Making a Point (11 page)

At least, when you're alive, you can make your own case to the publisher about preserving your desired punctuation. But what happens after you're dead? A different character now joins the company of punctuation-deciders listed in
Chapter 10
: the literary editor, ready to make fresh semantic and pragmatic decisions.

12

Interfering with Jane Austen

This is the opening sentence of Jane Austen's
Persuasion
(1818):

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed.

Readers have long admired the balanced and elegant character of this sentence, with its three
there
-constructions building up a rhetorical peak, subtly linked by semicolons. But the punctuation is almost certainly spurious. That's not how she wrote at all.

We know this thanks to a splendid project, led by Professor Kathryn Sutherland of the University of Oxford, which has collated all the extant handwritten fiction manuscripts of Jane Austen in digital form. You can see them online at the appropriately named <
www.janeausten.ac.uk
>. There isn't very much, as all the original manuscripts of the novels were
destroyed after the books were printed – routine practice in an age long before author's holographs came to be valued in the way they are today. But what survives gives us a remarkable insight into her way of writing. And it is a goldmine for punctuation enthusiasts.

Here's a short extract from
Persuasion
, from one of two chapters (page 4 of
Chapter 10
) which are the only surviving examples in Austen's handwriting of a novel that was completed for publication. If you know the book well, you won't recognize the text because these chapters were replaced in the published version. She changed the ending – and fortunately the unrevised text was never destroyed.

At last however, he was able to in:

:vite her upstairs, & stepping before her

said — “I
shall
will just go up with

you myself & shew you in — I cannot

stay, because I must go to the P. office,

5

but if you will only sit down for

5 minutes I am sure Sophy will

come. ––– and you will find nobody

to disturb you — there is nobody but

Frederick here —” opening the door as

10

he spoke. — Such a person to be paſsed

over as a Nobody to her! — After being

allowed to feel quite secure — indifferent

—at her ease, to have it burst on her

that she was to be the next moment

15

in the same room with him! —

No time for recollection! — for plan:

:ning behaviour, or regulating man:

:ners! — There was time only to turn

pale, …

I've chosen an extract where there is hardly any crossing-out, so that the style can be more easily seen. There are several interesting punctuation features. Word-breaks at the end of a line aren't signalled by hyphens, but by two colons – one at the end of the first line and the other at the beginning of the next (a throwback to the ancient tradition described in
Chapter 3
). Frequent exclamation marks convey the character's excitement. And above all, there are the dashes – a notable characteristic of Austen's style.

Handwriting does many things that print cannot do. The spatial relation of lines to each other can alter dramatically. Letter-sizes can vary enormously in a way that the contrast between upper-case and lower-case cannot capture. And if a dash is there to represent a pause, then the length of the dash tells us something that is lost when all dashes are reduced to a single piece of type in print. Look at the long dash in line 8, for example. Why such length? Read on in the novel. It anticipates ‘opening the door as he spoke'.

You won't see many dashes in the published book. We'd expect a publisher to do a certain amount of polishing, such as removing handwritten abbreviations (& vs
and
), correcting spelling mistakes (
recieve
), and ensuring house-style consistency (
judgment
vs
judgement
); but what Austen's editor did was far more radical. As Sutherland points out in
Jane Austen's Textual Lives
(2005), the manuscripts were normalized either by an editor at her publisher's (John Murray) or by a corrector in the printing-house. New paragraphing is introduced. Sentence construction is changed to follow prescriptive norms. Gone are her rhetorical dashes and her use of initial capitals on common nouns. And there is a huge amount of repunctuation, as seen in Sutherland's comparison of a section of manuscript in Austen's hand and the final text as it was printed.

Whoever corrected this is clearly under the influence of the heavy punctuational style recommended by the nineteenth-century grammarians I described in
Chapter 8
. And, as Sutherland points out, the process continued into the twentieth century, with subsequent editions reflecting later prescriptive preferences. For example, R W Chapman, whose five-volume edition appeared in 1923, considered the novels ‘under-punctuated'. Sutherland reports an instance when Chapman asked the
Oxford English Dictionary
editor Henry Bradley for advice about how to punctuate the phrase ‘a quick looking girl' (describing Susan Price in
Mansfield Park
). Should he use a comma or a hyphen? Bradley's response (a letter of 14 February 1922) is illuminating: do neither.

Your alternatives of comma and hyphen imply different constructions, and I am not quite sure which is right, or whether the author may not have felt the collocation as
something between the two … is it not possible that if we demand that it
must
be either comma or hyphen, we shall be insisting on a precision of grammatical analysis which punctuation has rendered instructive to readers of today, but which
c
1800 only a grammarian would be capable of?

Chapman let Austen's version stand in this instance; but in many other cases he implemented a policy, following the tradition going back to Lindley Murray, that punctuation exists to foster grammatical precision. And Sutherland concludes:

he prepared a text which actively and misguidedly promoted Austen's twentieth-century reputation as a conformant and prim stylistician.

The issues now go well beyond the linguistic, and raise fundamental questions about the role of editorial intervention in literature, and what exactly we are studying when we analyse the linguistic choices encountered in a text. Austen is not an isolated case. Many other authors have had their punctuation emended in a similar way.

In the case of Daniel Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe
, we have an even more complex situation, as several printers were involved, and there is no surviving author's manuscript. Defoe's publisher, William Taylor, farmed the manuscript out to a printer, Henry Parker, and the first edition appeared on 25 April 1719. Demand was so great that a second edition was required, and this was set in a hurry by three different printers, appearing two weeks later. A month later, there were two further editions set by the same three printers, and two more in August set by Parker alone. The textual variations introduced by the printers are an editorial nightmare for anyone trying to establish a version that comes closest to what Defoe intended. And variations in punctuation, according to Evan
R Davies, the editor of the Broadview 2010 edition, are most frequent of all. He writes:

To a reader accustomed to twenty-first grammatical conventions, the first edition of Robinson Crusoe can seem hopelessly mispunctuated, replete with fragmented clauses, run-on sentences, capricious commas.

He illustrates with a short comparison:

Apart from the lexical changes (such as
Men
to
Man
), we see a grammatical punctuation replacing the rhetorical style. However, there is nothing ‘capricious' about it. Both versions are systematic, but the later edition shows the clear influence of a printer wishing to make a text conform to the rules as laid down in the grammars of the time.

Those who have edited the few surviving manuscripts in Defoe's hand have noted a highly individual style, with idiosyncratic abbreviations and little punctuation. Davies generally keeps the punctuation of the first edition except where ‘the meaning of the prose is seriously undermined', in which case he uses the punctuation of later editions. And, crucially, he gives a list of these changes – an eminently desirable practice that ought to be followed universally. For example, on p. 51, we read:

in an ill Hour, God knows, on the first of
September
1651 I went on Board a Ship bound for
London
;

We learn that the first edition has a period after ‘knows'. Nobody would disagree with the decision in this case. But the few instances where there is clearly an error are far outnumbered by the hundreds of instances where any emendation would be a matter of stylistic choice.

Modern editions have continued to make the punctuation conform to modern standards, as with Austen, so that the present-day reader encounters a text that is orthographically familiar. But ease of reading is gained at the expense of a distancing from Defoe's style – and in this case, from the character of the narrator, Crusoe. As Davies concludes:

Whether by accident or by art, Defoe created a text that matches its protagonist: neither Strunk nor White, but sprawling, rambling, and discursive.

William Strunk Jr and E B White are the authors of a good-usage manual, originally published in 1919 – the equivalent, to American readers, of Fowler in Britain.

Novelists who use as little punctuation as possible do so in an interesting way. They omit the features that were later arriving in the history of English orthography, as described in
Chapter 6
, such as quotation marks, semicolons, and apostrophes. They don't usually (James Joyce is an exception) mess about with the oldest features, such as periods and paragraphs. The same applies to poets whose punctuation is highly idiosyncratic: there may be variation in the use of one kind of feature (such as the use of dashes), but there is respect for others, such as stanza separation and the identity of the poetic line. All of this suggests that writers manipulate some features of orthography more readily than others.

This is indeed the case. As in any system, some features of punctuation have a critical role: the system would collapse if they were not there. Other features are less important: if they were missing, the written language would survive. We see this selectivity in practice in writers like Cormac McCarthy, as well as in the distinctive markings observed in the oldest English manuscripts. And from it we reach a conclusion of major significance for anyone involved in teaching or learning about punctuation: some marks are more important than others. The system, in a word, is hierarchical.