![]() ![]() This all adds up to an admirable opportunity for anyone wishing to examine and study the textual history of Lyrical Ballads, a major literary work that exists in several variable forms. In this case, the text of the relevant pages of three copies of this edition may be compared: one with the error of omission, one with a paste-in of the missing lines, and a third in which two new leaves were added to rectify the fault. Printing errors may also be examined in detail, as in the case of “Michael,” where in some copies of Volume II of the second edition of 1800 lines 202-16 were omitted. This enables the editors to offer what they call a “Dynamic collation” of all the texts of a single poem with the differing version of different editions on the screen at the same time, so that students can trace in detail the changes that were made over the years. In their Introduction, Gamer and Porter describe having to choose “a base text … choosing not just one version of a poem over another, but also privileging one edition and one historical moment” as “an editorial no-win situation.” However, it also prompts them to provide what they claim is “A Dynamic Edition” that “will help readers to understand the textual revisions to individual poems, as well as providing insight into why Wordsworth radically reordered the contents of the first volume.” Nevertheless, anybody who wants even more dynamism, or perhaps has become addicted to volume change, may decide to stay glued to the computer screen, since in Bruce Graver and Ron Tetreault’s “electronic scholarly edition” the reader has access to all the editions of Lyrical Ballads from 1798 (both the Bristol and the London editions) to 1805, both as transcripts and as facsimiles. So perhaps Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter’s edition would be a better initial purchase, since there the inquisitive reader will find a reprint of the 1798 single volume as well as both volumes of the 1800 edition – so three volumes for the price of one. He then proceeds to offer the reader the 1805 edition of Lyrical Ballads, leaving out everything that comes before apart from what he refers to in his commentary and footnotes, and is offered at the end of the volume. Michael Mason does not seem to have had a great opinion of the first edition of the poem, and even says that “All in all, 1798 deserves its celebrity only by a kind of courtesy” -a view with which one may wish to dissent vigorously (though naturally in a lyrical fashion), although Mason goes on to justify his dismissal by adding, reasonably, “One will not find anything significant in the first edition of LB which is not retained and perhaps improved in 1800 and later, augmented by Wordsworth’s remarkable prose and verse additions” (with which one would not want to disagree). If anybody were to follow this purely personal advice he or she would be in a good state to follow it in the three versions of Lyrical Ballads under review. ![]()
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