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APPENDIX
Observations on the collaboration between Cooper and John Fagan, reprinted
with the permission of Thomas and Marianne Philbrick from their
Textual Commentary for their CE edition of Cooper's 1844 novel Afloat and
Ashore (AMS Press, 2004).
The surviving proof sheets of Afloat and Ashore . . . provide a revealing glimpse
into the relation of author and printer in the production of mid-nineteenth-century
American texts in general and, more specifically, they supply an extensive demonstration
of the process by which Cooper and Fagan collaborated to produce the
novels of the writer's last twelve years. For the first time the entire sequence of steps
that led from the author's manuscript to the printed pages of the first American
edition can be followed in detail. It now becomes clear that Fagan's compositors not
only corrected obvious errors in the manuscript and introduced the usual number of
errors of their own but freely initiated stylistic "improvements," many of which, in
the absence of the proof sheets, would be virtually impossible to distinguish from
Cooper's revisions. Moreover, the proof sheets display Fagan's important role in the
process, for it was he who initially proofread the typeset copy, comparing it to the
manuscript and catching many of the compositors' errors and innovations (but missing
many others), and it was he who acted as a copy-editor by querying phrasing that
he regarded as infelicitous and proposing changes for the author to consider. Finally
the proof sheets afford a full picture of Cooper's role, as he responded positively or
negatively to Fagan's queries, corrected some of the errors that had eluded Fagan's
proofing, and continued the revision of his text that he had begun with his manuscript
alterations—all the time, it would seem, working without further reference to
the manuscript.
The text that resulted from this process, the basis for the first American edition
and for all subsequent printings of Afloat and Ashore, is a highly imperfect one. As
the proof sheets reveal, in Part 1 alone more than 600 substantive departures from the
author's manuscript, consisting of compositorial errors as well as innovations, escaped
the scrutiny of Fagan and Cooper. Some of those printers' variants merely blunt the
edges of Miles Wallingford's narration, as when (at 1.226.26-27) Emily Merton's
"bright, blue, English eye" becomes her "light, blue English eye," or muffle the tones
of a character's speech, as when Marble, asserting that he has enough needles and
thread to "set up" a slop shop, is made to say that he has enough to "supply" one (at
1.435.17). But many other such variants do serious damage to Cooper's meanings, as
when the compositor drops whole lines of the manuscript (at 1.459.14-17 and 1.471.79)
or misreads "into the colony" as "in the valley" (at 1.16.22), "even more" as
"comrade" (1.23.6), "gleaned" as "gained" (1.66.4), "sly" as "shy" (1.166.5), "hint"
as "point" (1.181.16), "more" as "men" (1.278.25), "sheers" as "shores" (1.359.27),
"Callao" as "called" (1.383.27), "minx" as "miss" (1.475.16), "artlessness" as "restlessness"
(1.515.17), and even "south" as "north" (1.231.1).
In setting the text of Afloat and Ashore from Cooper's manuscript, Fagan's compositors
applied what would seem to be a house style in the treatment of capitalization,
spelling, and punctuation. Thus at the same time that the compositors correct
a good number of the mechanical errors in AMS, in many more instances, though
with varying consistency, they obscure Cooper's acceptable, if at times unconventional,
accidental forms. For example, the printers regularly capitalize his lower case
"state" (in reference to the American political division) and use the lower case for
his capitalized "Street" (as in "Wall Street"); they print his "favor" as "favour" and
his "any thing" as "anything"; and they often normalize his characteristic treatment
of the comma, by which it functions only sporadically in its familiar grammatical role
of signaling such things as the distinction between restrictive and non-restrictive
clauses but persistently as an indicator of the pauses that a speaker might make, almost
in the manner of phrase-marks in a musical score.
The styling of Cooper's text by the compositors extends to his words and word-order.
They frequently tinker with his prepositioned idioms, as when they change
"edifice in stone" to "edifice of stone" at 1.16.26; they update his verb forms, as when
they change "sprung" to "sprang" at 1.50.17; they fuss with his connectives, as when
they change "Then" to "Besides" at 1.212.24 or "for" to "as" at 1.413.4; and they rearrange
his adverbs, as when they change "got subsequently" to "subsequently got"
at 1.52.16.
But beyond such piddling refinements and wholly apart from the hundreds of compositorial
misreadings of AMS is a large class of substantive variants in the uncorrected
proof (subsequently referred to as PR) that can only be seen as attempts by
the printers to re-write Cooper. These variants have nothing to do with styling, nor
are they forms that have any visual resemblance to those of AMS. Rather, they are
free inventions, apparent efforts to improve upon the author. Thus AMS "named"
becomes "called" in PR (1.50.26), "in that day" becomes "at that time" (1.55.12),
"steeples" becomes "spires" (1.55.22), "senses" becomes "soul" (1.60.10), "square-built"
becomes "square-rigged" (1.62.11), "direct" becomes "enclose" (1.68.17), "portion" becomes
"part" (1.77.25), "threshing" becomes "good threshing" (1.78.18), "passage"
becomes "voyage" (1.80.21), "oddities" becomes "peculiarities" (1.81.1), "the tale"
becomes "it" (1.82.12), "in the spring" becomes "early in the spring" (1.82.17) and
"as soon as" becomes "at the time" (1.92.4). These examples are drawn from just two
of the thirty chapters of Part 1, but they are representative in kind of this whole class
of variants.
All of the extant proof of Afloat and Ashore except that for the first seven paragraphs
of the Preface to Part 1 is marked with notations—corrections, queries, and
occasional comments—made distinctly in black ink and written in a hand that is
clearly John Fagan's. Fagan's copy-editing (hereafter referred to as FPR) performs a
number of different functions. For one thing, it corrects many printer's errors, most
of them typographical, such as the use of the wrong font, the misalignment of type,
or the setting of an inverted letter. Some of those corrections, as when FPR supplies
AMS text that the compositor has dropped, could only have been made by reference
to the manuscript. The many occasions on which Fagan overlooked compositorial
departures from AMS, however, suggest that he did not read the proof against the
manuscript but only consulted the manuscript when he encountered obvious anomalies
in PR.
In addition to making corrections, Fagan continues in proof the process of styling
that the compositors had initiated in PR, attending to spelling, capitalization, and
punctuation and making a few minor substantive changes on his own authority, such
as replacing PR "as much as" with "so much as" at 1.115.27-116.1, PR "quick" to
"quickly" at 1.357.15, and PR "sung" to "sang" at 1.370.16. But nowhere does FPR
embody the bold substantive changes to Cooper's language that PR so frequently
(and silently) does. Rather Fagan almost always poses substantive changes as proposals
or queries, at times only underlining the forms that he regards as questionable and at
with the abbreviation "qr." The queries that he addresses to the author range from
such small matters as changing PR "dove" to "dived" at 1.362.5 (a proposal that
Cooper rejected) to issues of plot and character: at 1.453.14-16, for example, he marks
Miles' joke about the width of Neb's grin during the battle with the Malay pirates
and then comments marginally, "This remark seems scarcely to consist with the
gravity of Wallingford" and at 1.455.13 he underlines Miles' mention of the Bay of
Naples, querying, "Will Wallingford see Naples?" Although Cooper usually responds
to Fagan's stylistic queries by revising the text, he never makes changes in response to
Fagan's comments on his narrative, and some he strikes out with a thoroughness that
suggests a degree of fury.
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