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Final Research Essay: ANNOTATED/SCHOLARLY EDITION
What is an edition? An edition is the name for any particular form of a published workvery
time a work is republished, that constitutes a new edition of the text. In particular, a scholarly,
annotated edition is a publication of a text that is speci cally intended to be useful for students
and scholars.
When editors produce editions, they also make choices that impact how their readers may
interpret the text. Often, an edition adds a lot of useful information for the reader: it adds
explanatory notes for unfamiliar words or allusions, and includes an introductory essay that offers
a brief overview of the authors,ives, careers, and place in literary history.
SELECTION
Choose any short text or short excerpt from a text we have read (or a related one you propose to
me) and produce an annotated edition of this text for fellow students. Think about what you, as a
reader, wished someone had explained to you(is can help you decide what you might want to
explain as an editor.
Your rst step will be to nd the rst edition (or as early an edition as you can nd). Look in Early
English Books Online (EEBO) or Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Archive.org, or the
special collections pages of the libraries I have mentioned thus far.
Since we have been looking at manuscripts and early printed books and even making our own
commonplace books in the class, you might want to continue the work of bringing different texts
together in new ways. If you would like to make an edition that, for instance, places an excerpt
from Montaigne’s Essays next to a related text (early modern or ancient), you may; you could also
place Woolf àwriting (excerpted) next to an author from her time, or next to a different writing
from her own body of work.
TRANSCRIPTION
Next, transcribe the text or the excerpt of the text (this is like what you did for your pre-modern
edition, but this time you will probably go right to typing the text). Yes, retype it! Here, you get to
make decisions about layout and formatting. How will you help make the text easy to read? How
do you decide between making changes that could help make the text easier for a reader and
preserving the original appearance of the text? Will you preserve original spelling and
punctuation, or modernize them? Will you include line numbers? Will you try to reproduce or
describe other elements of the textàdesign (title pages, images, decorative elements), or will you
leave those out?
ANNOTATIONS (footnotes)
Now you¥ ready to tackle the annotations/footnotes: in short, decide how you¥ going to
explain elements of the text that you think students like you might nd confusing. For instance, if
there are any words that could use de nitions, look these up in the OED and de ne them. If there
are phrases, lines, or sentences that are particularly challenging, you might want to offer a
paraphrase. If there are allusions to mythology, literature, or historical events, you might want to
look these up and offer an explanation for readers. Include at least 8 explanatory annotations.
Finally, write a short introduction (about 2-4 pages single-spaced) to the text or excerpt you are
including. Your introduction will shape how your reader encounters the text you¥ chosen, so
here, you get to decide what you think is most important for your reader to know and look out for. How might
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you explain the signi cance of this text? How might you help your reader get interested in the
text? What do they need to know before they can most productively approach the text you¥
chosen? What do you think are the most important elements of the text to focus on, and how
would you want this text to be read, discussed, and taught? You get to decide what kind of voice
you want to write this in(e example I¥ provided has an authoritative teacherly/scholarly
voice that aims to sound objective, but you might want to experiment with other options: what
happens if you write this for other students as a student? What happens if you write this from a
particular and explicitly stated critical, political, or cultural vantage point? The introduction
should:
Contextualize your chosen text in the broader literary and/or cultural history of this
°eriod, referring to at least two other texts we have read in class
Name the genre of the text and explain this if needed.
‰f you¥ given an excerpt of a longer text, include a brief summary of the longer work
¡nd contextualization of
the excerpt you¥ chosen
Explain any editorial choices you made, and note which edition you transcribed from
ake some kind of claim (this is your thesis statement for the edition) about how you think
´his text ought to be read (highlight something you think readers ought to pay attention to,
note something you most want your readers to take away from the text, note something
you think is particularly compelling, interesting, puzzling, or moving). You have a lot of
freedom here(is is where you get to decide what you think is most important.
Lastly, include a Works Cited page, noting the resources you consulted. Good resources to
µse include: the OED, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), Oxford Reference;
British Library interactive timelines of literature and history (for overall historical
background), as well as their articles on Britain in the eighteenth century speci cally.
PARATEXT AND APPEARANCE
Once everything is written, you will want to think about format. What kind of font will you use?
How will you arrange the text? Will you provide your own thematic title for the excerpt? Will you
include illustrations? Images from the original manuscript or other early editions? Whatever you
decide, be prepared to tell your reader why (even if this is subtle, such as through the selection
itself, which draws out your title, or in a caption for an image, etc.). Keep in mind that even a
page heading in a book produces meaning for the reader. Do you want to include this? Notes in
the margin? How much do you want to guide your reader?
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Additional Suggestions for your preparation of this assignment
The idea behind this assignment is to provoke your close engagement with a literary work in a
detailed textual, linguistic, and/or critical way. The goal is not simply to produce a close reading
or interpretation of a poem; it is to develop such an interpretation through a close attention to
form, vocabulary, textual transmission, and editorial activity. Here are some ideas and
approaches:
Compare the version of a poem in the two places or editions. What do you see as the editorial
choices at work here? How does the modernization change, limit, or even create possibilities of
literary meaning?
What is the sense you get of the principles of selection in these editions? Do they enable or
constrain interpretations; how do they edit the texts; in what order to they place them; how does
this information speak to any other information provided by the collection?
Take a particular word or phrase that you see central to a given poem or set of poems. Using
such resources as the on-line Oxford English Dictionary and the Literature Proquest corpus
collection (literature.proquest.com), try to recover the history and various connotations of the
word or phrase. Is it historically something new or something old? What are its various
resonances? How does it contribute to the overarching creation of the poetic persona? Are there
examples of usages in other, contemporary poets that shed light on your discussion?
A critical edition is more than a transcription. It involves choices and arguments about
punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and even emendation (revision). You may, for example,
decide that a form in the manuscript or early printed book is inexplicable or erroneous. What an
editor would do in such a situation is emend the text: that is, come up with a version that is not in
a source, but which you argue should be in the source (or in the lost original).
An idea for a paper would be to take a particular characterization of a poem or a book and
develop it, take issue with it, contest it, or nd a speci c way of using it to focus your own
interpretation. At stake here is not just agreeing or disagreeing. It is trying to get behind the critic,
gure out his or her presuppositions, focus on the language that the critic uses and work with it.
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The Common Reader
First Series
by
Virginia Woolf
TO LYTTON STRACHEY
Table of Contents
Preface
The Common Reader
The Pastons and Chaucer
On Not Knowing Greek
The Elizabethan Lumber Room
Notes on an Elizabethan Play
Montaigne
The Duchess of Newcastle
Rambling Round Evelyn
Defoe
Addison
The Lives of the Obscure
2
Taylors and Edgeworths
Laetitia Pilkington
Jane Austen
Modern Fiction
¡ne Eyre nd õthering Heights‡eorge Eliot
The Russian Point of View
Outlines
MISS MITFORD
DR. BENTLEY
LADY DOROTHY NEVILL
ARCHBISHOP THOMSON
The Patron and the Crocus
The Modern Essay
Joseph Conrad
How it Strikes a Contemporary
Preface
Some of these papers appeared originally in the Times Literary Supplement, the
Athenaeum, the Nation and Athanaeum, the New Statesman, the London Mercury, the
Dial (New York); the New Republic (New York), and I have to thank the editors for
allowing me to reprint them here. Some are based upon articles written for various
newspapers, while others appear now for the first time.
3
The Common Reader
There is a sentence in Dr. JohnsonàLife of Gray which might well be written up
in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit
of reading is carried on by private people.  . . I rejoice to concur with the common
reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all
the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all
claim to poetical honours. t defines their qualities; it dignifies their aims; it bestows
upon a pursuit which devours a great deal of time, and is yet apt to leave behind it
nothing very substantial, the sanction of the great manàapproval.
The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the
scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for
his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.
Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends
he can come by, some kind of whole ! portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory
of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle
fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real
object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial,
snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture, without caring where he finds it
or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure, his
deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr. Johnson
maintained, some say in the final distribution of poetical honours, then, perhaps, it may
be worth while to write down a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in
themselves, yet contribute to so mighty a result.
4
The Pastons and Chaucer1
1
The Paston Letters, edited by Dr. James Gairdner (1904), 4 vols.
The tower of Caister Castle still rises ninety feet into the air, and the arch still
stands from which Sir John Fastolfàbarges sailed out to fetch stone for the building of
the great castle. But now jackdaws nest on the tower, and of the castle, which once
covered six acres of ground, only ruined walls remain, pierced by loop-holes and
surmounted by battlements, though there are neither archers within nor cannon without.
As for the åven religious men!nd the åven poor folk7ho should, at this very
moment, be praying for the souls of Sir John and his parents, there is no sign of them nor
sound of their prayers. The place is a ruin. Antiquaries speculate and differ.
Not so very far off lie more ruins 4he ruins of Bromholm Priory, where John
Paston was buried, naturally enough, since his house was only a mile or so away, lying
on low ground by the sea, twenty miles north of Norwich. The coast is dangerous, and the
land, even in our time, inaccessible. Nevertheless, the little bit of wood at Bromholm, the
fragment of the true Cross, brought pilgrims incessantly to the Priory, and sent them
away with eyes opened and limbs straightened. But some of them with their
newly-opened eyes saw a sight which shocked them 4he grave of John Paston in
Bromholm Priory without a tombstone. The news spread over the country-side. The
Pastons had fallen; they that had been so powerful could no longer afford a stone to put
above John Pastonàhead. Margaret, his widow, could not pay her debts; the eldest son,
Sir John, wasted his property upon women and tournaments, while the younger, John
also, though a man of greater parts, thought more of his hawks than of his harvests.
The pilgrims of course were liars, as people whose eyes have just been opened by
a piece of the true Cross have every right to be; but their news, none the less, was
welcome. The Pastons had risen in the world. People said even that they had been
bondmen not so very long ago. At any rate, men still living could remember JohnÊgrandfather Clement tilling his own land, a hard-working peasant; and William,
Clementàson, becoming a judge and buying land; and John, Williamàson, marrying
well and buying more land and quite lately inheriting the vast new castle at Caister, and
all Sir Johnàlands in Norfolk and Suffolk. People said that he had forged the old
knightàwill. What wonder, then, that he lacked a tombstone? But, if we consider the
character of Sir John Paston, Johnàeldest son, and his upbringing and his surroundings,
and the relations between himself and his father as the family letters reveal them, we shall
see how difficult it was, and how likely to be neglected 4his business of making his
fatheràtombstone.
For let us imagine, in the most desolate part of England known to us at the present
moment, a raw, new-built house, without telephone, bathroom or drains, arm-chairs or
newspapers, and one shelf perhaps of books, unwieldy to hold, expensive to come by.
The windows look out upon a few cultivated fields and a dozen hovels, and beyond them
there is the sea on one side, on the other a vast fen. A single road crosses the fen, but
there is a hole in it, which, one of the farm hands reports, is big enough to swallow a
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carriage. And, the man adds, Tom Topcroft, the mad bricklayer, has broken loose again
and ranges the country half-naked, threatening to kill any one who approaches him. That
is what they talk about at dinner in the desolate house, while the chimney smokes
horribly, and the draught lifts the carpets on the floor. Orders are given to lock all gates at
sunset, and, when the long dismal evening has worn itself away, simply and solemnly,
girt about with dangers as they are, these isolated men and women fall upon their knees
in prayer.
In the fifteenth century, however, the wild landscape was broken suddenly and
very strangely by vast piles of brand-new masonry. There rose out of the sandhills and
heaths of the Norfolk coast a huge bulk of stone, like a modern hotel in a watering-place;
but there was no parade, no lodging-houses, and no pier at Yarmouth then, and this
gigantic building on the outskirts of the town was built to house one solitary old
gentleman without any children ir John Fastolf, who had fought at Agincourt and
acquired great wealth. He had fought at Agincourt and got but little reward. No one took
his advice. Men spoke ill of him behind his back. He was well aware of it; his temper was
none the sweeter for that. He was a hot-tempered old man, powerful, embittered by a
sense of grievance. But whether on the battlefield or at court he thought perpetually of
Caister, and how, when his duties allowed, he would settle down on his fatheràland and
live in a great house of his own building.
The gigantic structure of Caister Castle was in progress not so many miles away
when the little Pastons were children. John Paston, the father, had charge of some part of
the business, and the children listened, as soon as they could listen at all, to talk of stone
and building, of barges gone to London and not yet returned, of the twenty-six private
chambers, of the hall and chapel; of foundations, measurements, and rascally
work-people. Later, in 1454, when the work was finished and Sir John had come to spend
his last years at Caister, they may have seen for themselves the mass of treasure that was
stored there; the tables laden with gold and silver plate; the wardrobes stuffed with gowns
of velvet and satin and cloth of gold, with hoods and tippets and beaver hats and leather
jackets and velvet doublets; and how the very pillow-cases on the beds were of green and
purple silk. There were tapestries everywhere. The beds were laid and the bedrooms hung
with tapestries representing sieges, hunting and hawking, men fishing, archers shooting,
ladies playing on their harps, dallying with ducks, or a giant ¥aring the leg of a bear in
his hand  Such were the fruits of a well-spent life. To buy land, to build great houses, to
stuff these houses full of gold and silver plate (though the privy might well be in the
bedroom), was the proper aim of mankind. Mr. and Mrs. Paston spent the greater part of
their energies in the same exhausting occupation. For since the passion to acquire was
universal, one could never rest secure in oneàpossessions for long. The outlying parts of
oneàproperty were in perpetual jeopardy. The Duke of Norfolk might covet this manor,
the Duke of Suffolk that. Some trumped-up excuse, as for instance that the Pastons were
bondmen, gave them the right to seize the house and batter down the lodges in the
owneràabsence. And how could the owner of Paston and Mauteby and Drayton and
Gresham be in five or six places at once, especially now that Caister Castle was his, and
he must be in London trying to get his rights recognised by the King? The King was mad
too, they said; did not know his own child, they said; or the King was in flight; or there
was civil war in the land. Norfolk was always the most distressed of counties and its
country gentlemen the most quarrelsome of mankind. Indeed, had Mrs. Paston chosen,
6
she could have told her children how when she was a young woman a thousand men with
bows and arrows and pans of burning fire had marched upon Gresham and broken the
gates and mined the walls of the room where she sat alone. But much worse things than
that had happened to women. She neither bewailed her lot nor thought herself a heroine.
The long, long letters which she wrote so laboriously in her clear cramped hand to her
husband, who was (as usual) away, make no mention of herself. The sheep had wasted
the hay. Heydenàand Tuddenhamàmen were out. A dyke had been broken and a
bullock stolen. They needed treacle badly, and really she must have stuff for a dress.
But Mrs. Paston did not talk about herself.
Thus the little Pastons would see their mother writing or dictating page after page,
hour after hour, long long letters, but to interrupt a parent who writes so laboriously of
such important matters would have been a sin. The prattle of children, the lore of the
nursery or schoolroom, did not find its way into these elaborate communications. For the
most part her letters are the letters of an honest bailiff to his master, explaining, asking
advice, giving news, rendering accounts. There was robbery and manslaughter; it was
difficult to get in the rents; Richard Calle had gathered but little money; and what with
one thing and another Margaret had not had time to make out, as she should have done,
the inventory of the goods which her husband desired. Well might old Agnes, surveying
her sonàaffairs rather grimly from a distance, counsel him to contrive it so that e may
have less to do in the world; your father said, In little business lieth much rest. This world
is but a thoroughfare, and full of woe; and when we depart therefrom, right nought bear
with us but our good deeds and ill.”he thought of death would thus come upon them in a clap. Old Fastolf,
cumbered with wealth and property, had his vision at the end of Hell fire, and shrieked
aloud to his executors to distribute alms, and see that prayers were said n perpetuum
so that his soul might escape the agonies of purgatory. William Paston, the judge, was
urgent too that the monks of Norwich should be retained to pray for his soul ¯r everŠThe soul was no wisp of air, but a solid body capable of eternal suffering, and the fire that
destroyed it was as fierce as any that burnt on mortal grates. For ever there would be
monks and the town of Norwich, and for ever the Chapel of Our Lady in the town of
Norwich. There was something matter-of-fact, positive, and enduring in their conception
both of life and of death.
With the plan of existence so vigorously marked out, children of course were well
beaten, and boys and girls taught to know their places. They must acquire land; but they
must obey their parents. A mother would clout her daughteràhead three times a week
and break the skin if she did not conform to the laws of behaviour. Agnes Paston, a lady
of birth and breeding, beat her daughter Elizabeth. Margaret Paston, a softer-hearted
woman, turned her daughter out of the house for loving the honest bailiff Richard Calle.
Brothers would not suffer their sisters to marry beneath them, and åll candle and
mustard in Framlingham The fathers quarrelled with the sons, and the mothers, fonder
of their boys than of their girls, yet bound by all law and custom to obey their husbands,
were torn asunder in their efforts to keep the peace. With all her pains, Margaret failed to
prevent rash acts on the part of her eldest son John, or the bitter words with which his
father denounced him. He was a 2one among bees the father burst out, èich labour
for gathering honey in the fields, and the drone doth naught but taketh his part of it He
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treated his parents with insolence, and yet was fit for no charge of responsibility abroad.
But the quarrel was ended, very shortly, by the death (22nd May 1466) of John
Paston, the father, in London. The body was brought down to Bromholm to be buried.
Twelve poor men trudged all the way bearing torches beside it. Alms were distributed;
masses and dirges were said. Bells were rung. Great quantities of fowls, sheep, pigs,
eggs, bread, and cream were devoured, ale and wine drunk, and candles burnt. Two panes
were taken from the church windows to let out the reek of the torches. Black cloth was
distributed, and a light set burning on the grave. But John Paston, the heir, delayed to
make his fatheràtombstone.
He was a young man, something over twenty-four years of age. The discipline
and the drudgery of a country life bored him. When he ran away from home, it was,
apparently, to attempt to enter the Kingàhousehold. Whatever doubts, indeed, might be
cast by their enemies on the blood of the Pastons, Sir John was unmistakably a
gentleman. He had inherited his lands; the honey was his that the bees had gathered with
so much labour. He had the instincts of enjoyment rather than of acquisition, and with his
motheràparsimony was strangely mixed something of his fatheràambition. Yet his own
indolent and luxurious temperament took the edge from both. He was attractive to
women, liked society and tournaments, and court life and making bets, and sometimes,
even, reading books. And so life now that John Paston was buried started afresh upon
rather a different foundation. There could be little outward change indeed. Margaret still
ruled the house. She still ordered the lives of the younger children as she had ordered the
lives of the elder. The boys still needed to be beaten into book-learning by their tutors,
the girls still loved the wrong men and must be married to the right. Rents had to be
collected; the interminable lawsuit for the Fastolf property dragged on. Battles were
fought; the roses of York and Lancaster alternately faded and flourished. Norfolk was full
of poor people seeking redress for their grievances, and Margaret worked for her son as
she had worked for her husband, with this significant change only, that now, instead of
confiding in her husband, she took the advice of her priest.
But inwardly there was a change. It seems at last as if the hard outer shell had
served its purpose and something sensitive, appreciative, and pleasure-loving had formed
within. At any rate Sir John, writing to his brother John at home, strayed sometimes from
the business on hand to crack a joke, to send a piece of gossip, or to instruct him,
knowingly and even subtly, upon the conduct of a love affair. Be s lowly to the mother
as ye list, but to the maid not too lowly, nor that ye be too glad to speed, nor too sorry to
fail. And I shall always be your herald both here, if she come hither, and at home, when I
come home, which I hope hastily within XI. days at the furthest. nd then a hawk was
to be bought, a hat, or new silk laces sent down to John in Norfolk, prosecuting his suit,
flying his hawks, and attending with considerable energy and not too nice a sense of
honesty to the affairs of the Paston estates.
The lights had long since burnt out on John Pastonàgrave. But still Sir John
delayed; no tomb replaced them. He had his excuses; what with the business of the
lawsuit, and his duties at Court, and the disturbance of the civil wars, his time was
occupied and his money spent. But perhaps something strange had happened to Sir John
himself, and not only to Sir John dallying in London, but to his sister Margery falling in
love with the bailiff, and to Walter making Latin verses at Eton, and to John flying his
8
hawks at Paston. Life was a little more various in its pleasures. They were not quite so
sure as the elder generation had been of the rights of man and of the dues of God, of the
horrors of death, and of the importance of tombstones. Poor Margaret Paston scented the
change and sought uneasily, with the pen which had marched so stiffly through so many
pages, to lay bare the root of her troubles. It was not that the lawsuit saddened her; she
was ready to defend Caister with her own hands if need be, (ough I cannot well guide
nor rule soldiers but there was something wrong with the family since the death of her
husband and master. Perhaps her son had failed in his service to God; he had been too
proud or too lavish in his expenditure; or perhaps he had shown too little mercy to the
poor. Whatever the fault might be, she only knew that Sir John spent twice as much
money as his father for less result; that they could scarcely pay their debts without selling
land, wood, or household stuff (t is a death to me to think if it{ while every day people
spoke ill of them in the country because they left John Paston to lie without a tombstone.
The money that might have bought it, or more land, and more goblets and more tapestry,
was spent by Sir John on clocks and trinkets, and upon paying a clerk to copy out
Treatises upon Knighthood and other such stuff. There they stood at Paston %leven
volumes, with the poems of Lydgate and Chaucer among them, diffusing a strange air
into the gaunt, comfortless house, inviting men to indolence and vanity, distracting their
thoughts from business, and leading them not only to neglect their own profit but to think
lightly of the sacred dues of