University of Virginia Library

The Printer's Reader's Revisions

Before the proofs were despatched to London they were marked up at Billing and Sons with corrections of typographical errors and suggestions for revision. In the first sequence of surviving galleys the queried readings were accompanied by "qy." in the margin, in the later sequence by "?". This suggests that more than one person was responsible for marking up the proofs. Lawrence responded to the majority of their promptings.

He evidently did not wish to reconsider the words "shapen" and "realest" which were underlined and queried in the margin, for he merely deleted the query (MS pp. 486, 532; E1 pp. 353, 413). But where three words were underlined and queried in his description of Dawes as "trying to get by unnoticed past every person he met", Lawrence deleted "by" and the query (MS p. 495; E1 p. 363). A similar query in the margin, without specific underlining, against "his experience had been It and not Clara" led Lawrence to replace "It" with "impersonal" (MS p. 489; E1 p. 356). In a tidy-minded vein the proof-reader underscored two sentences in a paragraph describing how Miriam sat with her "hands . . . clasped over her knee," and then, five sentences later, "suddenly took her finger from her mouth . . ." (MS pp. 57-58; E1 p. 419). Lawrence obligingly inserted a sentence: "She put her finger between her lips."

The final query concerned a repetition in the fourth paragraph from the end of the novel: "a level fume of lights. Beyond the town the country, little fuming spots for more towns . . .". Lawrence changed "fuming" to "smouldering", and then made three more changes to the paragraph, which he might not perhaps have focussed upon, had his attention not been drawn to "fume-fuming" (MS p. 540; E1 p. 422). In addition he deleted "low fuming of the" four sentences from the end of the novel (MS p. 540; E1 p. 423): "Turning sharply, he walked towards the low fuming of the city's gold phosphorescence."

In some instances the proof-readers did not merely enter a query and leave Lawrence to revise or not, they made specific suggestions. In chapter XIII, the reader wrote "qy. trs." and circled the words "nights" and "evenings" in the sentence: "The days were often a misery to her, but the

nights and the evenings were usually a bliss to them both." Lawrence's word order had prioritised "nights" as the time most significant of the physical bond between Paul and Clara: the evenings were of secondary importance as leading up to the nights. By contrast the reduction to mere chronological order is banal; but only the query is deleted, and the words were reversed in the page proofs (MS p. 486; E1 p. 353). Towards the end of chapter XV, where Miriam admired the flowers on Paul's table, L. Bristow had printed correctly one of Lawrence's MS sentences lacking a conjunction: "'Have them!' he said, and he took them out of the jar, dripping as they were, went quickly into the kitchen." The reader entered a caret mark after "were," and wrote: "? and /" in the margin, and Lawrence deleted the query (MS p. 539; E1 p. 421). The other intervention of this kind was to a sentence rendered ambiguous by L. Bristow's omission of a comma: "He wanted everything to stand still so he could be with her again." The reader wrote "? that" in the margin, and Lawrence both reinserted a comma after "still" and deleted the query (MS p. 532; E1 p. 413).

Finally, the punctuation was altered in two places. Both instances occur in the passages following the eighth paragraph of chapter XV. Towards the end of Paul's semi-intoxicated inner dialogue Lawrence had written:

But he did not trust that.

What he did not trust was a statement, but the proof-reader deleted the fullstop and wrote "?/" in the margin. It was not altered, and '"Miriam?"' appears in the page proofs (MS p. 533-534; E1 p. 414).

In the other case, fifteen lines later, Lawrence's punctuation was entirely adequate to his meaning: "Sometimes he ran down the streets as if he were mad. Sometimes he was mad: things weren't there, things were there." (MS p. 534). But the compositor, L. Bristow, had revised it to: "Sometimes he ran down the streets as if he were mad: sometimes he was mad, things weren't there, things were there" (E1 p. 415). The proof-reader deleted the comma after "mad" and wrote ";/" in the margin.

The evidence which makes it possible to distinguish the handwriting of punctuation revisions is given in the section below describing Lawrence's response to the house-styling.