Editing Lyrical Ballads for the Electronic Environment

As many readers of Romanticism on the Net are aware, Ronald Tetreault of Dalhousie University and I are preparing an electronic edition of Lyrical Ballads for Cambridge University Press. This edition will include full texts of all the authorized editions of Lyrical Ballads published in the poets' lifetimes, the full text of the unauthorized Philadelphia Lyrical Ballads of 1802, full transcriptions of the surviving printer's manuscripts housed in the Beinecke Library at Yale, and over a thousand images of manuscripts and printed pages, including complete sets of the pages of the authorized editions of the collection. Our texts will be fully searchable, according to a variety of criteria, and we will provide images of rare printed variants, such as cancels and paste-ins. No library possesses the range of copies that we will reproduce, and no exhibition, even in the bicentenary year of 1998, will bring them together in one place. But in the virtual space of our edition, they all will be present. Producing an electronic edition of Lyrical Ballads has presented us with a troubling dilemma. Partly because of its importance, and partly because Wordsworth and Coleridge scholars have cared very much about the accuracy of their texts, Lyrical Ballads is an exceptionally well-edited collection of poems. Facsimile editions began appearing a century ago, its printing history and bibliographical characteristics have been minutely examined, and in print at the moment are excellent paperback editions for classroom use, hardback facsimiles of the London editions of 1798 and 1800, and, of course, the greatest Lyrical Ballads edition of all, James Butler and Karen Green's magnificent Cornell Wordsworth edition, published in 1992. On the one hand, this rich editorial tradition provided a very firm foundation on which we could build our electronic version. On the other, we were concerned that our efforts would merely seem to repeat work that was already well done. We needed to find in the electronic medium ways to present our material that would be clearly distinct from print editions. Principally, we needed to distinguish ourselves from the Cornell edition of Butler and Green. In a paper entitled "Versioning Wordsworth," delivered at the 1997 SHARP conference, Tetreault has discussed one of the ways in which we addressed this dilemma. Rather than supplying a single "best" reading text, as editors of letterpress editions have traditionally done, we decided to supply a multiplicity of reading texts, which readers can study and compare with each other. Tetreault's argument builds on and responds to the work of Jack Stillinger, Jerome McGann, and Zachary Leader. Like them, he is suspicious of privileging one version of a poem or collection of poems over another; like them he also believes that developments in textual editing and literary theory have destabilized our understanding of the mode of existence of a literary work of art. The computer environment, Tetreault concludes, allows us to represent textual instability much more clearly than does the printed book: as McGann has argued, it is the necessary next step for the scholarly edition to take. Moreover, because of its authors' habits of revision, and the existence of several distinctly different authorized editions, Lyrical Ballads seems ideally suited for the electronic medium. We have also attempted to exploit other capabilities of the computer. The most obvious of these is its ability to analyze large bodies of data quickly. Our edition will provide the first reliable concordance to the various editions of Lyrical Ballads, and rather than having to thumb through a printed book, users will be able to generate this kind of information instantaneously, at the touch of a button. In addition, …