The Keepers of the People

WHAT WAS CORRECTED

Silently, as errors of the digitisation and not of the book:

— Line-end hyphenation. The scan marks a broken word with ¬ and a genuine compound hyphen falling at a line end with -, but not reliably. All 276 soft-hyphen breaks were rejoined; all 54 line-end hyphens were adjudicated one at a time. Where the join produced a real word the hyphen was dropped (Varanda-leel, Fresh-ington, sus-pected, Pesha-wur, inter-fere); where it produced a non-word the hyphen was restored (drawing-room, letter-writing, hard-bitten, hag-ridden, loop-shaped, soul-crushing, heavy-eyed, half-measures, over-reckoned).

— The opening quotation mark, which the scanner misread as a letter or a pair of letters throughout: 340 instances of u, and some thirty more of 11, lt, il, li, tl, i(, l(, (t, 4<, ". The closing quotation mark appears 34 times as /'.

— The fi ligature, which fails in about twenty places and always in the same way: tine and line for fine, lingers for fingers, light and lighting for fight and fighting, tit for fit, tilled for filled, dill for till, lire for fire, Erst for first, list for fist, live for five, clay for day, bum for burn.

— A spurious letter after w, a scanner artefact: wrere, wras, wTas, swTept, dawrn, flowTers.

— The apostrophe in contractions of I: Pve, Pm, Pd for I've, I'm, I'd.

— About twenty-five further single-word misreadings identified by dictionary sweep and confirmed from context — Ler for her, wath for with, thej1' for they, conesnt for consent, iyou for you, I11 and O11 for In and On, ail for all, I lor for Lisdor, Princ^ for Prince, VM1 for Well, IPs for It's, soufflee for soufflé, decave for décavé, lineness for fineness, and the rest.

— Two verse passages (I.i and I.x) restored to lines; the OCR had run them into prose.

— Paragraph breaks invented by the page turn. This was much the largest single class of damage and the least visible. Where a page ends in the middle of a paragraph, the scan leaves a blank line — sometimes with the folio and running head in it, sometimes with nothing at all, because the folio was not read — and a naive assembly turns every one of these into a paragraph break. There were rather more than three hundred. They are resolved by treating a gap at a page turn as a break only where the text before it plainly ends a sentence and the text after it plainly begins one; 269 such gaps were closed up and 74 kept as genuine paragraph breaks, and a final pass merged 21 more where the first half left a speech unclosed and the second did not re-open it, which is not a thing any compositor sets. The text as printed here contains no paragraph beginning with a lower-case letter and none whose quotation marks do not balance.