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.]