University of Virginia Library

Casting Off

Edward Garnett had prepared the manuscript for publication and calculated its length. The task of casting-off enough text to fill the galley-trays was complicated by the fact that the amount of text on each MS page ranged from sixty to nine hundred words because of variation in paper-size, changes in Lawrence's handwriting (in the amount of interlinear revision and in the degree to which he crammed lines together on unlined paper), and deletions of irregular lengths of text by Garnett.

The clicker's entries in pencil are typically as follows. The cast-off galleys were marked for example "Gal 27" or just with a number. The numbers ran roughly from one to fifty-two and some have a compositor's name pencilled beside them. It seems that when the clicker gave a compositor a taking of one or more cast-off galleys he wrote the man's name beside the first number; but it is not uncommon to find the same name beside more than one of the cast-off galleys in a long taking.

The marks in ink are fuller, and they were evidently entered as the lines

that had been set were imposed in galley proofs. But in fact they indicate only where every alternate proof began. A typical entry marks with a large square bracket the precise point in the text where the first slip of a new proof begins, even mid-word in some cases, and records the galley number, the slip number, the compositor's name, and the chapter number. The code for denoting the chapter number referred back to the last chapter-heading which had been set, as "l.c." or, once, "Last chapter", plus a roman numeral.

For example on MS p. 489 (in chapter XIII) such an entry reads: "Moore Gal 45 Slip 177 Lc XIII", and there is a large square bracket in the eleventh line of the page around the first word of "too flagrantly give herself away before the other girls" which coincides precisely with the start of slip 177 on the only one of the surviving galley proofs that is recorded in the manuscript. The few others are not so recorded because of the clicker's system of marking only alternate proofs, and because even within this sequence he omitted to note proofs at the very end (and indeed the beginning) of the novel.

Thus fifty-two galleys were cast off in pencil and fifty-two appear to have been pulled, but the two sets of numbers in pencil and ink fluctuate in relation to each other as they progress through the manuscript. Evidently the clicker hoped that the length of text he estimated when entering his pencil marks would turn out to fit the 352 lines of type wanted for each galley proof, but in fact his cast-off galleys varied a great deal and, when set, ranged between approximately one hundred and five hundred lines of type.

Twenty-one of the fifty-two cast-off galleys started with a new page in the manuscript, and all except two began with a new paragraph. The two exceptions, cast-off galleys 4 and 20, started mid-sentence with a square bracket marked in the text, and this suggests that here casting off was made in terms of a point already reached in the setting. On the other hand, the clicker's pencil can also be seen at work making improvised adjustments within a sequence already cast off.

He pencilled-in a galley-number 39 towards the end of "galley" 38 as originally cast off, evidently because he wanted the compositor of 38 (which would have been 470 type-lines long) to make a new start. He then had to change his original cast-off galley 39 a few pages later to 40, and the one after that is numbered not 41 but 40A. This suggests that here the later 39 at least, if not also the later 40, had been cast off in advance (though the 40A may have been a subdivision of a cast-off galley that proved too long—40 and 40A together totalled nearly 460 lines of type). Presumably the reason why the clicker did not extend the new short "galley 39" into the next, and tell the compositor to continue setting, was that he had already given the next to someone else; and the reason that he renumbered the next "40" instead of "39A" must be that he used that tactic only within a taking.