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As Lawrence had sent it to Edward Garnett, the finished manuscript was 533 pages long but numbered 1-540. Garnett had then pruned the text, largely by deleting passages but also by scissors-and-pasting a little, so that it was 530 pages long when it reached the printers and still numbered 1-540. Evidence that Garnett had calculated the length of the manuscript, to determine format and page-length, in preparation for printing, is found in two sets of 100-word enumeration marks by him in the manuscript.

Lawrence had written on one side of the paper only, but most of the novel, that is the 436 pages he wrote out at the last revision stage onto continental paper,[6] consisted of gatherings usually of about five but sometimes as many as ten sheets folded over together. These were now torn along the folds so that the manuscript stood in a pile of single leaves which could be handed round to the compositors.

The annotations they then made on the manuscript show that it was set by a team ("companionship", or "ship") of nine compositors, working "upon lines", a method or organisation described by Philip Gaskell as "by the later nineteenth century . . . the normal arrangement in English houses for all classes of work." The team-leader or clicker "received the copy, passed on the overseer's instructions about letter for distribution and typographical

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style, and handed out takings of manuscript."[7] The publishers had normally "calculated the length of the whole manuscript, and it was no longer customary to cast it off [measure it in terms of format and page-lengths] in the composing room. . . . The clickers . . . divided the batches of copy into individual takings for the members of the ship, the length of the taking varying but being typically from one to four leaves of a manuscript written on one side of a 'quarto' paper. . . . The pattern of composition of a companionship job, as revealed by surviving copy marked up both by the individual compositors and by the clickers, was complex, not surprisingly since the six or eight members of a ship worked simultaneously on takes of different length, and probably had three or four different books on hand at a time" (Gaskell, p. 293).

There are in fact two sets of clicker's marks[8] in the Sons and Lovers manuscript: entries in pencil recording the casting off of copy into estimated, numbered galley-lengths, and the distribution of these to the compositors; and entries mainly in ink, overlapping with the former, which indicate the actual galley proofs pulled. The relationship between these two sets of marks is instructive, but frequently baffling; and the pages below are an attempt to understand them and to gain a clearer picture of the working routine by which the novel was printed.

Because Billing and Sons were not working towards page proofs, which Gaskell indicates were the norm at least until the 1880s (p. 293), but galley proofs consisting of four columns of eighty-eight lines of type, the manuscript appears to have been cast off in passages estimated at the equivalent of 352 lines of type. The notation entered in the manuscript, referring to each proof as a "galley" and each eighty-eight-line column as a "slip", ran counter to the normal use of the terminology at the time, which referred to the long trays of type as galleys and the proofs printed from them as slips. This suggests that this style of proofing was sufficiently recent for the terminology not yet to have settled down.[9] The clicker's annotations to the manuscript, marking the start of "galley one", "galley two" etc. (although the printed galleys were not numbered) occur on average every ten pages. Not only is this longer than the usual takings gauged in terms of page-lengths, but in practice the takings of this manuscript often consisted of more than one such cast-off galley.