Sourcing

Sometime tomorrow, I'll be posting on a long poem, Celia Moss' "The Massacre of the Jews at York," which first appeared in her and her sister's Early Efforts in 1839.  There is no digital edition of Early Efforts; I had it photocopied in U of C special collections.  Ah, says the reader, but look--the poem was anthologized in 1917 by Joseph Friedlander, and it's available online in at least three different places!

There's only one problem: Friedlander has silently edited out a good chunk of the poem--in fact, its most deliberately unnerving sections (the actual ritual suicides)--as well as the footnotes.  Given the scarcity of Early Efforts in print form, and its total absence in digital form, the online reader who, for some reason, develops an interest in Victorian Jewish women poets (Amy Levy is hardly the only one!) could be pardoned for concluding that the Friedlander version is the poem. 

Now, the initial damage rests with the print copy of Friedlander's anthology, which has perpetuated a "polite," less challenging version of the text.  Such editorial practices are an issue no matter what the medium.  However, the ease with which the anthology can be accessed online, coupled with a growing skepticism in some quarters about our need to actually be in the physical presence of books, makes the situation potentially more troubling.   Students of textual editing would be the first to point out that errata (or erasures) have a bad habit of replicating themselves, thanks to the vagaries of editors and their copytexts; that problem is only exacerbated if we fall into the habit of regarding digitized texts as somehow exhausting the available print options.  In fact, many truly rare nineteenth-century texts are nowhere to be found online, and will very likely not be found online for years, if at all (often because they are too fragile to be scanned easily).   One of the reasons that the push to use public domain e-texts in class gives me pause is precisely this question of editing: which text is online? Who has done the work to check for unexpected corruptions, errors, or outright editorial interference? Again, it's not like such problems were invented in the digital era (the Cattley-Townsend edition of Foxe and its afterlife is a notorious case in point), but the e-text boom sometimes (more than sometimes) threatens to elevate cheapness and ease of access over, say, reliability or quality.