Artículos sobre Thomas De Quincey
EDITING DE QUINCEY
It is just over a century since the last complete' edition of De Quincey's works appeared. David Masson's Complete Writings (A&C Black, 1889-90) is a typical product of its period. Attempting to present De Quincey in the best possible light, it takes a very free hand with its text - cutting single articles into two, splicing two or more into one; retitling; mixing revised and unrevised versions; bowdlerising occasionally; repunctuating everywhere and sometimes -apparently to `improve' De Quincey's style - rewriting as well (in the first essay On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts' Masson at one point, amazingly, alters murder' to homicide' for no perceptible reason).Meanwhile, a survey of publications shows that the number of books wholly or mainly on De Quincey has doubled in each decade of this century; since 1980 the number of articles on his work has come close to doubling every year. Nearly all of these depend, unquestioningly, on Masson's misleading edition.
Now a project is under way to produce a new scholarly edition of De Quincey's writings. The publishers will be Pickering and Chatto of London, who in recent years moved from scientific editions (Darwin, Boyle, Babbage) into Romantic and early nineteenth-century prose, with editions of Godwin, Wollstonecraft and others. The editors, who have planned the edition as an integrated group undertaking, are Frederick Burwick (UCLA), Edmund Baxter (currently freelance in London), Robert Morrison at Acadia University, Nova Scotia, and Barry Symonds and Grevel Lindop (who is co-ordinating the edition) at Manchester University.
The initial impetus for the edition came from the Trustees of Dove Cottage, who acquired the manuscript of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in 1989. This working manuscript, textually important and full of fascinating deletions, deserved full publication, but with the rest of De Quincey's text in chaos there seemed little point in publishing it in isolation. The Trustees found a publisher and invited Grevel Lindop to organise the project. Numerous funding bodies were approached, and over the years support has been generously given by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Modern Humanities Research Association, the Pilgrim Trust, the University of Manchester and above all the British Academy, which has been extremely supportive.
Work is now well under way. The bulk of material is formidable (a main text of some 4.5 million words, with extensive annotation, extending probably to sixteen volumes) and, in some limited areas, the textual problems appalling (as in the case of Suspiria de Profundis, where De Quincey used parts of the text, heavily revised, for a revised edition of his Autobiographic Sketches, itself cobbled together from a range of earlier publications) but in other areas things are more straightforward: most of De Quincey's fiction and newspaper work, for example, was never revised; for most other texts there are only two versions, the original magazine publication and the revised text from his own collected edition, Selections Grave and Gay (1853-9).
The copy text for the edition will be the first published text of each item, variants from the revised text being given in the apparatus (to take Selections Grave and Gay for copy-text would have produced a patchwork of revised and unrevised essays that would completely obscure De Quincey's stylistic development). Works will be given in chronological order of publication, except that runs of articles for particular periodicals will be grouped together. Manuscripts of unpublished items transcribed at the end of the relevant volume. Completely rewritten items (such as the Confessions in its 1821 and 1856 versions) will be given in full following the unrevised texts.
The emphasis will thus be on De Quincey as a writer for the magazines - an essay for Blackwood's shows up as a completely different thing from an essay for Tait's Edinburgh Magazine or the Glasgow Evening Post - and on his chronological development. This will produce some surprises: the essays on On Murder' and their Postscript', for example, printed together since the American collected edition of 1851-9 and kept that way by De Quincey in his revision, will be spread between three volumes: inconvenient at first sight, but dramatically revealing their stylistic and thematic connections with other work written in the same periods.
The edition will be constructed on disc for direct typesetting; this should minimise printing costs, and make the publication of an electronic version, should there be the demand for one, relatively easy. Accordingly the editorial guidelines have been very complex to produce. Not only have conventions for treatment and annotation of texts had to be specified, but it has been necessary to set up electronic coding for typesetting (including such problems as Greek fount) and for possible electronic publication (distingushing opening from closing quotation marks, for example, and end-of-line hyphens from hard' hyphens in compound words, and both of these in turn from rules or rows of dashes to show the ends of sections of text).
Inputting of text is being done as far as possible by optical scanning. After many tests it has turned out that by using clear photocopies enlarged to 150%, processed by a Hewlett-Packard Scanjet Plus optical scanner, in conjunction with OmniPage software, printed text from as early as 1824 can usefully be scanned in. The product is very messy; but as many of the errors are recurrent, the search-and-replace facility in WordPerfect 5.1 (in which the edition is being constructed) makes it relatively easy to clean up the text.
Final correction is being done by ear-to-eye checking, involving tape-recording the texts with all accidentals and then playing them back against the edited text. This is thought to be more accurate than eye-to-eye checking and has the advantage that the tapes can then be used for collation with revised and other variant editions (the spectacle of a De Quincey editor sitting in the library wearing a Walkman is easily misunderstood; fellow-readers have been reassured that De Quincey's texts do not carry a synthesised percussion accompaniment).
De Quincey's manuscripts are scattered throughout the world, and there is no likelihood that a definitive list will ever be established. However, the major collections have been located and private owners have been generous and cooperative. Provisionally, it is hoped that the edition may be complete in 1999; though, as we all know, such timetables are vulnerable. Pickering and Chatto will publish the volumes together as a set, fully indexed.
The editors hope that the edition will not only be useful in itself but will make a contribution to current thinking about editing and coding texts. Anyone who would like a copy of the editorial guidelines should write to Grevel Lindop at the Department of English, University of Manchester, M13 9PL. A voluntary contribution of £2.50 (payable to University of Manchester) would help offset photocopying and postage costs.
Alternatively, the Guidelines may be downloaded from the World Wide Web.
http://www.art.man.ac.uk/ENGLISH/projects/deqdesc.htm
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