Money, mouth
Like every literature professor known to humankind, I have been known to grumble about footnotes. Footnotes that do too much; footnotes that don't do enough; footnotes that don't exist. (Don't even get me started on anthologies that do things like delete Pope's footnotes to The Dunciad, without which the poem makes zero sense.) And now, here I am, joining the ranks of the footnoters, between working on Book Two and undergoing coughing fits. (It is a truth universally acknowledged that all academics going on vacation must immediately become ill--in my case, with bronchitis.) To be precise, I'm footnoting Robert Elsmere, which presents some pressing difficulties. Firstly, for those of you who have never seen Robert Elsmere--that would be the non-Victorianists reading this site--the book is big. As in, big enough to cause serious back and shoulder injuries if you try to carry it around in a backpack. Clyde de L. Ryal's 1967 edition is 636 pages in what appears to be five-point type. Secondly, and pursuant on item #1, Mrs. Humphry Ward's modus operandi is to establish character and context by dropping offhand political, cultural, musical, artistic, religious, and literary allusions every which way ("like a Stothard picture"), nearly all of which are essential for understanding the point at hand, and nearly all of which are now obscure to both students and many of their professors. (As this will be a teaching edition, it would be nice if everyone concerned could follow what the book is about.) And, of course, some things that appear not to need glossing really do (Rose's "Japanese pots," for example, as opposed to her neighbors' shocked response to what seems to be a fifth-generation knockoff of a Gothic Revival church). I have anxious visions of the footnotes swamping the main text. All of this is before one deals with the supplementary materials. How much of William Gladstone's fifty-page book review to include? And Mrs. Ward's response? Or of T. H. Green, from whom Mrs. Ward borrows copiously? Good times...