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Misprints and errors are indicated by an asterisk* SUMMARY OF VARIANTS In the first three books of Pilgrimage Richardson was constrained by the conventional expectations of her publisher. In The Tunnel, which might have invited more punctuation in response to its greater complexity, she actually cut back. Of course she did not kick out commas, as Knopf said of Mrs. Dawson-Scott; she simply failed to sprinkle them in. But when it came time for revision she inserted no less than 1743 of them. She also inserted 140 hyphens to produce in CE compounds like smoke-grimed, Eleven-thirty, and one-and-eleven-three; and 12 more within single words to make compounds like arm-chair; and she deleted 21 hyphens. In the course of revision, she very frequently changed periods and commas to question marks, and commas to periods. In all, The Tunnel exhibits 2829 variants. Among them are 143 misprints and errors in the English First Edition, 59 of which are irregularities in the presentation of titles and 31 irregularities in quotation marks. All but 46 of the 143 are too slight to be included among the substantives. In fact, only 236 out of the 2829 variants qualify as substantive. And of this much reduced number, 70 involve the following: section break omissions (4), punctuation, inclulding 9 variants in quotation marks (29), italics (2), spelling (20), number (5), word order (7), and tense (3). Richardson deletes words from the First Edition text in 15 places: the most significant of an insignificant lot being Miriam flushed as | Miriam flushed heavily as (CE177.20; E185.22). She also adds words to CE in 16 places, all very minor except Masquerade, but real | Real (CE25.23; E16.27). Words have been altered in 73 places, not infrequently by minor shifts like to | and, of | in. Other changes are of small effect, like third landing | top landing (CE12.7, E2.18). But Mr. Hancock acquires a sister in place of a cousin (CE51.31; E45.18-19); one unimportant clause about a work bench at E63.28-30 is dropped at CE68.26; and a series of clauses describing the tedium of Miriam's work in the dental surgery (E33.2-9) is considerably trimmed (CE40.3-13), on the grounds no doubt that the point could be made without actually inducing a comparable tedium in the reader. The 19 misprints and errors in CE are generally easy to spot, even the bloom | gloom of the hall (CE45.17; E38.24). But note moved up on | moved on up (CE77.27; E 74.3-4) and independently elderly | independent elderly (CE212.2; E224.7). Of the 43 misprints and errors in E, 13 arise from the use or misuse of quotation marks. Most of the others are obvious, but Richardson was no doubt glad to set right a couple of tricky misprints: by right for by night (CE233.24; E247.7) and wise softness for wide softness (CE265.5; E282.14). She also removed two embarrassing errors by twice substituting Byron for Tennyson as the source of a quotation (CE27.6-9; E18.15-18) and three times substituting Antonio for Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice (CE186-88; E195-96). Such an extraordinary sprinkling in of commas cannot fail to have an impact on the reader of The Tunnel. Otherwise, though the number of variants is greater than before, their effect is rather slight. Substantive variants are marked >
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