{"id":168,"date":"2014-02-03T01:43:58","date_gmt":"2014-02-03T01:43:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=168"},"modified":"2014-02-03T01:43:58","modified_gmt":"2014-02-03T01:43:58","slug":"five-questions-anthony-mandal-on-self-control","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=168","title":{"rendered":"Five Questions: Anthony Mandal on Self-Control"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Brunton<\/a><\/p>\n

Dr Anthony Mandal,\u00a0Reader in English at Cardiff University<\/a>,\u00a0has published widely on Romantic and Victorian fiction and culture, focusing particularly on Jane Austen, book trade history and the Gothic novel. \u00a0Among many other things, he is the developer of British Fiction 1800-1829: A Database of Production, Circulation & Reception<\/a>,\u00a0 the author of\u00a0Jane Austen and the Popular Novel: The Determined Author<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), the\u00a0editor of the open-access online journal Romantic Textualities<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0one of the General Editors of The New Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson. \u00a0<\/em>He is also co-organising (with Dr Jane Moore) the 14th BARS International Conference, Romantic Imprints, which will take place in Cardiff in 2015. \u00a0Below, we discuss the process of preparing his new edition of Mary Brunton’s Self-Control<\/em><\/a>, which was published last year by Pickering & Chatto.<\/p>\n

1) How did you first come across Self-Control<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My first encounter with Self-Control<\/em>, and Mary Brunton, was while undertaking research for my PhD in the late 1990s. \u00a0I was looking at the intersections between Jane Austen and her contemporaries’ fiction, and my fourth chapter (which was actually the first I wrote) read Mansfield Park<\/em> against the emergence of evangelical fiction during the late 1800s. \u00a0As one of the key novels of the genre, Self-Control<\/em> formed a key focus of the print cultural analysis and comparative textual readings that I made use of.<\/p>\n

2) Which aspects of the book and its history made you want to produce your edition?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When it appeared in 1811, Self-Control<\/em> was an unexpected bestseller by a first-time novelist, completely overshadowing the publication of another 1811 d\u00e9but\u2014Austen\u2019s Sense and Sensibility<\/em>. \u00a0My starting point was Austen\u2019s rather tart comments about the novel, which seemed to dismiss the aesthetic achievement of Self-Contro<\/em>l while simultaneously acknowledging its overwhelming popularity: \u2018my opinion is confirmed of its\u2019 being an elegantly-meant, elegantly-written Work, without anything of Nature or Probability in it.\u2019 \u00a0The more I looked into its publication, the more compelled I was by the narrative that unfolded. \u00a0Begun as a pastime, Brunton was clearly unprepared for the novel\u2019s success, avowing \u2018I would sooner exhibit as a rope-dancer\u2019, than be recognised as a novelist. \u00a0And it is this ambivalence\u2014between commercial success and religious rectitude, between popularity and propriety\u2014that offers a suggestive lens through which to examine women\u2019s writing during the Regency.<\/p>\n

The publishing context itself was fascinating too: the novel was published by the Edinburgh publishers Manners & Miller, who shared a personal connection with the Bruntons. \u00a0Manners & Miller partnered up with the London-based Longmans, who were among the most eminent Romantic businesses of the period. \u00a0The novel quickly gained popularity, with the first edition virtually selling out within a month, so much so that Longmans in effect took over the management of the edition, instructing Manners & Miller to produce a second, enlarged edition. \u00a0This, again, sold rapidly, and the novel had gone into its fourth edition by the time the year was up. \u00a0The reception of the novel was by no means unilaterally positive, and critics were divided over its religious content and depiction of sexual violence, with Mary Russell Mitford observing that she\u2019d heard that the book \u2018had occasioned [a dispute] between two gentlemen, one of whom said it ought to be burnt by the common hangman, and the other that it ought to be written in letters of gold.\u2019<\/p>\n

Given the popularity of Self-Control<\/em> during the nineteenth century (it remained in print until the 1880s), I was disappointed by the poor attention it received during the twentieth: a facsimile reprint had appeared by Garland in the 1970s, followed by a reset edition which appeared as part of Pandora Classics\u2019 \u2018Mothers of the Novel\u2019 series. \u00a0While laudable in its intentions, this latter edition was riddled with typos and carried no annotations, giving little sense of the novel\u2019s allusiveness and richness beyond its relationship to Austen.<\/p>\n

3) What were the major challenges you faced in selecting and preparing the text?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Given that the novel went into four lifetime editions within one year (Brunton died in 1818), the main challenge was getting access to these texts. \u00a0Luckily, I was able to secure most of the source material electronically from various sources, such as the Internet Archive, the Hathi Trust and the Corvey collection. \u00a0Although it wasn\u2019t going to form a key authority when undertaking any emendations, I also wanted to collate the Standard Novels edition that Colburn & Bentley published in 1832, as this formed the basis of the remaining editions that appeared over the next sixty years. \u00a0Then came the arduous process of converting these pages into editable text, and carefully proofreading each edition in preparation for the collations. \u00a0Luckily, the collation process was assisted by my use of the JUXTA application (www.juxtasoftware.org\/<\/a>), which enabled me to compare the variants digitally. \u00a0This was good news indeed, as the collations yielded around 6000 separate variants between the five editions! \u00a0Of course, I still had to read through each one and decide which ones to implement and which ones to disregard, ultimately having to apply around 200 substantive emendations, which was no small task.<\/p>\n

Another key challenge lay in my choice of copy text. \u00a0I decided to return to the first edition, as the rest of the nineteenth-century editions were derived from the second. \u00a0Owing to various criticisms and suggestions that Brunton had received, she made a number of significant alterations to the text, toning down various controversial elements. \u00a0For instance, the villain of the novel is presented as much more calculating and sexually violent in his predations on the heroine in the first edition; whereas from the second onwards, he is presented as much more under the instinctual sway of his desires. \u00a0I wanted to return to the more unsettling aspects of the first edition, which I felt would offer the modern reader a more compelling and complex text. \u00a0Structurally, Self-Control<\/em> originally appeared in two volumes, which broke at a very dramatic moment in the narrative; whereas the second to fourth editions were divided into three, which I felt diminished that compelling sense of urgency.<\/p>\n

That said, what struck me about the first edition was how poorly the paragraphs had been set for a published work. \u00a0This was borne out by anecdotal comments which stated that the first edition had been typeset directly from Brunton\u2019s first manuscript (rather than a fair copy), as well as an examination of the printer\u2019s press-marks in the volumes themselves, which showed that the job had been spread out among multiple personnel. \u00a0As a result, paragraphs in the first edition sometimes run for pages in length, while passages of dialogue are squashed together, distorting some of the textual richness of the first edition. \u00a0After much agonising, I elected to follow the paragraphing of the second edition, which seemed to open up the text much more fluidly and lucidly. \u00a0All the while, the textual purist on my shoulder was berating me for such a decision. \u00a0However, I reasoned that rapid preparation of the first edition afforded Brunton little opportunity to make the interventions that she did a few months later when revising the second edition text.<\/p>\n

4) In your introduction, you make a strong case for the novel as a ‘messy, rich and rewarding text’. \u00a0Now that the new edition has made it more generally available, what sorts of research projects and taught courses do you think might profitably employ it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I would say that Self-Control<\/em> is richly rewarding on a number of levels. \u00a0Firstly, research into and teaching of the Romantic book trade will find it a very interesting case study for the production, dissemination and reception of fiction. \u00a0This, coupled with Brunton\u2019s anxieties about fame and recognition, offers some suggestive material about the role of the woman writer during this crucial period in the history of the novel. \u00a0More generally, the fortunes of Self-Control<\/em> provide some interesting opportunities for the study of canon-formation and literary legacies, especially when read against more readily recognisable writers such as Austen and Scott. \u00a0But the content of the novel itself offers some very interesting dynamics to students of the nineteenth-century novel, as it presents a strong and independent heroine who resists her marginal status in quite powerful ways, while attempting to evince a religious agenda. \u00a0Brunton is able to draw together melodramatic incident, literary satire and psychological sensitivity throughout the novel, in ways that can be read backwards to Richardson and forwards to Victorian realism. \u00a0I\u2019ve taught the novel for a number of years on an MA module entitled \u2018The Popular Novel in the Age of Austen\u2019, and students were very responsive to it, which was another spur to prepare the edition. \u00a0My hope is that scholars who study the novel will find that, while it may not have the sustained elegance of Austenian prose, Self-Control<\/em> nevertheless provides a compelling and at times moving account of the limitations and pressures faced by women at the turn of the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n

5) What’s next for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

As usual, too much! \u00a0During 2014, I\u2019ll be co-authoring with Franz Potter<\/a> and Colin Marlaire<\/a>, The Palgrave Guide to Gothic Publishing: The Business of Gothic Fiction, 1764\u20131835<\/em>. \u00a0This is a 230,000-word reference guide that examines the authors, publishers, printers, circulating-library proprietors and magazines that played a formative role in ensuring the success of first-wave gothic fiction. \u00a0I\u2019ll be balancing this project with a number of articles on medical writing and nineteenth-century periodical gothic, as well as my role as a General Editor of the New Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson<\/em>\u2014our first half-dozen volumes will be appearing over the coming year.<\/p>\n

Oh, and there\u2019s the little matter of co-organising BARS 2015, of course\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr Anthony Mandal,\u00a0Reader in English at Cardiff University,\u00a0has published widely on Romantic and Victorian fiction and culture, focusing particularly on Jane Austen, book trade history and the Gothic novel. \u00a0Among… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=168"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":178,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168\/revisions\/178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}