), monarchs are identified in the form "Louis XVI" rather than in any other way (e.g., "Louis the Sixteenth"), other ordinal abbreviations are regularized ("22d" becomes "22nd"), names in small caps are given in upper and lower case, italics are substituted
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