Difference between revisions of "Millgate 1987"

Latest revision as of 16:32, 1 September 2019

Jane Millgate. Scott's Last Edition: A Study in Publishing History. University of Edinburgh Press, 1987.

vii: But the magnum opus edition, as Scott liked to call it, also had a more far-reaching effect: in collecting and annotating his writings in this way Scott was implicitly assigning to fiction a status previously reserved for poetry and drama, and to the productions of a living author a treatment normally accorded only to the achievements of the great masters of the past.

vii interleaved set of scott’s revisions and holograph intros @ Nat Lib Scotland

1 Cadell ad— collecting in order to tranche down (St Clair 2004)
2 each vol cost 5 shillings vs 3 vol first run with price set by Kenilworth
3 crash of 1825 resulted in financial trouble for Scott, Constable, Ballantyne— cf Sutherland’s article in Library
4 Constable mooted a collected ed of the novels earlier, in 1823
- 5 constable pushes for this ed sooner, while Scott preferred posthumous
6 Cadell instigates MO ed 1826— also details of sale of Waverley copyrights
7 WS "handsome and cheap ed of the whole with notes"
- "give these works a new value"
9-10 Cadell chooses 18mo format to result in quick ROI
11 32 vol, Waverley-Quentin Durward based on copyrights owned by Cadell/Scott-trustees
- other novels were scott’s property alone
- stereotyping
  - also betting on separate sales of illustrations to owners of earlier eds
12 "Cheapness remained for Cadell the key attraction of the scheme, offering as it did a new market untapped by the earlier collected editions of the W Novels."
ded. to the king

15 Cadell succeeds in commissioning prominent artists incl. Landseer and Wilkie for engravings/illustrations
17 Scott didn’t have direct control/input over the illustrations, nor desired it (unlike Dickens later)
19ff Scott working on annotations

79: [Idiolect] This renewed interest in the speech of his favourite characters goes along with a more general concern on Scott’s part to adjust the idiolect of his speakers for region and class as well as for individual idiosyncrasies. Balmawhapple no longer insists that his orders were ‘precise’ but ‘preceese’.
- see Griffiths 2016 on idiolect

81: [Revising chapter epigraphs in Guy Mannering] Scott could not claim to have been the first novelist to employ epigraphs, and he did not begin using them until two thirds of the way through the final volume of Waverley… [he inconsistently labels them though] Once the epigraph convention had become established Scott could introduce among the bona fide quotations an occasional extract from ‘Old Play’ or ‘Old Ballad’ that was more authorial than authentic, but the time for this had not arrived when he was composing Mannering and so the pair of couplets introducing the seventeenth chapter were left without any identification. In the magnum Scott supplies the information that the lines are ‘imitated’ from Pope. This taking trouble with the ostensibly peripheral matter of the epigraphs gives some indication of Scott’s concern with the detail of every aspect of the new edition, and the interleaved set provides moving evidence that this attentiveness was maintained to the very end of his work for the edition[.]

86-7: “antiquarian zeal” [in his annotations]…. Such seizing upon new documentary fragments and the preserving of them in the editon, no matter how awkward it might be to find them a place, was entirely characteristic of Scott’s practice during the preparation of the magnum.