ABSTRACT
R. W. Chapman is predisposed to the detection of error; and he is so through a failure to appreciate the relationship between sentence structure, punctuation and meaning in the early printed Austen text. Chapman, Mary Lascelles and James Kinsley are the three chief exponents of the Austen text. Chapman's edition is also the basis for modern American editions, including the Norton critical editions, the most recent of which is Claudia Johnson's 1998 Mansfield Park, a reconsidered reprint of Chapman's copy-text. The assumption of an authorised level of familial correction, evident in the changes to the second editions of Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park, appears to sanction Chapman's own ameliorating and chastising treatment of the Austen corpus. Chapman's error of emendation, on the contrary, establishes the culturally endorsed necessity for a subsequent visual instruction, and with it, of course, Mansfield Park's translation into an English classic.
