University of Virginia Library

The Surviving Galley Proofs: How Accurate Were the Compositors?

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.

Moore

The fragment of galley proofs set by Moore comes from his stint of cast-off galleys 44-46A (MS pp. 478-500) in the long taking of MS pp. 417-516 shared by him and F. Bristow which covered the end of chapter XII, chapter XIII, and nearly half of chapter XIV. This specimen of Moore's work represents his setting of a passage from chapter XIII beginning midword in a description of Clara's passionate preoccupation with Paul during working hours at the factory (MS p. 486; E1 p. 353): "[Every second she ex]-pected him to come through the door," and ending with Paul's return home to his mother after his fight with Baxter Dawes (MS p. 498; E1 p. 368): "She was there, he was in her hands."

Moore set this passage, the longest specimen of the three compositors' work, in 704 lines of type and introduced a total of 232 punctuation changes (counting pairs of brackets and inverted commas as one). This is approximately one every three lines, a higher rate than the other two compositors, but Moore made less serious substantive errors. These were "marram" for MS "marrain" and "train" for MS "tram", both of which Lawrence corrected on the galley proofs; and "every" for MS "ever", which had been cleared up by the first edition. Moore also corrected four substantive errors in the manuscript: "always" for MS "alway", "One evening as Paul" for MS "One as Paul", and "one" for MS error "on", all of which were probably pen-slips. Finally, he set a correct form, "different from", instead of Lawrence's "different to", which, being spoken by a character (Clara) rather than the narrator, may possibly have been a deliberate grammatical error (MS p. 495; E1 p. 364).

In addition to his many alterations of punctuation, Moore corrected two small punctuation slips in the manuscript, and introduced six changes of paragraph. Finally, he omitted one meaning-bearing comma, which Lawrence reinserted on the galley-proofs, after "Behind" in: "Paul glanced round. Behind, the houses stood on the brim of the dip, black against the sky, looking like wild beasts . . ." (MS p. 497; E1 p. 366).

Knowles

Knowles and L. Bristow finished the last twenty-four pages of the MS. Knowles's cast-off galleys 50 and 51 covered nearly all the second half of chapter XIV, and L. Bristow's cast-off galley 52 started on the last page of the chapter and continued to the end of chapter XV.

Knowles began in the middle of Mrs Morel's illness but the surviving specimen of his work begins after her death, with Walter Morel's words: "'No!' he said. 'Why—has she gone?'" (MS p. 523; E1 p. 401) and it ends

with the end of his taking and the start of L. Bristow's (MS p. 531; E1 p. 410), in the middle of the final scene between Paul, Clara and Baxter Dawes where, at Clara's decision not to go back to Nottingham with Paul, Baxter "jerked suddenly, as if he had been held on a strain. He looked out over the sea, but he saw nothing." This fragment is 406 lines of type, the smallest of the three specimens, and in it Knowles made the fewest punctuation changes, only 76, which is about one every five and a third lines, and he introduced only one new paragraph. His substantive errors were also fewer, being only two, but they were more serious than Moore's and neither of them was picked up by Lawrence or the proof-correctors.

In the first, Knowles omitted the word "now", which seems a trivial slip, but it may be significant that L. Bristow also omitted this word. Here (MS p. 524; E1 p. 402), Lawrence was describing Walter Morel's inability to look at his dead wife: ". . . he got out of the room again and left her. He never looked at her again. He had not seen her now for months, because he had not dared to look." Knowles's second error occurred during the initial awkward moments after Clara's arrival in the Skegness lodgings shared briefly by Paul and Baxter, when Paul, covering his unease by busily making arrangements, urged Clara to change out of her wet boots and offered her his slippers. Knowles set "felt" for "left" in the concluding sentence (MS p. 529; E1 p. 408): "He put the slippers near her feet. She left them there." The error was not corrected on the proofs, and "felt" continued to be printed until the 1960s.

L. Bristow

The third compositor, L. Bristow, who set the second largest share of the book, c. 2380 lines or thirteen percent of the whole, made in this extract of 520 lines (or twenty percent of his total share) ten substantive errors, four of which remained unnoticed, and 129 punctuation changes, an average of one every four lines. He made no changes of paragraphing but inserted one dubious substantive correction of MS and omitted one significant comma.

L. Bristow began at a new paragraph on the second lines of MS p. 531 (E1 p. 410), beginning "'There are one or two books in the corner,' said Morel." When he had set the page, which ended the chapter, he probably handed the leaf back to Knowles, so that he could set the last words of the preceding paragraph, which were the top line on this leaf: "over the sea, but he saw nothing." On this first page, where, at the very end of the chapter (MS p. 531), Clara asked Baxter to take her back, and ". . . put her fingers through his fine, thin dark hair . . .", L. Bristow made his first error, setting "her fingers through her . . . hair". Since this reading makes sense, only Lawrence would be likely to notice the error. He overlooked it on the galley proofs but the correct reading was restored in the first edition (E1 p. 411). Similarly, Lawrence did not notice at once that his "saw, far away," had been printed as "saw far, far away," but by the first edition the reduplication had been removed and the phrase reduced simply to "saw" (MS p. 533; E1 p. 413).

The next error may have been set correctly but while the lines of type were being moved, the word "his" was dropped from the beginning of one line: "his own glass on the slopped, mahogany board. There was", and replaced at the end. The resulting nonsense was spotted by the printer's reader who wrote the correction onto the proofs before they were sent to Lawrence (MS p. 534; E1 p. 514). L. Bristow then understandably misread Lawrence's "k" as "h" and set "Colwich" for "Colwick" twice in one paragraph (MS p. 535; E1 p. 416). Only Lawrence could decide these spellings were wrong, and he corrected only one of them, the other remaining in a number of subsequent editions despite the obvious inconsistency. Another slip, "quiet" for "quite", was self-evident in context and had been corrected by the first edition (MS p. 536; E1 p. 417).

L. Bristow's last four errors are more serious and three of them have never been corrected. In the last meeting between Paul and Miriam, Lawrence inserted an extension of Miriam's inner monologue in very small handwriting at the bottom of MS p. 538, beginning with the sentences: "Oh, why did not he take her! Her very soul belonged to him. Why would not he take what was his!" The first of the inversions "not he" L. Bristow set correctly but the second he reversed to the more common "he not" (E1 p. 420). A few lines later he omitted the word "now", written clearly if small, and not obscured by interlinear revision: "'Stop now all this restlessness and beating against death . . .'". The word has never been restored (MS p. 539; E1 p. 421). But when, a few lines further on, L. Bristow again reversed Lawrence's word order, the error was more easily identified: on the galley proofs Lawrence corrected "By her tone she knew he was despising him" back to "he knew she" (MS p. 539; E1 p. 421).

Finally, on the last, now damaged, page of the manuscript Lawrence had first written, of Paul's tilt towards despair: "On every side the immense dark silences seemed pressing him into extinction, and yet, tiny speck, he could not be extinct" (MS p. 540). Then he changed the middle of the sentence to: "pressing him, so tiny a speck, into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could not be extinct" (E1 p. 422). Lawrence wrote his revision "so tiny a speck" very small, right at the edge of the page where it is difficult to read, but there is no doubt from the context that this is the reading he intended. However, L. Bristow set "so tiny a spark", which has never been corrected.

L. Bristow also "corrected" Lawrence's prose by inserting a conjunction into the disjointed perceptions of Paul's "semi-intoxicated trance" at the opening of "Derelict". I quote the passage in full because it exemplifies both the deliberate disjointedness of the prose and some typical effects of the compositors' punctuation changes:

The lack of conjunction in the second sentence has a parallel in the first, where the comma separating "light went out, there was a bruising thud" in MS suggests Paul's disjointed perception of the near-simultaneous events. In the third sentence, Lawrence's "Only," meant "But", and this was a common usage of his which frequently depended on the comma; but L. Bristow's removal of the comma changes the meaning to "The mice alone . . ." .

Finally, in the near-famous last sentence of the novel (MS p. 540): "He walked towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly.", L. Bristow removed the comma before "quickly", but Lawrence restored it on the galley proof (E1 p. 423). In the manuscript the comma had originally been written over a full stop, and "quickly" was added after the sentence had been completed without it. Therefore Lawrence's reinstatement of the comma indicates that its rhetorical value was important to him.