P. G. Wodehouse: variorum editions

These are variorum editions of books by P. G. Wodehouse that have already entered the public domain in the US. The overall structure is simple: the main text is that of a book edition, and the footnotes record all the differences observed between it and other versions of the text: magazines, UK and US books, and later editions.

The base text selected depends on the case. For the first project of this kind that I completed, Leave It to Psmith, the first UK edition was used, and the same happened with The Small Bachelor. For the third installment A Gentleman of Leisure, however, the 1921 British edition (Jenkins) was chosen, since I judged that the changes introduced in it with respect to the 1910 Alston Rivers edition represented the author's decision on what the final version of the text should be. (The American 1910 version The Intrusion of Jimmy is equally an earlier stage in the development of the text.) Naturally there is much of subjective appreciation in these choices. For the next in line, the US book The Little Warrior seems a more sensible choice than the much abridged UK version Jill the Reckless. Here the motivation is practical as well as artistic: selecting the shorter version as main text would have meant an apparatus swollen with dozens of paragraphs excised from the longer version.

Although all the footnotes are presented at the same level, the differences they contain are really of two kinds. On the one hand, differences between serializations in magazines prior to the publication of the novel in book form, and between the UK and US book (what I call "main texts"), very often represent authorial decisions: additions and deletions, choices of vocabulary and other changes made by Wodehouse to accomodate the text to its intended audience; or as already mentioned they may mark stages in the composition, as he found ways to improve the narrative or detected errors (such as lack of continuity). Sometimes these could be attributed to his editors, and at this distance in time it may be impossible to find out which was the case.

On the other hand, differences in later editions and minor serializations, grouped under "secondary texts", may at times have been due to Wodehouse when they were published during his lifetime, but more often are either conscious decisions made by editors, or mere errors that are unavoidably introduced during the resetting of a text. Changes in later book editions, particularly British, tend to be perpetuated in successive editions, since each new one is usually based not on the first (and theoretically best) but on the latest. In this regard, variorum editions may be useful to determine at what point each change entered the history of the text and whether it should be maintained in an ideal edition.

These editions presents the bare differences, without attempting to explain the reasons behind each change. This is best done in a running commentary, which for some of these texts already exists in the Annotations published at Madame Eulalie's Rare Plums. These often discuss the most significant of the differences described here from a literary and editorial perspective.

A short introduction provides full details of the texts and conventions used, plus additional resources and bibliography. In the text, I have tried to distinguish between the actual text and the editorial intervention using dark red for the latter.

These are not reading texts. The page is perhaps too large, and the footnotes are somewhat intrusive. I like to think of them as texts for scholars, useful as a tool for studying their composition and history. If you just want to enjoy the novel, nothing beats a traditional printed book.

These editions have been prepared using Google Docs. GDocs is very limited in terms of the formatting possibilities it offers, and I'm not too happy about some of the issues resulting from these limitations, such as the fact that footnote callouts can be separated at the end of a line. Better results could be obtained with other word processors like MS Word, but they all have shortcomings when used for this kind of work. Ideally should be done using a critical text editing software, with numbered lines and a proper critical apparatus, but I don't have one at present. So rather than converting it to a better word processor I'll wait until I can have continued access to a professional tool.

I don't suppose for a moment that these variorum editions are perfect or complete. I'm quite confident about the analysis of the main texts, but each has hundreds of footnotes, and it is very easy for errors to creep in when you're dealing with such a large amont of data. I would also like to analyze the later editions better, and include others that are not available to me now, and to establish the dependence between book editions (now only tentatively done in the introductions). So each file may be updated in the future, changing the date given at the end of the introduction.

Variorum editions published so far:

• A Gentleman of Leisure (US The Intrusion of Jimmy) (PDF, 2,535 KB)
• Leave It to Psmith (PDF, 1,618 KB)
• The Small Bachelor (PDF, 1,365 KB)