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When D. H Lawrence's final manuscript of Sons and Lovers is compared with Duckworth's first edition there are found to be thousands of variants. They are hard to quantify because substantive revisions can be one word or several sentences, but when they are listed according to the points in the text at which they occur, the list has approximately seven thousand entries, of which approximately four and a half thousand are punctuation. Discovering who was responsible for each item is not now possible but some bearings can be taken from the small number of revised galley proofs which has come to light.[1]
An unmarked set of page proofs has been in the possession of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at Austin for many years, but James Boulton's more recent location of the galley proofs is both the rewarding by-product of scholarly endeavor and an invaluable discovery for editors and others who ponder the many changes that took place between Lawrence's submission of his manuscript to Duckworth in November 1912 and publication of the first edition in May 1913. For although the galleys that have survived are unfortunately incomplete, amounting to only about a ninth of the novel, they belonged to the set corrected by Lawrence.
The galley proofs are of interest in the pure bibliographical sense of providing evidence about a sample of printing practice. They also help to make sense of the compositors' marks on the Sons and Lovers manuscript, which number more than eighty and may well puzzle the many scholars who are currently consulting the photographic facsimile of the manuscript published in 1977.[2] Most importantly, they provide the only firm evidence of how accurate the compositors were; what changes and suggestions were entered on the proofs before they were sent to Lawrence; how well Lawrence corrected substantive errors; how he responded to the massive quantity of punctuation changes; and how much and in what way he revised.
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