TEXTUAL COMMENTARY

I. History of the Text

Thackeray probably began writing Catherine at the beginning of April 1839. Since the first installment of the novel appeared in the May issue of Fraser's Magazine that year, he must have completed that installment during April: by April 15 if the date at the end of it is accurate. Moreover, since he seems to have based the name of one of the major characters in the first installment on that of a character in a play that first appeared on stage on April 1, 1839,¹ it is not likely that he began the novel before April 1.

After the first installment of Catherine appeared in May, three further installments appeared in each subsequent month through August. There was then a two-month hiatus in publication, and the fifth installment did not appear until November. After another hiatus in December, the final two episodes appeared in Fraser's in January and February 1840. Thackeray finished writing the novel in mid-January 1840, according to a note he wrote to James Fraser, the publisher of the magazine (Letters 1: 407).

Thackeray's unhappiness with the novel, discussed in the Historical Commentary, may partly explain the gaps in publication, which presumably correspond to gaps in composition.² Thackeray's absences from London during the months when he would have been preparing installments for September, October, and December 1839 may also be part of the explanation for why no episodes appeared in those months.³ The same situation arose five years later with Barry Lyndon, which was appearing in serialized form in Fraser's in 1844. Halfway through that novel, Thackeray began to consider it a nightmarish burden, and in the middle of composing it, in late August 1844, left London for a trip to the Mediterranean: the result was that he was unable to provide copy for the October issue of Fraser's.⁴ The theory of Keith Hollingsworth, that publication of the installments of Catherine was deliberately delayed so that the last installment would appear in the same month as the last installment of Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard,⁵ has no evidence to support it.

Thackeray's manuscript for Catherine, along with all his other manuscripts for Fraser's, has disappeared.⁶ The only manuscript-related material for Catherine that does survive is the original of the drawing Thackeray made to accompany the fifth installment of the novel. Curiously, this is the only one of Thackeray's five illustrations for Catherine that did not appear in the first edition in Fraser's, and perhaps that is why it survived, having been spared the Fraserian publication process. However, three of Thackeray's illustrations that did appear in Fraser's, accompanying his earlier work, The Yellowplush Correspondence, also survive despite going through the publication process in Fraser's.⁷

Catherine was never republished in Thackeray's lifetime, not even by the publishers in New York who reprinted many of his obscure early works from Fraser's without his permission.⁸ Thackeray did at one point contemplate including Catherine in his authorized Miscellanies, which Bradbury and Evans issued in the late 1850s: in 1855, while on his second American lecture tour, he wrote Bradbury and Evans about Catherine, and also about Barry Lyndon and "A Shabby Genteel Story," saying he did not have time to work on proofs for those works, but that he would do so when he returned or when he had more time.⁹ The implication is that all three works were to appear in the Miscellanies, but in the end only Barry Lyndon and the "Shabby Genteel Story" were published there. No evidence survives concerning the decision to exclude Catherine, but given Thackeray's unhappiness with the novel, the decision was probably his.¹⁰

In any case, from 1839-40, when it appeared in Fraser's, until 1869, when the publishing house of Smith, Elder reissued it as part of the twenty-second and final volume of its first edition of Thackeray's collected works, Catherine was available only to those who had access to copies of Fraser's Magazine. Thus the writer George Augustus Sala, who praised Catherine in 1864, would, as a reader of that novel, have been a member of a select group; and as he himself noted, Catherine was one of Thackeray's least known works.¹¹ It is true that in the 1830's Fraser's was an important and widely read magazine. The Wellesley Index reports that it "stood with Blackwood's at the forefront of monthly magazines," and in 1831 it claimed a circulation of 8,700, which was more than Blackwood's, though somewhat less than that of the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review.¹² According to The Wellesley Index, the figure of 8,700 may be an exaggeration. Even assuming that it is not, however, and assuming that the figure remained the same in 1839-40, this still leaves the number of purchased copies of Fraser's containing installments of Catherine well below the number of purchased copies for Thackeray's later novels. Vanity Fair, for instance, sold close to 32,000 copies between its first publication and 1865, while The Newcomes and Pendennis each sold close to 20,000.¹³ And of course, since the three other novels appeared as separate works, their sales figures directly indicate the number of purchasers intending to read each novel. In contrast, of the 8,700 purchasers of an issue of Fraser's containing Catherine, some percentage may not have been interested in Thackeray's novel at all.

From 1869 on, Catherine became more readily available. Not only did it appear that year in the Smith, Elder collected edition, but it also made a rare appearance in that same year as a separate publication, issued by the Boston firm of Fields, Osgood. Over the next thirty years, Smith, Elder reissued the novel several times in successive editions of Thackeray's collected works, and Catherine also appeared in various American editions of Thackeray's works. During this period, it appeared one more time on its own, in 1883, in an edition published by the New York firm of Lovell. In the early twentieth century, Catherine appeared in Smith, Elder's Centenary Biographical Edition of Thackeray's works (1911) and also in editions of the collected works put out by other British publishers, notably Macmillan and Oxford. It also continued to appear in American editions of the collected works, such as the ones issued by Scribner's. From 1920 on, however, the publication of collected editions, and thus of Catherine, virtually ceased, though two translations of the novel did appear: a Spanish translation published in Madrid in 1920 and an Italian translation published in Milan in 1945. It is a curious fact that, according to the available sources, these two translations were, until the Michigan edition in 1999, the only editions of Catherine as a separate work issued in the twentieth century.¹⁴

The 1869 republication of Catherine by Smith, Elder no doubt brought Thackeray's first novel a larger audience than it had previously had, but by consigning Catherine to the last volume of their collected edition, Smith, Elder was certainly not according it much prominence. Moreover, the Catherine that Smith, Elder put before the public in 1869 was, in certain significant respects, not the Catherine that had appeared thirty years before. The most important difference resulted from Smith, Elder's decision to expurgate the text: the editors in 1869, according to a footnote they supplied in the final chapter, decided that the descriptions of the murder of John Hayes and the execution of his murderers were lacking in literary merit and much too gruesome for their readers' tastes, and so removed them, along with several of Thackeray's personal attacks on Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens, and Ainsworth. In all, the editors in 1869 removed approximately four pages of the 95-page Fraser's text on the grounds of propriety and merit. They also removed or rewrote most of Thackeray's references to the fact that his novel was appearing as a serial in Fraser's. Moreover, they added as well as subtracted: they supplied a title for Chapter One, the already mentioned footnote in the final chapter, and a preliminary "Advertisement" explaining, rather defensively, Thackeray's intentions in the novel. The overall impression conveyed by the 1869 edition is of an uneasy publisher trying to make a difficult work presentable.

The Smith, Elder expurgations clearly produce a text different from the one Thackeray produced. However, Smith, Elder made two other sorts of changes in their 1869 edition which, though they altered Fraser's readings, in some cases resulted in a text closer to what Thackeray most likely wrote originally. These two sorts of changes were (a) substantive emendations of passages in Catherine that to Smith, Elder seemed in need of correction and (b) stylistic revisions of the accidentals.

The 1869 editors were extremely conscientious. They attacked more than 85 substantive textual problems, or passages they perceived as problems, and in about half of these cases brought the text closer to what Thackeray must have written or at least intended to write. Unfortunately, the other half of their substantive emendations consist of indifferent alterations of already acceptable readings or, worse, removal of clearly intended effects in the name of fussy literal-mindedness. Thus, the editors in 1869 considered Tom Billings's reference to the Count as the "Bavarian envy" to be an error rather than the mispronunciation joke it surely was, and so emended "envy" to "envoy." Similarly, when confronted with the shifts in the name of Count von Galgenstein's prospective wife from Dripping to Drippings to Brisket, in Chapters 2 and 3, the 1869 editors did not see or would not allow the meat-related joke; they thus emended to make the name read Dripping throughout. In addition, when dealing with passages in the first edition text that are clearly erroneous, the Smith, Elder editors sometimes introduced readings that are equally erroneous, or at least doubtful. In emending "biles" to "bills," for instance, in the Chapter 7 passage on unavoidable afflictions, they simply replaced one error with another (the correct reading is most likely "bile").

Still, Smith, Elder's editors did make many useful corrections, for instance reversing Thackeray's inadvertent interchanging of the names of the horses ridden by Brock and Galgenstein, replacing Thackeray's erroneous reference to the "Sun" when he meant the Bugle Tavern, and correcting numerous typographical errors (e.g., emending "There no law" to "There's no law"). The result is that some of the substantive readings of 1869 are closer to what Thackeray wrote or intended than are the equivalent readings from Fraser's text.

Curiously, the same is true of some of 1869's accidentals. As will be discussed in detail below, the style of capitalization, punctuation, and spelling in Fraser's text of Catherine is not typical of Thackeray's style as seen in his manuscripts for other works. Briefly, Thackeray's style was light in punctuation and heavy in capitalization, whereas the style of Fraser's Catherine is exactly the reverse. Moreover, Thackeray tended to use "ize" endings for words like "sympathize" and "recognize," but in the Fraser's version of Catherine these words are spelled "ise." The 1869 edition of Catherine returns to the "ize" spelling that Thackeray most likely used in his manuscript. It also lightens the punctuation and capitalizes such phrases as "the Count," "the Captain," "the Abbé," and "the Queen," phrases which are not capitalized in Fraser's text, but which are typically capitalized in Thackeray's manuscripts.

There is no evidence that the Smith, Elder editors had access to Thackeray's manuscript of Catherine, which had likely been destroyed long before 1869. The fact that they emended "biles" to "bills" instead of "bile," along with some of their other editorial decisions,¹⁵ suggests that they did not have the manuscript in their possession. Moreover, the style of the 1869 accidentals is not Thackerayan in all respects. Thackeray usually wrote "the Inn" with a capital "I," and most likely did so in his manuscript for Catherine, but the phrase is printed as the "the inn" in 1869 as well as in 1839-40. Similarly, although it was Thackerayan practice to capitalize "Sir" and "Madam," the lower case forms of 1839-40 persist in the 1869 edition.

This mixed style of accidentals suggests that what resemblance there is to Thackeray's style in the 1869 edition is the result of coincidence rather than planning. It happens that the style practices of Smith, Elder and of their printers, Spottiswoode and Company, were such as to produce an effect partially resembling that of Thackeray's manuscripts. The Smith, Elder house style was to spell words like "sympathize" with an "ize" ending, and the practice of at least some compositors at Spottiswoode, including the ones who set Catherine, was to use capitals in phrases like "the Captain," but not for "sir" or "madam." The result was an edition of Catherine with "ize" spellings and relatively heavy capitalization.¹⁶

In short, the Smith, Elder republication of Catherine in 1869, both by design and by happenstance, in some ways is closer to what Thackeray most likely intended than is the Fraser's text. However, because of its large-scale expurgations and its smaller-scale alterations, the 1869 Smith, Elder edition on the whole is further from Thackeray's intentions than is the edition of 1839-40.

Subsequent Smith, Elder editions derive from the edition of 1869, presenting an expurgated version of the novel and reprinting verbatim the explanatory footnote and the preliminary Advertisement added in 1869. Editors of the Smith, Elder editions of 1872 and 1874 may also have consulted the Fraser's text, but later editors probably did not. This can be seen by examining one of the few typographical errors introduced in 1869. In Chapter 7 of the novel, the narrator describes the nastiness of his little brother, who, he says, "having attacked my sister Rebecca . . . and smitten her on the elbow with a fire-shovel, apologised to us . . ." (Fraser's 20: 226). In 1869, "and smitten" became "had smitten," making nonsense of the grammar. The editions of 1872 and 1874 restored the correct form found in the Fraser's text, but in 1879 the editors introduced a completely new reading by emending "apologized" to "apologizing." This corrected the grammar, but moved even further from Fraser's text, suggesting that the 1879 editors were working from the 1869 text and did not have either Fraser's or the 1872 or 1874 editions available to them. Subsequent Smith, Elder editions followed the 1879 emendation.

(Of course, even the editors of 1872 and 1874 may not have had access to Fraser's; without consulting Fraser's, the editors in 1872, who otherwise followed the 1869 edition faithfully, may simply have hit upon the original reading in seeking to correct the error in the 1869 text, and the editors in 1874 may simply have been following 1872.)

The editors in 1879 introduced two major changes concerning the illustrations for the novel. First, they had Thackeray's four illustrations redrawn by Joseph Swain (or one of his assistants). Swain was a noted engraver of the time who worked for the Cornhill Magazine and Punch; his signature appears on the 1879 illustrations, but he was known to allow his assistants to publish under his name.¹⁷ Secondly, the editors introduced pictorial initials drawn by an artist signing himself "FAF" to begin each chapter. (When these new illustrations were reused in volume 24 of the 1911 Centenary Biographical Edition of Thackeray's works, the title page of that volume identified the artist as F. A. Fraser.)

In 1898-99, Smith, Elder issued the Biographical Edition of Thackeray's works, with introductions by his daughter, Lady Ritchie. Catherine appeared in volume 4 this time, accompanied by the four redrawn illustrations from 1879 but not by the pictorial initials from 1879. The editors for the Biographical Edition revised the spelling style to reintroduce "ise" forms and to modernize such spellings as "villany" (which became "villainy"). They also made even more emendations to the text, dealing with some of the cruxes ignored in earlier editions, but producing few demonstrably superior readings. Thus the editors in 1898 tried to correct the Chapter 5 muddle about who left the Tilt-Yard Coffee-House "in good time," a muddle left untouched by earlier editors; the 1898 emendation, however, introduces an unacceptable factual error and cannot be what Thackeray intended.

In 1911, the Smith, Elder Centenary Biographical Edition followed some but not all of the new emendations from 1898, and indeed most likely used 1879 as copy-text even though referring to the 1898 edition. Thus the pictorial initials introduced in 1879 but dropped in 1898 return in 1911 (though the full-page illustrations disappear altogether), and the spelling "villany" reappears. The 1898 emendation that made Father O'Flaherty find out about Voltaire's visit to England in "the Post" rather than in "the post" is followed, but the 1898 emendation of Thackeray's pseudo-Latin "bero" to "bore" (in the Chapter 1 quotation "exiguo pinxit proelia tota bero") is not.

Meanwhile, in the United States, editions of Catherine had been appearing regularly, the first being the one issued by Fields, Osgood in Boston in the same year as the first Smith, Elder edition. The Fields, Osgood version, which appeared on October 14, 1869, two and a half months after Smith, Elder issued its edition,¹⁸ clearly derives from the Smith, Elder edition: it makes exactly the same expurgations and it reproduces verbatim the Advertisement and the explanatory footnote that Smith, Elder had supplied. The main differences between the two 1869 versions are that the American one is set in double columns – like the Fraser’s version, oddly – and  it introduces such spellings as "Laboring" for "Labouring" (see the first word of the final paragraph).

Later American editions such as those of Scribner's and Cassell followed either the Fields, Osgood edition or the 1869 or 1874 Smith, Elder editions, but not the post-1874 Smith, Elder editions. That this is so is indicated by the failure of the later American editions to follow the few additional emendations made in 1879 and adopted in subsequent Smith, Elder editions: e.g., the deletion of the phrase "sang she" at the end of Chapter 1 in Catherine's song. The phrase is not in post-1874 Smith, Elder editions, but is in the Scribner's and Cassell editions.

The 1903 Scribner's edition is very conservative in emending, following its Smith, Elder copy-text quite faithfully.¹⁹ The editors of the undated Cassell edition, in contrast, were quite adventurous, lightening the punctuation even more than Smith, Elder had done, and introducing at least half a dozen new emendations; at least one of these emendations is entirely persuasive (altering "he" to "we" in the phrase "until he can relieve guard" in Chapter 5): the Cassell editors seem to have discovered the reading Thackeray originally intended. On the other hand, the Cassell editors or compositors could be careless, as in the very first sentence of the novel, where they print "Organizing" for "Orangizing."

Besides the 1869 Smith, Elder edition and my edition for Michigan in 1999, there are two posthumous editions which derive independently from the serialized version in Fraser's: the 1908 version of Catherine edited by George Saintsbury as part of volume 3 of The Oxford Thackeray and the 1911 version edited by Harry Furniss as part of his Centenary Edition of Thackeray's works published by Macmillan.²⁰ Both Saintsbury and Furniss eschew the expurgations introduced by Smith, Elder, but Saintsbury does make the minor deletions that remove references to Catherine's magazine origins. Neither of them makes many emendations; indeed, Furniss even refrains from correcting the confusion over the horses' names in the opening chapters and leaves intact the mistaken reference to the Bugle Tavern as the Sun (Saintsbury makes these corrections). On the other hand, Furniss follows Smith, Elder in making at least one unnecessary and misleading emendation, and partially follows Smith, Elder in another instance, producing a confusing combination of readings from 1839 and 1869.²¹ In addition, the Furniss edition produces a curious effect by including new illustrations drawn by Furniss himself alongside the original illustrations by Thackeray. Furniss even redraws the scene in one of the original illustrations and includes both versions for comparison. Finally, his edition suffers from several typographical errors, including the one of "Organising" for "Orangising" in the first sentence. Thus, although the Furniss edition is the most complete of the posthumous editions, in many ways it is unreliable and unsound.²²

Saintsbury's edition, in contrast, does not suffer as much from typographical errors, though it does contain a misprint of "No one" for "No man" at the beginning of the paragraph on Dickens at the end of the novel. Saintsbury is faithful to the capitalization practices of the Fraser's text, even to the extent of reproducing its inconsistencies. Thus, in general, phrases like "the count" are left uncapitalized in Saintsbury's edition as they are in Fraser's, but the few capitalized examples of "the Count" from the Fraser's text are also capitalized in his version. On the other hand, the Saintsbury edition replaces "ise" spellings with "ize" throughout. As already mentioned, Saintsbury makes minor deletions, but not the major expurgations, in the novel; he also follows Smith, Elder in some of their unnecessary emendations. Still, Saintsbury's edition of Catherine is probably the best of the posthumous editions published before 1999, being more complete than any edition derived from the 1869 Smith, Elder edition and more sound than what Harry Furniss produced.

II. Editorial Practices in this Edition

In the absence of the manuscript and without any editions from the author's lifetime other than the serialized text in Fraser's Magazine, the copy-text for Catherine must be the version of the novel found in Fraser's, that is, the text closest to the now lost manuscript and the only surviving version which Thackeray had a hand in producing. How much of a hand is not entirely clear. Thackeray was a "Fraserian" of several years' standing; he had been contributing to the magazine at least since 1837, and even before that had been included in the group picture of Fraserians published in Fraser's in 1835.²³ There is also at least one piece of evidence that indicates that contributors to Fraser's were allowed to read proofs of their articles before publication, and Thackeray is known to have read proofs for some of his later works and to have complained about editorial alterations in cases where he did not see proofs.²⁴ Given this evidence, it is possible that Thackeray read proofs for Catherine and that he was able to ensure that the novel Fraser's published was the one he had written. However, there is no direct evidence on this point, while there is evidence that William Maginn, the editor of Fraser's in the period just before Catherine was published, would revise his contributors' work without consulting them. Moreover, as George Saintsbury remarks,

. . . it has to be remembered that in no case of anonymous publication in a periodical, can we be certain that the matter is as it left the author's hands. (Oxford Thackeray 1: xii; emphasis in original)

Thus it is possible that the Fraserian Catherine is not quite the same as the Thackerayan Catherine – but, of course, if Fraser's made any substantive alterations in the text it is virtually impossible to know what they are. Concerning the accidentals, however (spelling, capitalization, and punctuation), the situation is somewhat different.

Because even an inconsistent writer like Thackeray has certain tendencies in spelling, capitalization, and punctuation, it is possible, by studying those tendencies, to determine whether the style of any given work of his conforms to his usual style. In the case of Catherine, the conclusion that must be drawn from such a study is that the text as it appears in Fraser's does not conform to Thackeray's usual style. What it does conform to is the style found in Fraser's in this period, suggesting that those responsible for preparing Thackeray's manuscript for publication in Fraser's made systematic alterations to it before it appeared in print.

To begin with capitalization: A sampling of Thackeray's surviving manuscripts²⁵ reveals a heavy style of capitalization. Typically, Thackeray would capitalize phrases such as "the Count," "the Queen," and "the Captain." Just as typically, Fraser's would print such phrases without capitals, and in the Fraser's edition of Catherine these phrases, with only a handful of exceptions (eight examples of "the Count," compared to dozens of examples of "the count," "the queen," "the captain," etc.), are consistently left uncapitalized. Similarly, Thackeray usually capitalized the words "Sir" and "Madam," but Fraser's did not, and in Fraser's version of Catherine all but one of the 52 examples of "sir" are printed lower case, as are all but one of the 29 examples of "madam." The conclusion is irresistible: Thackeray in his manuscript must have used a great many capitals which were removed before publication.

Similarly with spelling. As already suggested, Thackeray could be inconsistent in his orthography, seeing nothing amiss in writing "parlour" and "parlor" or "soda-water" and "soda water" in the same work or even in the same paragraph. He also varied between "wagon" and "waggon," "marshall" and "marshal," "good bye" and "good-bye."²⁶ Still, some tendencies can be identified. For instance, Thackeray usually spelled words like "recognize" and "sympathize" with an "ize" ending. Fraser's, on the other hand, at least in the 1839-40 period, consistently used "ise." In Fraser's version of Catherine, all but four of the 23 such words in the text are spelled with "ise" (or "ising") endings; and the four exceptions are all nonce words that the compositors may have been reluctant to touch. Similarly, Thackeray's invariable spelling of "grey" in all manuscripts sampled is with an "e," not an "a." Fraser's style at the time of Catherine, however, was to spell this word with an "a," and it is so spelled in Fraser's version of Catherine all ten times that it appears. Again the conclusion is irresistible: Thackeray provided copy that read "ize" and "grey," but his spellings were altered to "ise" and "gray."

Finally, there is the punctuation. Although little work has been done up to now on Thackeray's spelling and capitalization practices, Thackeray's style of punctuation has been studied by scholars such as Peter Shillingsburg, Edgar Harden, and Natalie Maynor, who have been able to document his tendencies by examining his surviving manuscripts and comparing them with his first editions.²⁷ These studies of Thackeray's punctuation have established two major points: first, that Thackeray tended to leave conventional punctuation, such as quotation marks, commas in series and before quotations, and periods at the end of paragraphs, to his compositors; secondly, that the compositors generally went beyond their mandate to add conventional punctuation, and imposed their own punctuation style on Thackeray's manuscripts. Philosophically, there existed a style conflict between Thackeray and his compositors, with Thackeray following the older rhetorical system of punctuating according to the pauses he wanted in a sentence, while the compositors followed the newer syntactical system of punctuating according to the grammatical units in each sentence. In practice, this meant that while Thackeray's manuscripts were in general lightly punctuated, with few commas but many dashes, the first editions based on those manuscripts contain many more commas and far fewer dashes.

Like the first editions of other works by Thackeray, the Fraser's version of Catherine is heavily punctuated, especially with commas.²⁸ On the other hand, a few sentences in the Fraser's text are under-punctuated. For instance, twice the conventional comma before a quotation has been omitted. These omissions suggest that in the manuscript of Catherine, as in the manuscripts of his other works, Thackeray left out much of the conventional punctuation, expecting his compositors to supply it. In general they must have done so, because most conventionally required punctuation is present in the Fraser's text, but occasionally the compositors must have failed to supply what was needed. In addition, those compositors most likely supplied much punctuation which was not needed, and which Thackeray did not desire, but which suited the style found in Fraser's.²⁹ Thus, although the situation is less clearcut than with the spelling and capitalization, since punctuation is more variable than the other types of accidentals, it seems clear that the punctuation in Fraser's version of Catherine, like the spelling and capitalization, was altered by hands other than Thackeray's.

What is not entirely clear is whether the alteration of the accidentals in Thackeray's manuscript was the work of the editors at the offices of James Fraser, the publisher of Fraser's Magazine, or of the compositors at the printing house of Moyes and Barclay, the firm that printed Fraser's.³⁰ There is no direct evidence on this point, but an examination of two books published by James Fraser close to the time that Catherine appeared in his magazine suggests that the style imposed on Thackeray's novel was the printer's, not the publisher's. The books in question – the first edition of Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship . . . (1841) and John A. Heraud's Substance of a Lecture on Poetic Genius (1837), both published by Fraser but not printed by Moyes and Barclay – differ from Fraser's Magazine in capitalization and spelling. Whereas capitalization is light in Fraser's at this time, both of these books are very heavy in capitalization. And whereas Fraser's consistently uses "ise" forms for words like "recognise," both of these books mix "ize" and "ise" indiscriminately.³¹ The implication is that the style of "ise" spellings and light capitalization characteristic of Fraser's at the time of Catherine was the result of practices at the printing house rather than at James Fraser's offices. This conclusion is supported by the fact that in a work printed at this time by Moyes and Barclay, but not published by James Fraser, only "ise" spellings can be seen, and the capitalization for phrases like "the king" and "the duke" is generally as light as in Fraser's, though it is not consistently so.³² Further support for the view that Moyes and Barclay were the ones responsible for the accidentals can be seen by examining the Literary Gazette for 1839, which Moyes and Barclay printed. The Gazette for that year uses "ise" spellings almost exclusively (20 examples of "ise" to only one example of "ize," and that one is the unusual word "gormandizing"). As well, the punctuation in the Gazette is extremely heavy, very much reminiscent of that in Fraser's. On the other hand, capitalization of phrases such as "the queen" and "the count" is inconsistent (12 to 10 in favour of lower case forms), not consistently lower case as in Fraser's, perhaps indicating that the editors at the Gazette intervened on this issue at times.³³

On the whole, then, the bulk of the evidence indicates that it was the compositors at Moyes and Barclay who restyled the manuscript of Catherine. In any case, the main point is that somebody restyled the manuscript so that, at least as far as the accidentals are concerned, the Fraser's text is not reliably authorial. The question then is what is to be done about the unreliable accidentals in the only text of Catherine that survives from Thackeray's lifetime.

The conventional approach in such a situation is simply to follow the copy-text despite the doubts it raises. As W. W. Greg says, "In the matter of accidents the copy-text is always to be followed unless manifestly incorrect or misleading."³⁴ Greg argues that owing to our "philological ignorance," it is impossible to establish an author's standard style for spelling and other accidentals, and any attempt to do so would "only result in confusion and misrepresentation."³⁵ Greg, however, is arguing from the example of Shakespeare, about whom there is indeed "philological ignorance." In the case of Thackeray, however, a great deal is known about his style preferences. There is less philological ignorance, and it is thus tempting to use the knowledge available to reintroduce Thackeray's style preferences into the text of Catherine and thus recapture the style of the now destroyed manuscript. After all, as Greg himself says, the aim of textual editing is to "present the text, so far as the available evidence permits, in the form in which we may suppose that it would have stood in a fair copy, made by the author himself . . . "³⁶

However, the problem with this sort of restyling is that none of it can be done with certainty. Punctuation is especially problematic. It is one thing to say, as is probably true, that the compositors altered the punctuation in Catherine to introduce more commas and to remove some dashes. It is quite another thing to be able to say which of the commas are the compositors' and which are Thackeray's; and it is virtually impossible to say where the compositors may have removed dashes. Spelling and capitalization are easier to deal with because they follow more regular patterns, and in some cases one can be fairly confident about what the compositors did and about what Thackeray must have written. For instance, given Thackeray's invariable practice of spelling "grey" with an "e," and Fraser's equally invariable practice of spelling it with an "a," it seems reasonable to conclude that in Thackeray's manuscript for Catherine "grey" was spelled with an "e" which the compositors altered to "a." It seems almost as reasonable to conclude that in the manuscript Thackeray capitalized such phrases as "the Count" and "the Captain," which the compositors then lower-cased. However, whereas the sampling of Thackeray's manuscripts reveals that he spelled "grey" with an "e" 100 per cent of the time, he capitalized phrases like "the Count" only about 90 per cent of the time; moreover, he capitalized phrases like "a Count" only 75 per cent of the time and the phrase "the Sun" only 60 per cent of the time. Thus there cannot be as much certainty about whether phrases like "a Count" or even "the Count" were capitalized in the manuscript as there can be about the spelling of "grey"and of course, even though all the evidence indicates that Thackeray always spelled "grey" with an "e" in manuscripts other than Catherine, that does not conclusively prove that he spelled it that way in Catherine, although it strongly suggests that he did.

In short, any attempt to restyle the Fraser's text would be fraught with the danger of introducing non-authorial forms. Introducing a capital letter into a phrase like "a Count" might not be a restoration of what was in the manuscript, but rather a movement away from what was in the manuscript. Moreover, in addition to the possibility that an attempt to restyle might introduce non-authorial forms, such an attempt would undoubtedly fail to correct all instances of the compositors' restyling of Thackeray's manuscript. Some of their changes, especially the changes in punctuation, are undetectable and would survive any attempt to recapture what Thackeray actually wrote. The result would thus be an inconsistent, inharmonious text combining some newly restored authorial usages with many remaining non-authorial ones; moreover, the text would be neither the unrecoverable manuscript nor the first published version, but merely a posthumous reconstruction without authority. In a similar situation, discussing the texts of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novels, Fredson Bowers warned against such attempts to restore authorial style in first editions of Hawthorne's novels for which manuscripts do not survive. "Any student of Hawthorne's manuscripts," Bowers writes,

could in many respects restyle various of such first editions to enforce agreement with what clearly must have been a different manuscript usage. But no consistency is possible in a process like this, for only a part of the accidentals are susceptible of alteration with such certainty. A few notable and invariable Hawthorne characteristics might be emended, but much of the ordinary punctuation, for instance, could never be definitely distinguished as compositorial or authorial.³⁷

Despite this convincing argument against restyling, however, Bowers does advocate such a procedure in one situation. He says that "when variation is present, and when some one form can be established from manuscript (even though later) as representing . . . [the author's] known characteristic," then one should revise in the direction of the known characteristic.³⁸ In other words, when a copy-text contains inconsistencies in spelling or other accidentals, Bowers would attempt to introduce an author's known style preferences in order to regularize the text. This is a dubious procedure, apparently based on the notion that inconsistency within a copy-text should not be tolerated, a notion that has been criticized by textual critics such as Thomas Tanselle. Tanselle argues that the notion of consistency in accidentals is given too great a weight if it leads to the position that a consistent form in a given text is not to be altered, even though it varies from the author's known practice in surviving manuscripts of other works, whereas an inconsistent form does require alteration . . .³⁹

The Bowers approach, while removing surface inconsistencies such as a capitalized "Sir" in one paragraph and a lower-case "sir" in another, would create exactly the sort of deeper inconsistency that Bowers warns against, for it would lead to the introduction of some authorial usages but not of others.

In the case of Catherine, the Bowers approach would produce some quite odd results. For instance, as already mentioned, Thackeray's invariable practice was to spell "grey" with an "e." In the Fraser's text of Catherine, however, the word appears all ten times with an "a." It was also Thackeray's practice – not quite invariable, but close (80 examples out of 83 in the sample) – to capitalize the word "Sir." In the Fraser's version of Catherine, however, the word is capitalized only once, while appearing uncapitalized 51 times. The most plausible explanation for what happened to "Sir" and "grey" is that in the manuscript of Catherine "grey" appeared with an "e" and "Sir" was always capitalized, but the compositors then imposed their preferred style, changing all examples of "grey" to "gray" and attempting to change all the examples of "Sir" to "sir." However, they missed one "Sir," and it remained capitalized in the Fraser's version. According to the approach to accidentals recommended by Bowers, the 51 lower-case examples of "sir" should be emended to "Sir" to conform to the one capitalized "Sir" already in the text, since there is inconsistency in the copy-text and "Sir" is known to be the author's preferred style. However, following Bowers would also mean leaving "gray" as it is even though it is known that the author's preferred style was "grey," because in this case there is no inconsistency in the copy-text.

Of course, if one is simply concerned about the inconsistency of "sir" and "Sir" in the copy-text, one could regularize in the opposite direction, making the one capitalized "Sir" conform to the 51 uncapitalized ones, and thus altering the text to a much lesser extent. But even to regularize to this extent is a debatable procedure. Thomas Tanselle notes that inconsistencies abound in nineteenth-century works, adding that there is no evidence authors saw consistency as a virtue.⁴⁰ As noted above, Thackeray's manuscripts contain many orthographical inconsistencies such as "parlour" and "parlor" and "soda water" with and without a hyphen. In the Fraser's version of Catherine, some of the inconsistencies (e.g., "Peterborough" and "Peterborow," "night-cap" and "nightcap") may be authorial, and there is no evidence that Thackeray would have wanted them regularized. Moreover, some of the inconsistencies are likely the result not of Thackeray's use of variant forms, but of the conflict between his style and the style imposed on his manuscript: the "Sir-sir" discrepancy is an example of this, as are the eight examples of "the Count" amid the dozens of examples of "the count" and the four "izing" spellings amid the 19 "ise" and "ising" spellings. To regularize these discrepancies in the direction of the majority usage in the text would be to replace authorial forms with compositorial ones, a procedure that inspires some reluctance because, after all, what one is primarily interested in about an author's writings is what the author wrote, not what the editors or compositors produced.⁴¹

Thus, since some of the inconsistencies in the Fraser's version of Catherine may be the result of Thackeray's own inconsistencies and since others likely reveal authorial usages amid compositorial ones, the course followed in this edition has been to leave the stylistic inconsistencies unaltered, an approach that has the incidental effect of preserving the nature of the Fraser's text, reflecting the clash between author and compositors.

In short, then, the present edition closely follows the Fraser's text of of Catherine as far as style is concerned despite the knowledge that the style being reproduced is neither entirely authorial nor entirely consistent. The present edition is not, however, simply a reprinting of the Fraser's text. Rather, it is a corrected version of that edition, a version which reflects the competing style preferences of author and compositors, but which, as far as possible, removes the mere slips that neither author nor compositors wanted.

Thus, obvious typographical errors (missing quotation marks, missing letters, missing commas before quotations) have been corrected. As well, some not-so-obvious errors have been dealt with, such as the omission and garbling of words and phrases. Thus in the third paragraph of the novel the compositors in 1839 (or perhaps Thackeray himself) omitted a word which the editors at Smith, Elder in 1869 conjectured, no doubt correctly, to be "characters." The word is inserted in their edition, and it appears in this edition as well. Similarly, the correction of Thackeray's inadvertent reference to the Bugle Tavern as the "Sun" is corrected in this edition, as it is in most posthumous editions, on the grounds that though Thackeray no doubt wrote "Sun," he would have recognized an error here if it had been pointed out to him and would have wanted the correct name inserted.⁴²

Some cases are more difficult than the mistake of Sun for Bugle, however. For instance, near the end of the novel, Father O'Flaherty says, in a letter to a countess in Paris, "I need not tell you [that Catherine is a carpenter's wife]." This is clearly a mistake, probably influenced by the appearance of the phrase "I need not tell you" in the previous line. The Countess knows nothing of Catherine, so Father O'Flaherty does need to tell her: what Thackeray most likely wrote or intended to write was "I must tell you," a phrase that all posthumous editions, including this one, substitute for the erroneous one.

Some erroneous readings in the copy-text have been corrected in my editions for the first time. For example, the puzzling phrase at the end of Father O'Flaherty's letter to the Countess, in which he describes a cudgelling match that is to take place before a boxing match, or as he is made to say in the Fraser's version of the novel, "before the Master mount," is now finally put right. Thackeray in this case was copying an advertisement about the bouts found in a newspaper from 1726, but his source actually reads, "before the Masters mount," meaning that the cudgellers would do battle before the two main combatants (the "Masters") mounted the stage. No previous edition has made the correction of "Master" to "Masters."

Some first-time corrections in this edition are more conjectural than the one just described, lacking the documentary evidence available in that case. Thus no previous edition (not even my 1992 dissertation or the 1999 Michigan text) noted the oddity of referring to Catherine as a kitten who might be hanged someday (in Chapter 7). It makes much more sense for the reference to be to her son Tom, Tom being the son of Cat" (Catherine's nickname). To fix this merely required changing a "she" to a "he."

Of course, some errors defy correction. The clearest example of this problem concerns the age of the heroine. Catherine is 16 when the novel opens in 1705. At the end of the novel, the narrator clearly states the date to be 1725, but equally clearly states that Catherine is now 33 or 34: obviously there is an error here, but it is an error impossible to correct because immediately after saying that Catherine is 33 or 34, the narrator adds: ". . . and when, my dear, is a woman handsomer than at that age?" (Chapter 8). Because of the comment by the narrator, one cannot correct Catherine's age to 36, for that would make the narrator celebrate an age Thackeray did not intend him to celebrate. When an error is built upon and becomes part of the text in this way, it is impossible to do anything more than record it, as is done in this edition in the notes.⁴³

In addition to recording resistant errors such as the one concerning Catherine's age, the notes to this edition also record readings from the Fraser's version which though they seem erroneous are in fact correct, despite what some later editors thought. As noted above, the editors at Smith, Elder tended to literal-mindedness and thus did not allow Thackeray's "Bavarian envy" joke or his Dripping-Drippings-Brisket joke to stand. In this edition, both jokes reappear and are discussed in the notes.

Another example of an apparently erroneous reading in the Fraser's text is "them the village matrons followed"(Chapter 1). All posthumous editions of Catherine emend this to "then the village matrons followed." However, the inverted sentence construction of the original reading, though unusual, is not ungrammatical, and a survey of Thackeray's writings has revealed other instances of it: two are recorded in the notes. As a result, the Fraser's reading has been restored in this edition.

The textual practices of this edition can be summarized as follows. The copy-text is the first published version from Fraser's Magazine, and it is followed faithfully in style matters. Four different copies of the relevant volumes of Fraser's were collated;⁴⁴ however, no true textual variants among the copies were discovered. The only differences discovered related to the physical assembly of the volumes: the Alabama copy was missing the four illustrations and the University of British Columbia copy was missing the bottom line of a caption to an illustration.⁴⁵

Several posthumous editions were collated with the Fraser's text in order to help discover and find means of dealing with textual problems in the novel. The primary collation was done against the 1879 Smith, Elder edition and George Saintsbury's Oxford edition. Discrepancies encountered in this collation were then checked against other editions. Research into Thackeray's sources and other historical materials also helped in dealing with the textual problems.

The text of this edition is complete, containing all the material expurgated in earlier posthumous editions. The notes record the major expurgations and additions made in those earlier editions. The notes also record all emendations of the substantives and the accidentals: there are no silent emendations in this edition, except for typographical matters involving the use of such features as small capitals, the spacing around punctuation symbols, the use of double columns, and so forth.