The Keepers of the People

ON READING THIS EDITION

This edition is arranged so that the novel can be read straight through without interruption, and so that everything a reader might want around it is available without being imposed.

The novel is unmarked. There are no footnotes on the page, no superscript figures, and no editorial headings inside the text. The only editorial additions to the reading text are the book and part titles and the chapter titles, which are Jepson's own, taken from his table of contents. A reader who wants nothing but the story may begin at page one of Book I and ignore everything else in the volume.

The notes are at the back, keyed by book, chapter and phrase. They are listed in the order the phrases occur, under running headings that give the book and chapter, so that a reader who wants to check a reference can find it from where they are in the text without a page-number lookup and without a mark on the page to draw the eye. They explain period references, institutions, places and allusions — the S.P.G., Mudie's, Frascati's, Plevna, the "better fifty years of Europe", Haroun Al Raschid, the bearers of the bowstring — and they identify the Scriptural quotations, of which there are many and several of which are doing more work than they appear to be. They do not interpret and they do not summarise.

The four sections in front of the novel do different jobs, and only one of them should be read first. Key Words of the Novel is the one written to be read before the text. It takes a dozen words that Jepson uses in a sense a modern reader will get wrong — expedient, keeper, the people, laughter, helper, prater, mute, rum — and says what each meant in 1898 and what Jepson does with it. The point is to stop a reader being ambushed on page 30 by a word that does not mean what it looks like, and in this novel that happens early and repeatedly. It takes about a quarter of an hour.

The Outline of the Novel is a map, given by the original's page numbers. It is not a substitute for reading and it does not conceal the plot: the book has no surprises that survive the second chapter, and the Outline gives the whole story away deliberately, on the view that this is a novel whose interest is in how its argument is built rather than in what happens next. A reader who wants the plot fresh should skip it and come back.