ABSTRACT
The preparation of reliable, scholarly texts is one of the most valuable tasks a literary scholar can undertake. Both general readers and professional literary critics concentrate on texts, and their work of interpretation or evaluation will be gravely damaged if these are corrupt or imperfect. The more detailed a critic’s attention to the words of the text, the greater the need for textual accuracy. The us critic F.O.Matthiessen was famously caught out when he wrote admiringly of what he took to be a brilliantly incongruous image in Herman Melville’s White Jacket-the ‘soiled fish’ of the sea. Unfortunately for Matthiessen, ‘soiled’ was the printer’s invention: Melville had actually written ‘coiled’.
