Tales of Saint Austin's: a variorum edition

Tales of St. Austin's (variorum edition) (PDF, 2,126 KB)

This is the fifth edition of its kind I've completed. It has been in the works for some time, but I couldn't make up my mind to finish and publish it, partly because I'm concentrating on the early novels rather than the short story collections, but mostly because I do not have access to the first but to the 1923 edition, which according to McIlvaine's bibliography was reset, and so may contain differences. However, it is not certain tha I will ever get a chance to take a look at the 1903 edition, so I decided that there was no point in postponing this one indefinitely.

The work in this case has been considerably simpler than in all previous occasions. Although here one has to sort out publications from different magazines, the changes between all but one of the texts are few an straighforward; all the magazine versions are perfectly described and transcribed at Madame Eulalie; and there was no early American edition of the book to complicate matters.

The exception in the case is the long story or novella "The Manoeuvres of Charteris." Other stories present between no and twelve significant changes between the magazine text and their final book version; "The Manoeuvres," in contrast, had about 500: you can see that the apparatus for that section of this file takes one third of the page, whereas in the rest you find only two of three notes per page, and not a few perfectly "clean" pages. Some of the changes on the longer story are substantial, such as added or deleted sentences or paragraphs, but many are changes of expression, slight improvements and minimal adjustments in word order. My personal impression, without other support than the observation of these changes, is that Wodehouse re-typed "The Manoeuvres" and rewrote freely whenever he saw he could enhance the text; while for the rest of the stories the editor worked either from the original manuscript, a typist's copy of it, or the magazine texts, where the author may pencil in some necessary corrections but could hardly make the huge number of alterations observed here.

[Some notes on sources for the artists that illustrated these stories in magazines: not because they are relevant to this textual study, but because this information is not always easy to find, so I thought I would put together these links here.

• R. Noel Pocock and T. M. R. Whitwell, whose magazine illustrations eventually made it into the book editions of Wodehouse's early stories, aren't included in standard reference books, but fortunately there exists this incredible blog devoted to the history of British illustrators, which contains invaluable information abot each (Pocock, Whitwell).
• E. F. (Edward Frederick) Skinner seems to be the hardest to find anything about, but at least there is a short entry in S. Houfe, The Dictionary of British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists, 1800-1914.
• Savile Lumley os the best known of the four, with his own Wikipedia article, entries in B. Peppin, Book Illustrators of the Twentieth Century (link) and M. Bryant, Dictionary of Twentieth Century British Cartoonists and Caricaturists (link), and another great blog entry.]

Merrett's French prize

In Wodehouse's short story "A Division of Spoil" (The Captain, September 1906, online here) there is a mathematical error. The boy Merrett has unlawfully won a prize in French, and the rest of the class are not happy about it, so Linton seizes the book that constitutes the prize and says:

"... as we've all got just as much right to the prize as you, we're going to divide it."
"I say—" said a voice of protest. Tilbury had come out second in the French order, and he had not looked for this Communistic arrangement.
"Dry up," said Linton. "And if you come any nearer, Merrett, you'll get it hot. Follow? There are five hundred and sixteen pages of this book. How much is that each, some one?"
A pause.
"Thirteen, exactly," said Firmin.

Someone pointed it out in a letter which the editor answered in the November issue (p. 190):

"Three Years' Subscriber," referring to the story by Mr. Wodehouse entitled "A Division of Spoil," published in our September issue, says that if a book of 516 pages was divided among a class of 32 boys, each boy would get 16⅛ pages, and not 13, as the author had it. Quite right, T. Y. S. You may go up above Mr. Wodehouse.

Yet another reader attempted to explain the error (January 1907, p. 380):

"Romney" turns the tables on me by telling me my character from my handwriting. I have put her delineation in my top blush locker. With regard to the mathematical mistake in Mr. Wodehouse's tale, "A Division of Spoil," to which "Subscriber" recently drew attention, "Romney" says it is quite easy to see that "516" pages was a printer's error for "416," and that the latter number of pages gives thirty-two boys exactly thirteen each, so that Mr. Wodehouse goes up top again. This is all very well, but "Romney" is wrong in one little particular. The "516" was not a printer's error, but was the number actually given by the author in his tale, so that Mr. Wodehouse, after going up, comes down again with a run.

It appears, then, that the miscalculation was Wodehouse's—unless we are meant to think that Firmin, the boy who answered the question, got the division wrong. But in that case, if the physical book actually had 516 pages and Linton gave his 32 classmates 13 pages each, there would have been a hundred pages left over at the end. However, that doesn't happen: Linton runs out of pages exactly as Merrett's turn comes, and adds "You can have the cover." The book must have had 416 pages after all.

(And that is leaving aside the difficult question of how you can tear an uneven number of pages from a book, since you can only take full leaves, each with two pages. But even if we assume that Linton gave 14 pages—7 leaves—to each, that still makes 448 pages, with 68 left at the end. One might suppose that Wodehouse is using "page" loosely in the sense of "leaf," and that the total number of pages was twice 516, that is, 1,032, but this is unlikely, and the calculation would still be wrong.)

The book in question was a "handsomely bound copy of Les Misérables." Since it is presented as a prize for knowledge of French, we may safely assume that we are dealing with a French edition, not a translation. Now, Victor Hugo's "novel as a whole is one of the longest ever written, with 655,478 words in the original French" (Wikipedia). It was first published in 5 parts with a total of about 1,900 pages, and is seldom issued in one volume. It would be extremely difficult to fit it in 416 or 516 pages. What Merrett won must have been either only one volume or an abridged edition.

Of course, it is perfectly possible that Wodehouse just made up the book and the number of pages. But as it happens there was at the time a popular edition in French for English readers "abridged and annotated with introduction, notes and vocabulary by O. B. Super when Professor of Romance Languages in Dickinson College." This would be the right kind of book to be given as a prize to a schoolboy, a learning tool rather than a daunting full-length copy of Les Misérables. Not unlike Dr. Giles' "crib" to Greek and Latin authors mentioned earlier in the story.

It existed in several editions, but the one closest both to the date of publication of the story and also to at least one of the required amounts of pages was printed in America by D. C. Heath in 1903 and can be read at the Internet Archive here. It has 391 numbered pages, but if you add 8 pages of titles and introduction, frontispice, blank endpapers and (at a pinch) covers you can almost reach 416, and after all what matters for the division of spoil is the number of physical leaves. (In fact, a copy at HathiTrust has exactly 416 page scans including covers, although some of them seem to be counted twice.)

It may not be possible now to give a definite answer to the rather unimportant question of whether Wodehouse used this particular edition as a reference. If he did, a simple slip would explain the error. It would be nice to discover a copy of it in a library with an incorrect sum "392 + 8 + 16 = 516" hastily jotted down in his handwriting at the end, but until that happens all this must remain within the realm of speculation.