The Keepers of the People

EDITORIAL NOTE

THE COPY-TEXT

The Keepers of the People was published in London in 1898 in one volume by C. Arthur Pearson. The copy-text of this edition is not that issue but the one Methuen & Co. of 36 Essex Street, W.C. brought out in the same year for Methuen's Colonial Library — a series printed for circulation outside the United Kingdom, carrying the notice Copyrighted in the United States of America on the verso of the title, and printed by Unwin Brothers at the Gresham Press, Woking and London. It collates viii + 358 pages. The Methuen Colonial issue is used because it is the setting that has been digitised and is freely available: the copy scanned for the Internet Archive as item `keepersofpeople00jeps`.

The Pearson edition has not been collated. Whether the two settings differ, and how, is an open question this edition does not answer. Any reader quoting from this text for scholarly purposes should know that it rests on one issue of one edition, and on one copy of it.

METHOD, AND THE EDITION'S PRINCIPAL LIMITATION

The text was established from the digitisation's OCR layer by a single reproducible script, and then repaired systematically against internal evidence: a dictionary sweep of every word in the book, an audit of every line-end hyphenation, a census of every non-standard character, a check that every digit-bearing token in a novel that contains no numerals is a stray folio, a check of quotation-mark balance, a test that no paragraph begins with a lower-case letter, and a complete reading of the whole text end to end by the editor, during which a further two dozen errors were found. The finished text runs to 82,568 words in 1,912 paragraphs, thirty chapters and two books. As it stands it contains no character outside the set the novel uses, no numeral, and no unbalanced quotation.

It has not been collated page by page against the page images. That is the one thing a properly conservative edition does and this one has not done, and it is stated here rather than buried, because it determines exactly which errors can survive. The checks applied catch anything that produces a non-word, a broken quotation, an impossible character, a stray numeral or a paragraph that starts in the middle of a sentence. Two classes are structurally invisible to them.