ABSTRACT
Wives and Daughters was first published in the Cornhill Magazine in eighteen monthly parts between 1864 and January 1866. The present edition is based on the serialised Cornhill text in preference to the two other possible copy-texts: the original manuscript (now in the John Rylands University Library, Manchester) and the first edition, issued in two-volume form in 1866. The latter does not have the authority of the Cornhill text since it was prepared after serialisation was complete and thus after Gaskell’s death in 1865, so that editorial interventions were not overseen by the author. The departures from the manuscript made by editors and printers of the serial edition, on the other hand, must in the main be regarded as having had authorial approval. Some of these changes may have been made by Gaskell herself at the proofing stage, but the standardisation of punctuation in accordance with the printer’s house style, and the addition of chapter divisions and titles (absent from the manuscript, which runs seamlessly on, save for indications of divisions at the end of Chapters II, XXX and LIX) are almost certainly the work of compositors and editors, whose interventions Gaskell would have tacitly accepted even where she did not directly oversee them.
