Houghton, Mifflin Edition

[1881] / 1882

As explained in the Copy-text Rationale, the first American edition of The Portrait of a Lady was printed from a duplicate set of stereotype plates sent to Boston by Macmillan & Company. These were the same plates used to produce the second (one-volume) edition of the novel in Great Britain. Houghton, Mifflin published the novel on November 16, 1881, at a retail price of $2.00. The first impression of 1500 copies sold out quickly (for a title by James, that is) and was followed by numerous reprintings. Approximately 6000 copies were sold within the first year of publication.

Under the circumstances, one might expect this edition to be identical to the one-volume Portrait issued later by Macmillan, since they were printed from the same plates. In fact, some curious discrepancies exist between the two editions, which indicates that the second set of plates (used for the 1882 Macmillan text), though probably cast soon after those sent to America, were corrected later. The plates sent to America were made first and, at first glance, might seem in some respects superior. The second Macmillan edition, for example, drops a fair number of punctuation marks and end-of-line hyphens. These discrepancies suggest that, having already been used to cast the American plates, the moulds no longer retained the full impression of the original standing type and therefore could not reproduce such characters with proper fidelity. But the Houghton, Mifflin text also incorporates numerous substantive errors that then were corrected in the later British one-volume edition, suggesting that Macmillan’s compositors discovered these mistakes when they were “leading out” the type to print the three-volume first edition and then altered the second set of plates before issuing the six-shilling version—all the while ignoring or overlooking the new errors introduced by the defective casting.

For a complete record of these and other textual variants, readers should consult the Cambridge Edition of The Portrait of a Lady in its print form, published in 2016.

Houghton, Mifflin 1881 Edition