The primary question which presents itself at this stage, is whether
the compositors made a good job of printing Lawrence's manuscript.
The document itself was not a severe challenge to a compositor.
Lawrence's handwriting is characteristically neat, and even though there is
heavy revision in a number of places, the result is always legible. From
time to time it is difficult to distinguish his "h" from his "k", his small
from his capital "c" and "s", or a new line from an indentation for a new
paragraph; but these are not matters that would lead to a serious corruption
of the text. Garnett had been systematically through the manuscript,
marking in pencil and confirming in ink passages for deletion, and
censoring by removal or minor alteration isolated words and sentences; and
at the same time he had occasionally clarified or changed the paragraphing.
There remained Lawrence's use of dialect in speech, but in fact this only
rarely led the compositors into error. The thing that did, however, present
them with a major stumbling block, was his punctuation, which differed in
a variety of ways from their
house-styling practice.
Omitting from the total such categories of house-styling as
regularisation of the length of dashes, the insertion of hyphens in words like
"to-day", and various normalisations of spelling, the average number of
changes in punctuation, paragraphing, and hyphenation introduced by the
compositors amounts to approximately ten per page or one nearly every
four lines, in a book totalling c. 18,050 lines of type.
Finally, the evidence of the few extant galley proofs is that the
compositors made a small number of substantive errors not all of which
were corrected in the first edition. The main problem is that because so few
galley proofs survive, other similar errors cannot easily be distinguished
from revisions which Lawrence might have made on the lost galley proofs
and the lost set of revised page proofs.
The surviving galley proofs were set, on the evidence of the clicker's
marks in the manuscript, by Moore, Knowles and L. Bristow.
