MR. D. C. SOMERVELL explains in his own following prefatory note how he came to make this abridgement of the first six volumes of my book. Before I knew anything about it, a number of inquiries had been reaching me, particularly from the United States, as to whether there was any likelihood of an abridgement of these volumes being published pending the time—now inevitably postponed far beyond all original expectations owing to the war—when I should be able to publish the rest of the work. I had been feeling the force of this demand, but had not seen how to meet it (being, as I was, very fully occupied with war-work) until the problem was solved in a most happy way by a letter from Mr. Somervell telling me that an abridgement, made by him, was now in existence.
When Mr. Somervell sent me his manuscript, more than four years had already passed since the publication of volumes IV-VI and more than nine years since that of volumes I—III. For a writer the act of publication always, I suppose, has the effect of turning into a foreign body the work that, so long as it was in the making, was a part of its maker’s life; and in this case the war of 1939-1945, with the changes of circumstance and occupation that it brought with it, had also intervened between my book and me (volumes IV-VI were published forty-one days before the war broke out). In working over Mr. Somervell’s manuscript, I have therefore been able—notwithstanding his skill in retaining my own words—to read the abridgement almost as though it were a new book from another hand than mine. I have now made it fully my own by here and there recasting the language (with Mr. Somervell’s good-natured acquiescence) as I have gone along, but I have not compared the abridgement with the original line by line, and I have made a point of never reinserting any passage that Mr. Somervell had left out—believing, as I do, that the author himself is unlikely to be the best judge of what is and is not an indispensable part of his work.
The maker of a skilful abridgement does an author a most valuable service which his own hand cannot readily do for him, and readers of the present volume who are acquainted with the original text will, I am sure, agree with me that Mr. Somervell’s literary craftsmanship has been skilful indeed. He has managed to preserve the argument of the book, to present it for the most part in the original words and at the same time to abridge six volumes into one volume. If I had been set this task myself, I doubt whether I could have accomplished it.
Though Mr. Somervell has made the lesser task of working over his abridgement as light a one for the author as it could well be, two further years have passed since I first set to work on it. For periods of weeks and months on end I have had to let it lie untouched at my elbow. These delays have been due to the exigencies of war-work; but the notes for the rest of the book are intact, in the safe keeping of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York (I posted them in Munich week to the Executive Secretary of the Council, Mr. Mallory, who kindly undertook to look after them), and while there is life there is hope of finishing one’s work. Not the least of my reasons for being grateful to Mr. Somervell is that the process of working on his abridgement of those volumes of the book that have already been published has helped me to begin to turn my mind again to those that I have still to write.
It is also a happy thing for me that this volume is being published, like the full version of the book, by the Oxford University Press, and that the Index is being made by Miss V.’ M. Boulter, to whom readers of the full version are already indebted for the two indexes to Volumes I—III and Volumes IV-VI.
ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE