A Gentleman of Leisure (variorum edition) (PDF, 2,535 KB)
This is the third project of its kind I've completed. It is out of schedule: the next one was supposed to be The Little Warrior (UK Jill the Reckless), but a flurry of activity at Madame Eulalie around the 1910 book editions of A Gentleman of Leisure (US The Intrusion of Jimmy) made it more practical to concentrate on this one while it was still fresh in the mind.
The preparation of each of these texts has its own challenges, and forces the editor to make decisions that require some kind of justification. In the case of AGoL, the choice of the base text took some thinking. For other texts the first UK edition seemed a natural choice, as it clearly was in itself an evolution on previous versions, and also was more or less the established text for all subsequent editions, barring minor corrections or editorial deviations. AGoL, on the other hand, underwent at a relatively early stage a substantial revision between the first UK edition (Alston Rivers, 1910) and the 1921 Jenkins text, which would become the standard for the novel's later history. This alone would seem to mark it as the author's "definitive" version, and to justify giving it priority. But things are not so simple, since the Jenkins edition has some significant deletions from the previous version, and one always has misgivings about relegating genuine Wodehouse text to the footnotes. In the end, after much hesitation, the Jenkins text came on top.
The apparatus is longer than that of the two previous variorums, and this is due mostly to the British editors removing many of the peculiarities of Spike Mullins' speech. Again I was in doubt whether it was really worth it to record every time an' and fer in the American edition was changed to and and for. In the end I decided to keep them, on the principle that it will be easier to remove them later if I ever change my policy in this regard, and also that drawing the line between what is worth noting and what isn't is not so simple. As a result, the number of footnotes soared to over a thousand—or t'ousand, as Spike would say.
Side note: since I hope to keep adding to the number of variorum editions, I've created a separate page with a general presentation of the project, a list of finished documents and (eventually) ancillary material. This will be permanently available as a link in the nagivation bar at the left of the blog.
