Diotimos Library · Literary Fiction Collection · English Edition
The Keepers of the People
A Critical Edition of the 1898 Novel
Swipe or use the arrow keys.
English Edition · Branch 27 of 254
Editorial Note
The Keepers of the People
p. 6The first is an OCR misreading that happens to produce a real English word in a plausible place — he for be, and for said, of for or, a dropped not. Errors of that class are rare in a scan of this quality, but the number in this text is not zero and is not known.
The second follows from the treatment of page turns described below. Where a paragraph happens to end exactly at the foot of a page and the next paragraph begins at the head of the following one, the evidence in the text is indistinguishable from a paragraph that merely runs across the turn, and the rule adopted here — break only where a sentence plainly ends and another plainly begins — will occasionally have joined two paragraphs that the 1898 compositor set apart, or kept apart two he set as one. Only the page images can settle these, and they have not been consulted. A reader who cares about the paragraphing of a particular passage should check it against the scan.
Until a collation is made, this edition should be treated as a good reading text and not as a witness.
WHAT WAS REMOVED
The scan's text layer carries the furniture of the printed page mixed into the prose. Discarded, as belonging to the 1898 typesetting and not to the novel:
— 659 lines of running head and page number. The page numbers are the harder half of this: the scanner renders them as n6 for 116, J32 for 132, i6j for 164, 2X2 for 212, 3°6 for 306, 3IQ for 310, i «3 for 123, and, worst, as ordinary English words — is for 15, io for 10, no for 110, hi for 111. They were caught by three tests together: any short line carrying a digit; any short line standing alone between blanks and made wholly of the letters the scanner confuses with figures; and any such token surviving at the head or tail of an assembled paragraph. Seventeen more had been run into the body of a paragraph by the OCR ("…he had suspected" had acquired 78 KEEPERS OF THE PEOPLE in the middle of it).
— The printer's colophon at the foot of the last page.
— The chapter titles as set at the chapter heads, where these were OCR-damaged (THE XUS SI A NS GO, MISS FRESHING TON'S INTEREST A WANES). The titles printed here are taken instead from Jepson's table of contents on pp. vii–viii, which is the same wording and is legible.
Socrates
Reading The Keepers of the People · Editorial Note · Editorial Note
Ask about a concept, passage, contradiction, or connection.
Socrates will begin with this book and its sources.About This Reading Edition
Edgar Jepson’s The Keepers of the People begins as a late-Victorian lost-kingdom romance and becomes an unsettling political argument. Ralph Falcon moves from an English country house to the hidden state of Varandaleel, where laughter, secrecy, violence, education, and the duties of rulers are tested against one another.
Historical Text
The novel was first published in London in 1898 by C. Arthur Pearson. This reading text follows the owner-supplied critical edition, whose copy-text is the Methuen Colonial Library issue of the same year digitised by the Internet Archive. The supplied editorial note records the edition’s corrections, normalisations, limits, and unresolved textual risks.
About This Edition
This English Edition preserves the complete supplied text and apparatus: the introduction, reading guide, key words, plot outline, editorial note, both books and all thirty chapters, and the end notes. Its reader branches end at paragraph boundaries, with the original chapter structure and chapter page references mapped to the 1898 printing.
Rights
Edgar Jepson’s 1898 novel is in the public domain. The introduction, reader’s guide, key words, outline, editorial note, notes, editorial arrangement, and design of the supplied edition are © 2026 Diotimos Editions.