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The Happy Dreams of editors – the nightmares are privileged communications—feature banners with the strange device,“Definitive!” And sometimes incautious and over-generous reviewers make those dreams an apparent reality. But the irony has entered the soul, and cannot be long forgotten. Those of us engaged in editing John Stuart Mill's Collected Works have always known that, quite apart from our failings, it is impossible to produce an edition that will stand up for all time. Even more important is the realization that no editor of an author such as Mill can fully satisfy any one generation of actual, let alone potential, readers.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981
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NOTES
1. In the event, we now can foresee including all surviving material attributable to Mill, except for some manuscript scraps (we hope to include a descriptive list of these in the final volume), and the great majority of his India House dispatches. To admit defeat over these last is not shameful; Mill left a record of his draft dispatches (Home Miscellaneous Series, vol. 832), but just what was his part in their initiation and final wording cannot now be determined. They number 1708, and while they are not without interest, to publish them all would not, we believe, justify the cost and labour. A selection – perhaps all those published in official documents – will be included in our penultimate volume. For a summary listing of the documents, see Hamburger's, Joseph report in the American Philosophical Society Yearbook, 1957, pp. 324–27.Google Scholar
2. The University of Toronto still – though such parvenus as Anthropology and Sociology split off within living memory – manages to keep Economists and Political Scientists if not under one roof at least under one leaky administrative umbrella. But even as I write I hear ominous demands for divorce.
3. After his retirement I replaced him in both positions in 1970.
4. Apart from the letters, textual responsibility has been shared thus far only in the Autobiography and Literary Essays, where Jack Stillinger joined me, bringing a wealth of experience from his editions of The Early Draft of John Stuart Mill's Autobiography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961)Google Scholar and Autobiography and Other Writings of John Stuart Mill (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969).Google Scholar Both editors being accommodating and reasonable, compromises were reached, but some matters do not permit of compromise: there is no recognized way of using half a comma, or splitting the difference between putting or not putting a “The” in the title of a newspaper: the physicist's evacuation when matter and anti-matter meet will not serve as instructions for a printer. As a result, some practices in volume I of the edition (1981) differ from those in volume IX (1979) and will differ from those in volume VI (1982). And what will appear worse to some is that there will be differences, as a result of thought over volume I, between the practices in volume IX and volume VI. But, I hasten to say, the matters in question are minute, and I will wager happily that no one but a textual editor will notice them – and do textual editors have time to read beyond textual introductions?
5. The manuscript, which we shall re-edit for our final volume, has been published with annotations as Bibliography of the Published Writings of John Stuart Mill, ed. Mac-Minn, Ney, Hainds, J. R., and McCrimmon, J. M. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1945).Google Scholar We have discovered relatively few items not therein listed, but have of course added the writings not published in Mill's lifetime.
6. Though every attempt has been made to keep prices down, they have not seemed attractive to individual scholars who by and large (the words are carefully chosen) would rather use their money on dinner for two than on a volume of anybody's Collected Works.
7. The same holds, a fortiori, for his other much less important collection, Chapters and Speeches on the Irish Land Question (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1870)Google Scholar, the contents of which have appeared in our edition of the Principles or will appear in our volume of Journals and Speeches.
8. Recognition of our frailty – especially evident before our funding by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada – led us to dismiss after due consideration the possibility of including both sides of correspondences.
9. One great panjandrum, when I timorously pointed out to him what we had done, fixed me with a brief but withering glance, and said: “They will do it!”
10. See Tillotson's, Kathleen introduction to the Clarendon Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), esp. pp. xl ff.Google Scholar
11. Or in a footnote to the textual introduction, if the changes are few enough.
12. It may be thought that, following the lowest common motive analysis of revisionist historians, I am using a lowest common audience defence. Not so: my respect for nontextual scholars is genuine and profound; I merely try not to annoy them.
13. Cf. the Introduction to Autobiography and Literary Essays, Collected Works, vol. I (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), p. xlviii.Google Scholar
14. The volumes of letters and of newspaper writings, in particular, and isolated items elsewhere, require different treatment, for obvious reasons.
15. Or rather, we discovered – and should have known – as Horace had said of something else in Carmina Liber III, xxx, line 1.
16. Excluding, however, the writings – which could be taken to include the Principles of Political Economy, as well as On Liberty and the Autobiography – that Mill describes as “joint productions” with his wife. (See MacMinn, , p. xGoogle Scholar, and Autobiography, p. 251.)Google Scholar
17. The work had been begun in the early 1940s by F. A. von Hayek, who had passed on his material to Mineka in the 1950s.
18. See Ashley's, W. J. edition (London: Longmans, Green, 1909).Google Scholar
19. With reprintings, the more popular volumes are approaching sales of 4000.
20. The last of these contains an appendix of earlier letters discovered during the intervening years. Since 1972 we have been publishing edited texts of newly discovered letters in the Mill News Letter, a biannual we founded in 1965 to disseminate information about Mill and his circle. We have not yet seriously considered how, if at all, such material might be included in the final volumes.
21. It must not be concluded from this brief survey that we have been working on only one text at a time; normally at least three different volumes are in active preparation simultaneously. At the moment, for example, we are awaiting page proofs of vol. VI, while vol. xx is virtually ready for text entry, and preparation of the text and notes for vol. XXI has begun. And most of the materials for all volumes have long been assembled.
22. We have been very lucky to have had continuity in the copy-editing, only three very competent people having had that responsibility over twenty years.