The Keepers of the People

— I.iii — he keeps the secret for me— : the printing breaks Prince Melinsky's speech off with a dash and never closes the quotation. A closing quotation mark has been supplied.

— I.vii — “Rubbish! They're most cheerful Johnnies,” said Lord Lisdor - : the trailing hyphen has been read as a full point. Lady Hammersmith's sentence resumes in the next paragraph.

— I.vii — “Child, you must sleep,” and II.xiv — you were an Englishman once,” : both paragraphs end on a comma inside the closing quotation with no speech tag following. Read as full points.

— I.iii — in a year- — two years, I.viii — said Lord—Lisdor, II.xvi — much more a woman.- That Lord Lisdor : stray hyphens beside dashes, removed.

— II.iii and II.xii — Varandais for Varandals. The form occurs nowhere else in the novel against sixty-seven instances of Varandals, and is the scanner's is for ls.

— II.vi — said the old Prince; but in the wrong mouth! : the opening quotation mark of the Prince's reply was lost with the page number that had been printed on top of it.

CONVENTIONS OF THIS EDITION

— The reading text carries no editorial marks of any kind — no footnote figures, no brackets, no interpolations. Everything editorial is in the front matter or in the notes at the back.

— Square brackets appear nowhere in the text; any brackets a reader meets are Jepson's parentheses.

— The notes are keyed by book, chapter and phrase, in the order the phrases occur, and not by page number. This is deliberate: page keying would require either marks on the page or a concordance to a pagination that is not the original's. Citations in the front matter use the same form — II.iv means Book II, chapter iv.

— Book, part and chapter titles are Jepson's. The running heads of this edition are editorial.

THE STATE OF THE EDITION

This edition was made in a single working session from a single digitised copy. The text has been read once, completely, by its editor, and the corrections above were made in consequence. What it has not had is the collation against the page images described under Method, a second reader, or any comparison with the Pearson setting. Those three things are what stand between this and a text that could be relied on for quotation, and they are named here so that a reader knows which parts of the edition to be careful with.