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Lawrence's Response to the House-styling
The surviving galley proofs amount to 1630 lines of type and in them there are 437 differences of punctuation from manuscript (counting pairs of brackets and inverted commas as one). Lawrence did not change any punctuation, but he added a little, nearly all of which had been in his MS. This provides an insight into the nature of his attention to punctuation. He made eight interventions. Three have been discussed above.[14] The others are as follows.
In chapter XIII Lawrence had made Paul reflect on Clara as they dried themselves after their swim (MS p. 492; E1 p. 360): "'But she is magnificent, and even bigger than the morning and the sea.—Is she?—is she?'" The compositor, Moore, had set this without the dashes and Lawrence reinserted dashes but in a different place: ". . . Is she—? is she—?" It seems highly improbable that anyone but Lawrence should have entered this change on the proofs, and since the notation used is a long slash which bends upwards at the end so that it looks like a tick, this provides the evidence by which it is possible to identify Lawrence's punctuation revisions. When he entered verbal revisions he used a straight slash in the margin, as did the proofreaders.
Later in the same chapter, after the fight, Baxter Dawes returned to Nottingham (MS p. 498; E1 p. 368): "And dimly in his consciousness as he went, he felt on his foot the place where his boot had knocked against on[e] of the lad's bones." Moore omitted the comma, as did Knowles in chapter XIV: after Mrs. Morel's death, Walter Morel waited up late for Paul to return home (MS p. 524; E1 p. 402): "Paul realised with a start that he had been afraid to go to bed, alone in the house with his dead."
The fact that Lawrence reinstated these commas suggests that he heard a pause in these sentences. In the second example the comma is essential to the meaning: "alone in the house"; Moore's omission of it introduces a possible ambiguity: "to bed alone."
Finally, L. Bristow had set precisely Lawrence's MS version of a sentence
Statistically, Lawrence's alterations to the compositors' punctuation changes were minimal, but they underline the rhetorical element in his own practice. There is some evidence from The White Peacock proofs[15] that at the outset of his career he had tried to reverse more of the printer's house-styling, but he probably gave up the unequal struggle. Since this novel had been cut and censored, he had more urgent matters to attend to, and indeed, as was his habitual practice, he entered a larger number of substantive revisions.
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