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Editorial method
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The aim of the editor has been to make the chosen Henry James text available in a form suitable for use on the world-wide web, while retaining as much of the characteristic look of original printed sources as seemed desirable. The text has been either typed in or scanned and OCRed. It has then been marked up and converted to HTML, checking for the more obvious mistakes. Finally the HTML version has been proof-read and corrected against the souce text, which, except in the case of the play-scripts, is an original book publication, overseen by Henry James. Details of the source for each work and any deviations of the e-text from this source, are given in an individual ‘note on the text’, which you can find through the link on each e-text’s menu.
Of course no one, not even me(!), is perfect, so offers of further proof-reading will be welcomed. You may find it interesting to check the e-text against a modern paper-back edition: some of the differences may be my errors and others may be the paper-back editors’, while if you find many variants you probably have a different one of James’s own revised texts in your copy!! At the foot of this page you will find details of how to let me know about my mistakes.
In preparing the e-texts here, punctuation has been internationalized and adapted for best results in normal text on various standard web-browsers as follows:
Non-English words have been standardised as italic – which most of them are in the sources – to enable separation of the languages in my concordance (language separation there will be implemented soon). These changes are noted in the separate ‘text note’ page for each work, as are corrections of obvious errors and standardisations of spellings within each text. Other features have been retained from the sources, even when they may be due to differences in printers’ house-styles between publications.
In many cases an ASCII version of the final HTML text is available for downloading. This text has been designed to be suitable for computerised analysis (for example concordance construction, KWIC indexing and so on) and the typographical symbols in the HTML text have been replaced by ‘normal’ ASCII characters, as explained on a separate page.
For the benefit of an international audience, notes are gradually being provided for many of the place- and time-sensitive references in the text. Obscure words, though, are generally left without notes because the editor felt his time could be better used and English dictionaries are widely available. Some old usages of more common words, which have subsequently fallen out of favour, are noted, however.
The notes to individual words or phrases are made by hypertext links, but the text colour is the same as the rest of the text (unless you have fixed the text colours in your browser set-up). This means that you can view the text without the extra emphasis of the links by using your browser set-up to turn off the underlining of links. You will still be able check for links if you wish, by seeing if the cursor changes when over the relevant text, or by looking at the status bar on your browser which will show a message if Javascript is enabled. As a guide, these come in two types: ‘explanatory’ notes only explain something factual, whereas ‘comments’ offer my opinion, which you may wish to ignore while reading!
If you need to detect links you have already followed, look very closely and you should spot that they are slightly darker than the normal text (black instead of dark brown), but not enough, I hope, to spoil the flow for reading.
Talking of the flow of reading, I find the Microsoft Times New Roman script, to which many Windows’ browsers default, really irriating for reading prose text because it all ends up looking so lumpy! With the advent of cascading style sheets (CSS) here, I have taken the opportunity to specify, for preference, Century Schoolbook 11-point, the face to which I default my own browser preferences – I hope you like it (assuming you haven’t got your browser set to override the pages’ settings).
To provide a suitable layout the text appears in a central panel, with a menu on the left and space for the notes on the right. You might want to adjust the overall width of your browser so that the menu and notes, which simply take up equal amounts of space either side of the fixed-size text panel, have enough room. A minimum 800×640 display is recommended. Apologies if you got a complete mess because your browser doesn’t support frames! – you should have had a ‘no frames’ link to follow.
A very few of the notes have links on to fuller discussions, which will appear in the central, text, frame of the page. If you wish to return to the part of the text which raised the point you will need to use your browser ‘back’ button, because I can’t make the natty HTML form button take you anywhere other than the top of a page!
If you spot any corrections which need to be made, or have any comments about my e-text layout and editorial method or indeed about the tale itself, I would be delighted to hear from you.
For corrections please give details of the work, the part (if appropriate), the current text (so that I can find it quickly! – try cut-and-paste from your browser) and the emendation required; thank you.
this commentary
© 2002-2004
part of
the Ladder : a Henry James website