NOTE ON THE TEXT

The novel was typeset once for the Jarrold edition of 1933 (in the author’s lifetime), and a second time for the Jarrold Jackdaw paperback reprint of 1937 – without the author’s supervision, of course. In 1970 Hutchinson published a reprint, the text photographed from 1933. The textual history of the novel is thus, on the face of it, uncomplicated.

After Mitchell’s death, however, Mrs Mitchell came across a complete typescript of Spartacus ‘which Leslie [Mitchell] had typed here in Welwyn Garden City’1 – an interesting ambiguity which (as will shortly be seen) could be important. Presumably this is the typescript which survives among the Mitchell papers now in the custody of the National Library of Scotland. Mitchell was a quick, tidy and thoroughly businesslike worker, and the survival of a complete typescript is significant.

The Jackdaw came out by 17 February 19372 and did achieve some success – if we can trust the publishers’ notalways-ingenuous annotation on the editor’s copy listing it as being of the 42nd thousand. Likewise the 1970 reprint achieved some success, but by April 1978 Mrs Mitchell was sadly reporting to C. M. Grieve that poor sales meant that this edition, too, was shortly to be allowed to go out of print.

The next edition, of which this is an expansion and update, was in The Scottish Classics series of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, under the general editorship of David Robb. Spartacus was published in paperback form, no. 14 in the series, in 1990.

Why should a complete typescript of the novel survive among the author’s papers? We know that Mitchell typed his own work – despite the astonishingly cheap rates he could find for occasional professional retyping3 – but this is a fair copy retyping bearing none of the marks of the heat of first composition, but frequent changes of mind both in ink (in his hand) and in overtyping on the same machine. The ribbon was changed during the job, and there are instructions typed in to compositors which would have disappeared had the typescript been copy-edited in a publisher’s hands.

Perhaps most interestingly of all, Mitchell typed a page of prefatory matter listing other works as follows:

Books by J. LESLIE MITCHELL published in America

Hanno – E P Dutton

Cairo Dawns

Three Go Back – Bobbs-Merrill

The Lost Trumpet

and under the nom-de-plume of Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Sunset Song – Century Co.

The clear implication is that Mitchell had typed up and kept a copy for the US market, should success in Britain warrant his trying-out the book on US publishers. This would be consistent with his wide experience of US publishers and his keen commercial sense. The fact that it remained in Mrs Mitchell’s hands at his death suggests that the typescript (which appears to bear no marks of editing by any other hand) never left his desk. It does complicate the otherwise simple textual picture of Spartacus in ways which can be briefly described.

The published version (1933) includes some changes made by Mitchell on this new typescript (TS). TS p. 49 as an afterthought makes the phrase ‘Hating all Greeks’ start a new paragraph, accepted by 1933. TS p. 69 superimposes the phrase ‘Now, he shouted aloud’ on a much more complicated original version, and 1933 accepts this change.

This strongly suggests that the typescript was made before 1933 was published, and that the carbon was the basis for the typesetting at Jarrold. The top copy was thoughtfully retained for future submission to US publishers. Even apparent errors in the typescript appear in 1933 uncorrected.

However, the 1933 text has also had corrections made independent of the typescript. Mitchell typed ‘assailling’ on TS p. 285, and the printer has corrected this (p. 240 of 1933) to ‘assailing’; and minor changes are made – for example, ‘pectorale’ on p. 58 of TS becomes ‘breastplate’ on p. 55 of the published text, and the tribune who is ‘killed’ on TS p. 65 is ‘down’ on p. 61 of the final text. The typescript is thus probably Mitchell’s top copy of the final version the carbon of which went to Jarrold to be set in type, where it was edited and corrected. Had Mitchell lived, he would probably have marked those corrections on to the typescript and sent it on its way to the US for publication.

A comparison of this unique copy with the published 1933 text suggests few changes, though interesting ones. In the absence of proofs of 1933 (which do not seem to have survived), the text of this reprint is the 1933 version, as being overseen by the author – and without proofs we cannot tell which divergencies from the typescripts are Mitchell’s, and which the publishers’ own suggestions. The 1937 version, while catching some errors, offers no significant improvements and the 1970 version repeats the text of 1933 by photographic reprinting. In the present edition, obvious misprints have been silently corrected.

Notes

1MS Edinburgh University Library. To C. M. Grieve, 28 November 1960.

2MS Edinburgh University Library. To C. M. Grieve, 17 February 1937.

3Ian Campbell, ‘Gibbon and MacDiarmid at Play: The Evolution of Scottish Scene’, The Bibliotheck 13 (2), 1986, p. 52.