Textual Primitivism and the Editing of Wordsworth

Behind the Dream of the Arab. The Non‐Publication of Wordsworth’sThe Prelude

“…It makes a difference, in other words, if by The Prelude is meant the untitled manuscript B ('Title not yet fixed upon'), which was transcribed in 1806 and featured a title page with George Hutchinson's elaborate calligraphic work; or the first printed edition published by Edward Moxon in 1850, entitled The Prelude, and based on the substantially revised manuscript E, which was hastily and inaccurately transcribed in 1839, and cursorily reviewed by the author in July of that year; or its first scholarly edition published by Ernest de Selincourt in 1926, featuring reproductions of these two title pages along with emended versions of both the 1805 and the 1850 texts on facing pages, as well as the critical apparatus to be expected from Oxford's Clarendon Press; or Mark Reed's recent editions in the Cornell University Press series, where a welter of manuscript variants are photographically reproduced and the 'poem itself' is in danger of getting all but lost (Stillinger 2006). This makes a difference not only because of the many and intensely studied textual and contextual differences between the 1805 and the 1850 versions (not to mention the multiple versions in between), but also because of the material difference between a work in manuscript and a work in print.…”