The Science of Blunders.

I will not say James Willis’s “The Science of Blunders: Confessions of a Textual Critic” is the best thing ever written about textual criticism; that would be absurd, since I’ve read very little about the subject and Willis would probably rise from his grave and smite me for blasphemy. But it is so much fun to read I am tempted to reproduce the whole thing; instead I will just quote a few bits that delight me irresistibly as I scroll down. After a biographical introduction (which ends, sadly, “We regret that we have found neither obituary nor likeness of Willis to share with curious readers”), Willis’s text begins:

Some apology is sure to be demanded for a life largely devoted to what has been often called “mere verbal criticism” and regarded as no more than fiddling with letters and words which are of no importance in the wider horizon of the historian or the literary critic. Now while it would be useless to attempt to apologize for the lack of success with which I personally have practised the trade of a critic, for the trade itself much may be said in its defence. That textual criticism is a waste of time will be always believed by those who accept the texts of Greek and Latin authors as coming from heaven above by permission of the Syndics of the Oxford University Press, and therefore I will preach only to the convertible – to those who are willing to ask the simple question, “How do we have any knowledge of the Greek and Roman world?”

He discusses the difficult path to survival of literary texts, saying:

At every copying there is the possibility of human error. I say “the possibility”, but it is nearer to certainty. Copying is usually a boring task; boredom breeds inattention; inattention breeds mistakes. Therefore the manuscripts of classical authors contain mistakes. The detection and correction of mistakes in texts is the function of textual criticism. Therefore textual criticism is necessary, Q.E.D.

And he provides a splendid catalogue of examples, beginning:

Now some mistakes in copying betray themselves at once by giving a ludicrously inappropriate sense. The Times of Allahabad once wrote of India as “the cradle of civilization and nursery of rats”; the Manchester Guardian, which was at one time noted for the quaintness of its misprints, had to correct a line of poetry in which the words “and would his duty shirk” had been misprinted as “and mould his dirty shirt”; I observed recently in reading a trivial science-fiction story that, while the author had wanted to speak of that well-known astronomical object the Crab Nebula, the monotype operator had unfortunately confused the letters b and p. We have all heard of such absurd blunders, the most hackneyed involv­ing the confusion of battle and bottle, winch and wench, live and love, and so forth.

Unfortunately not all copying-mistakes are ludicrous, and (which is more troublesome) not all are obvious to the general reader.

Here’s an example from Jane Austen:

A rather similar problem, except that the true reading needs to be supplied conjecturally, is found in Northanger Abbey, Chap. 26: “By ten o’clock, the chaise-and-four conveyed the two from the Abbey…”. Who were the two occupants of the chaise? They were General Tilney, his daughter Eleanor, and the heroine of the romance, Miss Catherine Morland. Therefore Miss Austen could not have written the two. What did she write? In a copy possessed by her sister Cassandra the word two has been corrected to three, but there are not many people who would misread three as two. There can be little doubt that we must read conveyed the trio from the Abbey, as several critics have proposed independently. To ask whether Miss Austen elsewhere speaks of a group of three people as a trio is a legitimate question. She does indeed: Mansfield Park, Chap. 11: “They were now a miserable trio…”.

I include this paragraph for the sake of the (presumably invented) title of the munificent patron”:

In the 18th century the common way of producing a new edition of a classic was to reprint the text of the most esteemed pre­vious edition, making changes only where something seemed to be wrong with the reading accepted by one’s predecessor. The next step was to look in any manuscripts that came to hand until one of them yielded a reading that gave a tolerable sense. This reading would then be adopted into the text, the editor proudly claiming that he had restored the true reading from an excellent manuscript reposing in the library of that munificent patron of the arts, the Palsgrave of Pumpernickel, to whose mightiness he dedicated his humble work. In other places neither the editor nor his readers had any idea on what manuscript authority the text was based.

And I quote this passage for the sake of the judicial joke:

Here a difficulty can arise. When I began work on the text of Martianus Capella, I soon learned that there were nearly 250 man­uscripts of this author, whose text ran to a little over 530 pages in the previous printed edition. A few calculations of the time needed to report the variant readings of a single page, with the assumption that I should work on it for three hours every day, excluding Sat­urdays and Sundays, revealed that the task would take me roughly thirty years, after which I should still have to select the readings which seemed to me best, reduce my collations to the form of a critical apparatus, type the whole thing out together with prole­gomena and index, and correct the proofs. Since I was already 38 years old, I had obviously started too late. I felt like the old lag who, when sentenced to fifteen years’ penal servitude, cried out, “But, My Lord, I shall never live to finish such a sentence.” The judge, you will remember, kindly replied, “Never mind: just serve as much of it as you can.”

Later he talks about “what I have called the science of blunders – the name sphalmatology, jokingly invented by the late J.B.S. Haldane, has not achieved circulation, but the study deserves to be an -ology in its own right, and to endow a readership in it would be less waste of money than many things which I have seen done in the academic world.” And I can’t resist sharing this anecdote about the famous Lane:

Yet even the realm of typeset­ting is subject to Murphy’s Law. Edward Lane, the Victorian trans­lator of the Arabian Nights, wrote a clear and elegant copper-plate hand, and yet he found his proofs abounding with errors. When he sought an explanation, the printer told him that his writing was so good that the setting of it was entrusted to apprentices: the time of an experienced man would be wasted on such easy work.

I’d better stop; hopefully you’ve gotten enough that you know whether your life would be improved by reading the whole thing. There are many more instructive examples and striking anecdotes, and there are lots of lovely color illustrations (as well as a black-and-white Heath Robinson). OK, I can’t resist just one more quote:

Further, the critic becomes (unless he is of most unusual character) emotionally involved with his work. The pangs of a lover whose addresses are scorned are less severe than those of the emendator whose darling conjecture is accepted by no one. His attitude tends to be, as Miss Tallulah Bankhead so well expressed it, “To hell with criticism: praise is good enough for me.”

I shall try to remember Miss Tallulah’s wisdom when the need arises.