Single-Editor Editions from Manuscript: The Journals of Theodore Parker

Authors

Carol Johnston, Journals of Theodore Parker

Date of this Version

1983

Document Type

Article

Citation

Newsletter of the Association for Documentary Editing, Volume 5, Number 2, May 1983. ISSN 0196-7134

Comments

© Association for Documentary Editing, 1983. Used by permission.

Abstract

Anyone who undertakes to edit a text must necessarily make some basic decisions about the nature of that text and the purpose of the final edition. The editorial plan on which this edition is based was derived from a series of premises on the nature of the Parker manuscripts and on my purpose in editing them. The journal manuscripts are massive, encyclopedic documents rendering Parker's thought coherently, if not always according to strict grammatical usage. They are private, unpublished documents written in a hand that is cramped and difficult to read, and the manuscript pages are complicated by unformed words, slurred endings, and an extensive use of personal abbreviation. In editing this document, my primary concern is to make the Parker journals available as rapidly as is consistent with the ml)~t elementary requirements for a scholarly edition-accuracy and completeness. My second concern is to present the text in a manner that will retain rather than obscure the inevitable nuance of the rough texture of the journal. The final product will be an un-modernized, critical, genetic-text edition. It will be un-modernized in the sense that spelling and punctuation will not be altered to conform to recent usage, critical in the sense that it will incorporate certain kinds of editorial emendations dictated by the editor's judgment, and genetic in the sense that cancellations and insertions will be noted directly in the text.