The Happy Dreams of editors – the nightmares are privileged communications—feature banners with the strange device,“Definitive!” And sometimes incautious and over-generous reviewers make those dreams an apparent reality. But the irony has entered the soul, and cannot be long forgotten. Those of us engaged in editing John Stuart Mill's Collected Works have always known that, quite apart from our failings, it is impossible to produce an edition that will stand up for all time. Even more important is the realization that no editor of an author such as Mill can fully satisfy any one generation of actual, let alone potential, readers.

The Phrase “editing Hardy” encompasses a range of very different tasks: Hardy's private notebooks, for example, pose some editorial problems not at all characteristic of his correspondence, and there are similar differences in the problems involved in editing his poetry as opposed to his prose fiction. In fact, somewhere in the course of “editing Hardy” one can probably find an example of almost every major kind of problem which editors of Victorian authors are likely to confront. In the space of one essay it would be of course hopeless to attempt a detailed consideration of all the various questions Hardy's texts pose for editors; yet any discussion of editing Hardy that did not attempt to come to grips with at least some of the specific editorial problems editors face would scarcely be more than a summary account of current progress. This essay, therefore, provides a general survey of the present state of the scholarly editing of Hardy's texts, but it also includes a more detailed consideration of current theory and practice in editing Hardy's prose fiction which focuses on the question of copy-text choice and uses examples drawn from the texts of Far from the Madding Crowd to illustrate one aspect of that problem.

Victorian Literature, particularly fiction, offers both rich materials and complex problems for textual scholarship. The nineteenth is the first century for which multiple authorial manuscripts, proofs, and revised editions abound. There are major editorial projects underway for Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, and perhaps more, to say nothing of the Mill and Disraeli projects. But the variety of mistakes made so far in these editions makes one wish to pull the whistle rope – stop the train and survey the course.

When we couldn't understand a passage or a poem, I either walkt over or wrote to him, and got his explanation of it. At first I didn't take the volume with me, and he amused me very much by saying: “'Pon my word I don't know what I did mean by the poem … But I'll borrow a copy to-morrow and look at it again.”

Clough's poetry poses editorial problems that, if not special in kind, are certainly special in degree. The problems arise from Clough's way of writing and rewriting, so that one “poem” could in different stages be rewritten with widely divergent poetic intentions. The description that his own Mephistophelean Spirit gives in Dipsychus could stand for much of his experience in composition, and it well describes many of his manuscripts:

don't be sure — Emotions are so slippery … write verse, Burnt in disgust, then ill-restored, and left Half-made, in pencil scrawl, illegible.

Three holograph manuscript George Meredith poems and various holograph drafts now in the Sir Hugh Walpole Collection at the King's School, Canterbury, provide additions to Phyllis B. Bartlett's edition of The Poems of George Meredith, 2 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978). Bartlett's editorial methodology is based upon a comparison of printed texts and extant manuscripts, and “much of the hitherto unpublished material included” in the edition “is taken from two notebooks now in the Beinecke Library at Yale” belonging to Meredith's early creative period (I, xxviii). The three poems, whose manuscripts are bound in half green morocco binding at the King's School, were published in the second posthumous book of Meredith's poems to appear in 1909, Last Poems (London: Constable). They are: “The years had worn their season's belt,” with several early drafts of the poem; “The Wild Rose,” with revisions; and “OnComo,” with revisions in which the last three lines differ from those published.

In general Carlyle was not kind in dealing with the English Romantic poets. Wordsworth was no exception to the rule. As early as 4 March 1823 Carlyle cautioned Jane Welsh against admiring Wordsworth and Byron too much and Goethe too little. “Wordsworth and Byron! They [compared to Goethe] are as the Christian Ensign and Captain Bobadil before the Duke of Marlboro!” Even in treating rustics and their way of life Schiller was far superior to Wordsworth. In his Life of Schiller (1825) Carlyle wrote:

Among our own writers, who have tried such subjects, we remember none that has succeeded equally with Schiller. One potent but ill-fated genius has, in far different circumstances and with far other means, shown that he could have equalled him: the Cotter's Saturday Night of Burns is, in its own humble way, as quietly beautiful, as simplex munditiis, as the scenes of Tell. No other has even approached them; though some gifted persons have attempted it. Mr. Wordsworth is no ordinary man; nor are his pedlars, and leech-gatherers, and dalesmen, without their attractions and their moral; but they sink into whining drivellers beside Rösselmann the Priest, Ulric the Smith, Hans of the Wall, and the other sturdy confederates of Rütli.

Among the surviving papers of the indefatigable journalist, parliamentary barrister, and Cambridge “Apostle” George Stovin Venables (1810–88) recently deposited at the National Library of Wales are five delightful letters to Venables from Matthew Arnold – two written in 1879 and 1880 and three during the last full year of his life in 1887. The first two, being concerned with Arnold's 1879 book of selections from Wordsworth and with Venables' review of it in the Saturday Review, give us Arnold's reaction to published criticisms of his Wordsworth book and its well-known introductory essay. The three 1887 letters anticipate a visit by Arnold to the Venables family seat, Llysdinam, at Newbridge-on-Wye, in Radnorshire, Wales, hoping to include fishing in the river.

None of the principles that should guide an editor of letters seems to me more important than considering the reader's convenience. For the most part collections of letters are consulted by people searching for particular bits of information, and the editor's duty is to make it available as easily as possible. A reader who may be unfamiliar with books mentioned frequently in the notes ought not to be confronted with cryptic acronyms like LJOP and TLOP, which force him to consult a table at the beginning of the volume or even, in a multi-volumed work, in Volume I to discover that these puzzles stand for The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems and Tristram of Lyonesse and Other Poems. For the reader's convenience it would be more considerate to use a short and easily identifiable title. Tristram fills hardly any more space than the four capitals TLOP.

Our projected forty-volume edition of The Brownings' Correspondence had its origin in our intention to collect data for a checklist of the letters of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But as so much new material kept surfacing, we turned our thoughts increasingly towards a collected edition of their letters. Discussions between ourselves, and with various experts in the field, led us to announce in print, in 1963, our intention to undertake this project. The first four volumes, covering the years 1809 through 1841, are nearing completion.

Another year has passed, and once again we take this opportunity of updating our Checklist. It has been another fruitful year, thanks in large part to the very gratifying help we are receiving from Browning scholars. This supplement contains 277 entries–less than in previous supplements, but still containing an impressive proportion of totally new entries: 173. In addition to these new-found letters, we now know the present location of 35 letters whose whereabouts we had not previously established, and new locations for 17 letters that have changed hands. Quotations from catalogue sources have been added to 13 letters, and 9 have been redated as a result of further research in the course of editorial work on the early volumes of the Brownings' correspondence.