The Keepers of the People

WHAT WAS NORMALISED

These are changes to the 1898 house style, made deliberately and recorded here because a reader may want to undo them.

— French spacing before punctuation has been closed up. Methuen printed a thin space before the semicolon, colon, question mark and exclamation mark, as was still usual in 1898. About 3,000 such spaces have been removed. The novel is heavily punctuated with semicolons and the difference in texture is considerable; it is a change of typography and not of text.

— Spaces inside quotation marks have been closed up, about 1,860 of them: the printing sets “ Yes,” said Ralph Falcon and this edition sets “Yes,” said Ralph Falcon.

— Nothing else has been modernised. British spellings stand as printed — honour, labour, centre, realise, civilisation, develope, waggons, mediaeval, picquet, sha'n't — and so do Jepson's paragraphing and his very free use of the dash and the semicolon.

WHAT WAS LEFT STANDING

The following look like errors and have been left alone, because the evidence is that they are the author's or the compositor's and not the scanner's. Each was checked against its line in the scan and found to be set that way mid-line, where no line-break ambiguity arises.

— cornland (twice), housedoor, watchfires, vinegrowers, underthought, Whitecoats, moonray — all set solid, although moon-rays is hyphenated elsewhere in the same book. Late-Victorian compounding was unsettled and Jepson is inconsistent on his own account.

— Valkyre for Wagner's Walküre, Haroun Al Raschid, Hindostan, Rajpootana, Peshawur, Kafiristan — period transliterations, all normal in 1898.

— The variant in the verse. The quatrain that opens the novel is printed at p. 4 as And deep into the dying day and again, at the end of Book I chapter x, when Althea repeats it on the steps of the house after Ralph's wedding, as And far into the dying day. Both are set clearly. This may be a compositor's slip; it may equally be Jepson letting a thirteen-year-old misquote a poem she has known by heart since the first page, which would be characteristic. It is left as printed in both places and flagged here rather than silently harmonised.

THE EDITOR'S EMENDATIONS

Distinct from the repairs above, which correct the scanner, these correct the page. Each is a departure from what the 1898 printing appears to say, and each is listed so that a reader can reject it.