Honeycomb

The American Edition of Honeycomb, 1919, is a faithful resetting of the English First Edition, 1917. Of 26 variants, 20 are substantive. Five of these, representing obvious errors of punctuation in E, are corrected in A and later in the Collected Edition. A further 5 are the result of American misprints: for example A64.1 sight, E53.20 and CE377.20 right; and A97.14 know whether, E85.22 and CE394.35 knew whether. Of the remaining 10, the only A variant incorporated into CE is: A145.18 and CE419.1 He'll be, E130.11 He'd be. CE follows E in the other 9 instances, the most interesting of which are: E12.16 and CE355.5-6 Princess of Wales Fringe, A19.9 Royal family fringe (to help the American reader?), E37.5 and CE368.24 me tryin', A46.2 my tryin' (ignoring Richardson's deliberate attempt to represent the casualness of the speaker); E211.10 and CE463.1 well-cut grey clothes; A233.20 well-cut clothes (possibly to eliminate repetition, since the bridegrooms are called grey-clad in the previous sentence).

The errors in E are confined to 5 easily spotted deviations in punctuation, faithfully corrected in A. The remaining variants in A, with the exception of the tense shift noted above, are ignored in CE. There is very little evidence, then, that Richardson revised sheets or read proofs for Knopf, or that she consulted the American Edition in preparing the Collected Edition text.

NOTE The American Edition does not revise words like apologise and realise.

Chapter 5 introduction

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