Abstract
This chapter seeks to understand the extent of the influence of Caleb Stower’s The Printer’s Grammar (1808) on the presentation of Thomas Dunham Whitaker’s controversial 1813 folio edition of William Langland’s dream-vision poem, which was written in the fourteenth century. More specifically, it is through an examination of Whitaker’s usage of black letter and red ink and his punctuation style that this chapter demonstrates how Whitaker’s Romantic medievalism and interpretative but practical application of contemporary editorial style both assured the clarity of authorial content, and enabled Langland’s potentially anachronistic poem to be accessible to, and appreciated by, his nineteenth-century audience.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
See also The Annual Biography and Obituary, for the Year 1823, p. 212; The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle 1822, vol. 92, part I, p. 83.
- 3.
The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle 1822, vol. 92, part I, p. 83. This text appears verbatim in The Annual Biography and Obituary, for the Year 1823, p. 213.
- 4.
The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle 1820, vol. 90, part II, p. 104.
- 5.
Crowley ceased printing in 1551 when he was ordained deacon, ‘trading the printing press for the pulpit’ (Regan 1988, 6).
- 6.
Brewer (1996, 30) states later that ‘Warton quotes substantial sections from the poem, totalling about 500 lines in all, to illustrate Langland ’s “imagination” and to give the reader examples of “striking specimens of our author’s allegorical satire, [which also] contain much sense and observation of life, with some strokes of poetry”’. See also Kelen (1996, 89).
- 7.
Later in the century, Skeat observes (1873, lviii) Whitaker ’s error: ‘Crowley ’s words (to be found in Pref. II. p. xxxii) distinctly imply that date a. d. 1409 appeared in an “auncient copye” which “it chaunced him to se” rather than in the one which he chose to print from. Besides, the B-text was not written till A. D. 1377’.
- 8.
Skeat (1873, liv) provides the following interpretation of Whitaker ’s proficiency: ‘Only, I believe, by the old observation that the eye only sees that which it has been trained to see. It is clear that, as a scholar, he frequently misunderstood his author ; and that, as a transcriber, he often failed in deciphering the not very difficult characters in which the MS. is written. The two causes together are quite sufficient to account for such mistakes as, despite all his care, are certainly to be found in his edition.’
- 9.
See also Skeat (1873, lxi).
- 10.
M. B. Parkes (1992, 44) states that ‘[originally] the punctus elevatus seems to have consisted of a punctus surmounted by an acute accent or virgule (the pes), but by the twelfth century this stroke had evolved to a shape like a “tick”’.
- 11.
See also R. B. McKerrow (1913, 307).
- 12.
It is interesting that Skeat (1873, lxi) found the application of red ink troubling: ‘I confess I was much surprise to find that, in the case of proper names, the words printed in red letters are no sort of guide to the words written in red letters ; indeed, the deviations of the print from the MS are so frequent in this respect that the task of rectification became irksome ; and as no good result came of it (for the scribe is very capricious, and even writes words in red which are not names at all), I had no choice but to abandon all notice of this pecularity’.
- 13.
See also Bray (2000, 108).
- 14.
See also Bray (2000, 111).
- 15.
Parkes (1992, 49) notes that the semicolon in the sixteenth century ‘[reflected] the needs of those who were accustomed to the habit of silent reading’.
- 16.
See also Bray (2000, 110).
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Hargrave, J. (2019). Nineteenth-Century Editorial Style at Work: Thomas Dunham Whitaker’s Piers Plowman . In: The Evolution of Editorial Style in Early Modern England. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20275-0_8
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