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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

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:
"Then live."
"Marry whom?" came the sulky question.
"As best you can."
"Miriam."
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.
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