Note 33 to Chapter 5 of the author's Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and W. M. Thackeray, which University Press of Virginia published in 1992. It has been included in the Victorian Web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
Line-for-line resetting of new editions is not unusual. The main reason for it in this case was probably to ensure that the reset gathering M would mesh with the preserved setting of gathering N. But other advantages have a hearing: resetting line for line means that end-of-line word divisions and line justification problems are already worked out. Most deviations from exact line-for-line resetting were attempts to improve the look of especially crowded or tight lines.
From time to time, the compositor(s) working on the second edition failed to make the new lines match the line breaks in the first edition. On at least one occasion a textual variant ranged the line-break difference (see. Appendix D, table 1, item 55.9), but for the most part carelessness was the apparent cause, or else the knowledge that if one line did not match, the text could easily be brought back to the proper line ending within a line or two. Differences could result from attempts to loosen a right line; almost as often, however, new tight lines were created in bringing the lines back to the proper endings.
Other examples of line-for-line resetting occur in Thomas Babington Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays, entirely reset line for line for the second edition and again for the third edition, and in Thackeray's The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, which was printed at least three times in 1853 with substantial revisions and considerable line-for-line resetting.
Last modified: 4 April 2001