The French Revolution was published in three volumes, on 9 May 1837, in an edition of 1,000 copies, by James Fraser, 215 Regent Street. At the prompting of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the work was subsequently published by Little and Brown, of Boston, on 25 December 1837. The text used in the present edition is a version of Mark Engel’s critical text, which will be published together with a complete list of the emendations of the copy-text in the forthcoming three-volume Oxford English Texts (OET) edition of Carlyle’s history. The three-volume division of the first edition has been maintained here, but the pagination is continuous. Engel based the text on the collation of the five editions in which Carlyle participated: the first edition of 1837 as copy-text against the second edition of 1839, the third edition of 1848, the Uniform Edition of 1857–8, and the Library Edition of 1869–71.
Volumes I and II of the 1837 first edition were printed by James Moyes, but Fraser gave the third volume to the firm of Levey, Robson and Franklyn, 46 St Martin’s Lane, because Moyes was making slow progress on the first two volumes. Carlyle wrote to Fraser on 1 May 1837, commending ‘the Robsons’ as ‘accurate punctual Printers’ who ‘have been extremely helpful to me in this business’ (CL ix. 201). Carlyle continued to use this firm for all his subsequent publications. No manuscript material from the first edition is known to have survived, but a partial set of marked proof pages covering volume 1, book 1, ‘The Feast of Pikes’, is held in the Forster Collection of the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The proofs were transcribed by Kenneth J. Fielding and David R. Sorensen, and published together with a facsimile of the document by Brent E. Kinser in the Carlyle Studies Annual in 2006. This article has been republished in an appendix to the second volume of the OET edition. Though these proofs cannot be accepted as a final iteration—at many points, the proofs as marked do not correspond to the first edition as finally printed—they are of considerable interest regarding the late stages of Carlyle’s compositional methods. What they do confirm is Carlyle’s allegiance to what David R. Sorensen calls in the introduction his “Conversational” (xv) style of history. In the copy-text Carlyle employs single inverted commas as quotation marks to indicate factual historical material and doubles to highlight direct quotations from particular individuals, thereby stressing the oral aspect of his approach. This system was maintained in all subsequent editions of The French Revolution in which Carlyle was involved.
The text in all of these later editions shows evidence of careful authorial revision. The first edition contained a variety of obvious typographical errors, most of which were corrected in the 1839 second edition, but it also included many factual errors (for example, in the spelling of proper names) that were progressively caught and corrected in subsequent editions. The most notable revision in the second edition occurred at the end of volume 3, book 5, concerning the episode of the sinking of the French naval vessel Le Vengeur. In ‘On the Sinking of the Vengeur’, which is included together with introduction, notes, and textual note in the third volume of the OET edition, Carlyle recalls that he had been contacted by Anselm John Griffiths, a retired English naval officer, who disputed the account of the incident given in the first edition. After having carefully established the truth of the matter and discovered the source of the myth, Carlyle published his essay in Fraser’s Magazine in July 1839. In the 1839 second edition he added a paragraph, in which he retracted his previous account and denounced Bertrand Barrère, the original author of the falsehood.
The pattern of correction and revision continued in the 1848 third edition, as well as in later editions. The vast majority of variants found in the third edition were in punctuation, especially in the placement of commas. The earliest editions of Carlyle’s works prior to The French Revolution are punctuated according to a partially evolved form of an eighteenth-century ‘rhetorical’ system. In this scheme the various punctuation marks signalled suggested pauses of various lengths in a notional oral performance that were largely unconstrained by the structure of the sentence. Later editions of each work show a pattern of progressively imposing the modern system of ‘syntactic’ punctuation, the rules for which evolved through the nineteenth century in both Britain and America and remained in a state of flux.
The French Revolution was included in the sixteen-volume Uniform Edition, the first collected edition of Carlyle’s works, as volumes 7 and 8, published in 1857. Uniquely among the lifetime editions, it was printed in two rather than three volumes, and, presumably to avoid confusion, the ‘volumes’ into which all other editions are divided were renamed ‘parts’. By this point in his career, Carlyle had the editorial assistance of several youthful volunteers, and variants from this and following editions have to be considered with this participation in mind. It is no longer the case that a pattern of revision that printers would not have imposed on their own initiative can confidently be ascribed to the author.
The thirty-volume Library Edition of Carlyle’s collected works included The French Revolution as volumes 2, 3, and 4, and returned to the three-volume format of earlier editions. All three volumes are dated 1870, though, as a footnote labelled in the text by Carlyle indicates, they were evidently published in 1869. Careful attention is still being paid to all aspects of the text, with more authorial variants in the Library than in the Uniform Edition. Revisions range from minor alterations of wording, through many additions of missing accents in French names and words, even to matters of punctuation. A large category of variants in the Library Edition are the result of a careful consideration as to whether exclamation marks and question marks ought to be inside or outside of closing quotation marks. In earlier editions, these had been uniformly inside the quotation marks, perhaps as a matter of typographical convention, but in the Library Edition ‘tall’ punctuation marks that are not logically part of the quotation were moved outside. Given the many other persuasive examples of Carlyle’s personal involvement in this edition, it follows that he himself took the trouble to order these changes.
Much can be learned about the actual writing of The French Revolution from the Duke–Edinburgh edition of the Collected Letters, including the story of the loss of the whole manuscript of the first volume, burnt while in the care of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor. Jane Welsh Carlyle observed that the rewritten version was ‘less vivacious perhaps but better thought and put together’ (CL viii. 194), and Carlyle wrote that he made many changes in proof, including the division into chapters. Some scraps of manuscripts remain, mainly but not all listed by Rosenbaum and White in their Index of English Literary Manuscripts. The present edition includes an extensive annotated index of names and titles, and notes that pertain to Carlyle’s literary, biblical, and mythological allusions, as well as to his historical sources. These latter references are elaborated in the list of his English, French, and German sources provided in the Select Bibliography, and explored in greater depth in the OET version of The French Revolution.