Macmillan Collective Edition

1883

It was common practice among Victorian publishers to issue popularly-priced collective sets of authors’ works, not merely to satisfy audience demand but, just as important, to consolidate readers’ identification of a particular house imprint with a writer’s surname.  Such was Frederick Macmillan’s intent when he proposed the first Collective Edition of Henry James in April 1883.  This fourteen-volume set included all the novels that Macmillan had already issued (Roderick Hudson, The American, The Europeans, Washington Square, and The Portrait of a Lady) as well as Confidence (reassigned by James from Chatto & Windus) and a total of thirteen short stories and novellas, two of which (“The Siege of London” and “The Point of View”) appeared in Great Britain for the first time in this new collected edition.  When he received Macmillan’s proposal, James immediately accepted it, only making “the condition that the books be as pretty as possible.  Can you make them really pretty,” he wondered, “for 18-pence a volume?  I should like them to be charming, & beg you to spare no effort to make them so.”

To produce such charming little volumes, Macmillan was obliged to reset the type of all of James’s works, including The Portrait of a Lady.  Most of the earlier misprints were now corrected; a handful of substantive variants were introduced; invariably, a few inadvertent errors also crept in.  Most significant, perhaps, was the net gain of 169 commas in James’s text: 301 new ones were inserted and 132 existing ones deleted.  There is no evidence that James had any hand in these changes.  The Collective Edition went into production while the author was in the United States, settling the estate of his father, Henry James, Senior, who died in December 1882.  The Collective Edition of 1883, then, stands as one of the rare instances in James’s career when the author ignored an opportunity to revise his work.

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.

1883 Macmillan Edition – Volume I

1883 Macmillan Edition – Volume II

1883 Macmillan Edition – Volume III