I once received two separate gifts of the novel Moby Dick. These two editions of the novel sat happily on my shelf for a number of years before I finally picked one of them up to read for the first time. I selected as my reading copy the Oxford World’s Classics edition, a hardback with the nice dustjacket and the prestigious imprimatur of the Oxford University Press.
The less-prestigious paperback Wordsworth Classics edition sat on the shelf.
So I read Moby Dick, and I enjoyed it a great deal, and when I came to the end I thought, well, what an ending! And then I thought – hang on, what about Ishmael? Moby Dick’s opening, Call me Ishmael, is among the most renowned in literature. Surely the novel couldn’t end with Ishmael from the first line going unmentioned for the last hundred pages!
Luckily, I had my Wordsworth Classics edition to hand, and I pulled it out and found that the prestigious OUP had somehow managed to omit the last part of the book. They forgot to put the ending in. Whoops.
All of which demonstrates two valuable lessons which we can henceforth generalise into everyday life and apply to our every endeavour:
(1) you can judge a book by its cover (the Wordsworth said ‘complete and unabridged’ on the front, and the OUP did not)
(2) sometimes insignificant differences turn out to be quite significant after all.
For those also in possession of the OUP edition, I reproduce the omitted section below the jump.
EPILOGUE
And I only am escaped alone to tell thee. – JOB
The Drama’s Done. Why then here does any one step forth? – Because one did survive the wreck.
It so chanced, that after the Parsee’s disappearance, I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab’s bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three men were tossed from out the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So. floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the half-spent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another ixion I did revolve. till gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin like-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.
It seems that the author, Melville, likes to use one of the noblest elements of grammar, the comma, almost as much as I do, and I like it a great, indeed a very great, deal.
I prefer the semicolon; however, I tend to misuse it.
Ok, failure to print the end of the book kinda sucks, though I’d note that my OUP copy of Moby Dick has the bit yours doesn’t…
Meanwhile, the reason why I generally avoid Wordsworth Classics: as far as I can work out, they’re the cheapest editions on the market because they use texts out of copyright – saving money on royalties and also often on typesetting. Some of these old texts are reliable but superseded, other simply unreliable.
As an example of the former, the Wordsworth Classics edition of WB Yeats’ “Collected Poems” is the 1933 “Collected Poems” and it might be unabridged as a specimen of that edition, but would be frankly crap if you wanted the poems of the next six years of his life (ie the best ones).
As for the unreliable ones, that’d range over the usual contingencies of second-rate compositing jobs, censorship or unapproved editorial licence, etc etc etc.
Without checking, I’d just assume that a Wordsworth edition of Moby Dick was unreliable on a word-by-word, sentence-bby-sentence basis, even if it prints the final chapter.
Andrew – point taken. Definite caveat emptor for the Wordsworth books, which are clearly done as cheaply as possible. But aren’t all the texts for all editions of the classics out of copyright by definition?
Where’s the hyphen?
Get it sorted!
Moby-Dick is the book. Moby Dick in the text is the whale.
Neither of my editions call it Moby-Dick. They also omit the second title. AFAIK, it should be “Moby Dick, or, The Whale”.
Uncertainty is everywhere…
“But aren’t all the texts for all editions of the classics out of copyright by definition?”
Uh, not exactly. The editorial material isn’t exactly free of copyright issues; editors still get paid for their work.
Also, “by definition”? So, this’d mean that even though WB Yeats and TS Eliot wrote major works at the same time as one another, Yeats’s are classics but Eliot’s are not, because Eliot’s are still in copyright?
Editorial material notwithstanding, the actual text itself is always out of copyright, isn’t it? The only exception I know of is the Peter Pan arrangement with the Ormond Street Hospital.
“By definition” exposed something in my brain – I seem to operate on the assumption that for something to be a “Classic” it is out of copyright, in that Classic is a marketing term that usually turns up on new editions of out-of-copyright works.
Ummm, “actual” is a really loaded term… 😉 Sorry, just looking at that, the “actual text” here would be more like an “ideal” text, as in one that transcends the materiality of the… uh, “material text”, which is always mediated through editorial intervention.
Ok, my brain melted at this point. But I think what I’m getting at is that the “actual text” is pretty damn hard to separate from the editorial material – especially where we don’t have any text that isn’t already an edition (eg Shakespeare).
And yeah, marketing terms. Most publishers’ classics ranges are really just “old books”. Though this might not matter: Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” is probably more “classic” than Anne Bronte’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”, but it’s also more “bollocks”, so I don’t mind Anne’s book being marketed as a classic.
Andrew – yeah, the difficulties of actual vs. original vs. ideal etc. I guess I have to wonder how drastic the differences are in many cases. I know that some authors made massive alterations between, say, the serial release vs. the collected release of their novels, or made corrections and changes with new editions; and editors as well did the same. Still, I recognise that even cut-n-pasting something out of Project Gutenberg, printing it between a hand-drawn cover and selling it on a street corner counts as editorial input, perhaps even in a non-trivial way.
Apart from anything else, this Moby Dick experience has reminded me where post-modernism came from.
For the really old texts you get lots of editorial intervention in making the text readable to modern eyes. Things like normalising the spelling and inserting commas and quotation marks can make a big difference to readers’ interpretations of particular passages, and it’s mostly formed from the opinion of the editor. (On another note, reading Shakespeare in the original spelling is a fun and exhilirating experience. :-))
Also, very often the editor will write an interpretive essay that they stick at the front, and page notes that they stick at the back, both of which are meant to help you understand the context of the book.
“reading Shakespeare in the original spelling is a fun and exhilirating experience”
You’re scary, whoever you are…
Another mystery solved then – being as I have the same copy of the book, it’s missing the epilogue too. I read somewhere how the coffin saved him and wondered how I missed that – I’d guessed it had been implied in the text and I just hadn’t picked up on it. So slight faith in my comprehension skills restored.