Just to show that the SL forums do *not* comprise most of my internet time, I thought I might point to the following:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11610489
which amused me greatly.
Pep (wonders if one of his antecedents was responsible; what do you reckon, Scylla?)
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That will surely be a disappointment to Jane Austen lovers... and wonders if there will be pride and prejudice at the discovery.
ReplyDeleteI don't know who you are Shaun, but if you would like more comments to be published your veil of anonymity will have to be drawn aside. No alts allowed here, sorry.
ReplyDeleteActually, I've always been pretty sure that it was Francis Bacon who really wrote *Mansfield Park*.
ReplyDeleteThere's not nearly enough information here to know what is really going on, of course, but one point that may have escaped Dr. Sutherland is that it was common practice until well into the 19th century for writers to allow compositors, printers, and editors to add the "incidentals" to their published texts -- things like punctuation, regularized spellings, italics, and so forth. In fact, it's often possible to identify particular compositors by their idiosyncratic spellings or other formal features.
There were a few authors, such as Alexander Pope, Samuel Richardson, and Laurence Sterne, who were very particular about such things (Richardson printed his own texts), but, for the most part, authors delivered their manuscripts to the printer in a pretty imperfect state, and trusted in the printer to neaten things up.
That wouldn't extend to changing actual wording, of course, but it's by no means clear that *that* was involved. Of course, it wouldn't have been unusual for a male to involve himself heavily in the composition of a woman: Charlotte Lennox's *The Female Quixote* seems to have owed a fair amount to the interventions of Samuel Johnson.
God, what a boring post this is. Sorry Pep; next time I'll have Richard edit my response before submitting it. I'm sure it would be much more amusing as a result.
On the contrary Scylla, this is precisely the sort of post which I would have hoped for. Not all blogs and forums need to be full of one-line insults and I would much prefer that my blog was informative and educational as well as entertaining - and I would also prefer that I didn't have to do all the work myself - it gets tiring and monotonous. I will add to your post that I have read that Kipling did not punctuate his work at all, but made a list of all the possible punctuation marks and put them at the end of his manuscript with a note to the editor/publisher to insert them where they thought they would do most good.
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