5. Line/Verse Editing.
This is where I made my biggest changes. Although I have strictly adhered to the writers’ original spelling and lack of punctuation (to the best of my own limitations as a reader), I have reset the lines of the texts into verses, in order to clarify their meaning. Using free verse as a tool, I bring forward the message of the writers, without actually changing any of their words (although certainly I have edited their form – no lo contendere that charge).
To understand why I have done this, consider the original texts. The letters as written were, for the most part, begun at the top of a small piece of paper and continued almost to the end of the other side. Every available space was usually filled with writing (the men, more than the women, will leave unused space at the end). There are no periods to mark ends of sentences, nor paragraphs. The text is simply line after line of words and words and word.
For example, from Sarah Ann McGurdy’s letter of October 4, 1869:
I saw john thomas yesterday he was at
Sabbath school we have a Sabbath school in our school
house you would not know him he has got a whiskre
and mustache he is well Ester is well louisa hendall
is living in Owensound with Dr ellsworth her ma
could not put up with her she got so saucy
No, Louisa hendall’s ma is NOT Dr ellsworth! But the reader, in order to understand this, must stop, break the flow, look back, and figure it out. In order to preclude such possible confusions and difficulties, I first thought I would have to insert periods, and maybe commas. That would have resulted in a text which looks like:
I saw john thomas yesterday, he was at
Sabbath school. we have a Sabbath school in our school
house. you would not know him, he has got a whiskre
and mustache. he is well, Ester is well. louisa hendall
is living in Owensound with Dr ellsworth. her ma
could not put up with her she got so saucy
But this effort seems half-hearted. Without capital letters at the beginning of every sentence, it looks awkward. Why not go all the way? Use capitalization, a full pallete of punctuation, and even spell-check. Oh hey, why not grammar check, too? And re-set it for the contemporary, typed page:
I saw John Thomas yesterday; he was at Sabbath school. We have a Sabbath school in our schoolhouse. You would not know him: he has got whiskers and a mustache. He is well; Ester is well.
Louisa Hendall is living in Owen Sound with Dr Ellsworth. She got so saucy that her ma could not put up with her.
Hey! Reads great! No? Well, yes, except that it’s a blessed lie. That is not at all what my great-grandmother’s cousin wrote to her. Even the words have been changed to protect the innocent (or the guilty).
I chewed on this problem for a long time, throughout the months/years that it took (in between working, being a parent, studying at the University, and writing hundreds of poems) to copy each and every one of the hundred letters. Each time I would try to edit them for publication, I would end up frustrated and convinced that there is absolutely no way to "correct" these letters without washing away much of their rough character and naive charm. I wanted to present them to the world with all their misspellings and missing punctuation. Yet, even when I had typed them into clearly legible printing, they still, as verbatim texts, were hard to read.
Finally I decided to use verse structure to bring out the meaning. My solution lay not in the letters, not in the words, not in the spelling or punctuation, but in the lines. If I stop thinking of paragraphs, and instead set these texts into verses, then I can make line breaks which follow the flow of ideas being expressed by the writers. Thus I can make them easier to read without correcting any spelling, without capitalizing any letters, without inserting any punctuation.
So, with the example above, I reset the lines to read:
I saw john thomas yesterday
he was at Sabbath school
we have a Sabbath school in our school house
you would not know him
he has got a whiskre and mustache
he is well
Ester is well
louisa hendall is living in Owensound with Dr ellsworth
her ma could not put up with her
she got so saucy
N.b.: included in the text is an example of underlining passages – one which I am not certain of the exact handwriting (in this case too difficult to read clearly) but from context I believe I have determined the spelling as it was written by the original writer.
All Letters have been edited and reformated into verse form to assist in their reading. As such they are edited material and are Copyright 2001-2002 Daniel Charles Thomas (dates of gradual publication on this electronic publishing site). All rights are reserved. Feminist scholars and other persons interested in obtaining access or rights of publication are urged to contact the editor at dancharthos@yahoo.com or dancharthos@hotmail.com -- I answer most email within a week, sometimes two (depending on travels) -- if my spam filter doesn't kill it first....