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Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela

Chapter 23: Technical Note
By Samuel Richardson
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About This Book

This introduction assembles the author's preface, editorial remarks and a series of contemporary letters to trace the work's early reception and successive revisions. It reproduces complimentary and critical responses, summarizes reader objections, and explains specific alterations made across editions to address questions of tone, propriety and meaning. The text documents editorial decisions and printing variants, marks deletions and substitutions, and notes how certain passages were softened or recast. Altogether it offers a close account of the author's intentions, defenses of the moral aims of the novel, and the practical changes undertaken to make the text more acceptable to its original readership.

Technical Note

The original text showed two types of changes, as seen in this page image:

In the e-text, deleted text is shown with solid underlines, while changed text has dashed underlines. Additional features will appear if you hover or click (changed sections only) on the underlined text. Exact behavior depends on your browser, so you may need to experiment. In particular, the title box—in most current browsers, smaller text against a yellow background—may take a few moments to appear.

Deleted text will show a title box giving the edition number of the deletion in the form {DEL. 7th}.

Changed text will have the same type of title box, giving the edition number of the change in the form {7th}. In addition, the new text will appear, followed by blank space (necessary for technical reasons) representing the original. The inserted text could not be formatted, so italics—or de-italicized word in italic sections—are shown with _lowlines_.

Any changes or deletions that span multiple paragraphs are shown separately for each paragraph.

As noted above, users who find the mouse-hover behavior distracting need simply keep their mouse or cursor in text-free areas such a margin or scroll bar.

Users who are comfortable editing HTML files should try replacing the element "border-bottom" in the CSS for span.change and span.delete with "outline". Not all browsers interpret this feature correctly; those that do will outline the entire text block as a single unit.

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