In creating this digital edition of Henson’s journals, every effort has been made to preserve the features of the original text, including the various forms of mark-up in coloured crayon that Henson added when preparing his autobiography.
In most cases, Henson’s inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies of spelling, punctuation, and abbreviation have been retained, subject only to minimum formatting in some respects and silent editing in others. Use of [sic] has been kept to a minimum. However, some stylistic changes have been unavoidable in providing a typed transcription, displaying this in web pages, and distinguishing between brackets used by Henson himself and those which have been necessary to indicate editorial interventions.
Inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies retained in the edition
Henson:
- used both single and double quotation marks throughout the Journals, and sometimes in the same passage; he had no fixed method for use of quotation marks for quotations within a quotation
- used different abbreviations for the same word, e.g. cts and Commts for communicants. However, the meaning of these varying abbreviations is obvious from the context.
- adopted archaic spelling for some words, e.g.,
- a ‘c’ at the end of a word becomes ‘ick’, as in fanatick, heretick, Catholick
- ‘sate’ for ‘sat’
- ‘shew’ for ‘show’.
- ‘negociation’ for ‘negotiation’
- varied the spelling of words ending in ‘ise/ize’, e.g. surprise/surprize
Editorial changes to the appearance of the text
As Henson’s practice on some textual matters varies, editorial standardisation has been undertaken as follows:
- dates at the head of each journal entry have been ordered uniformly as follows: anniversary/feast: day of the week: month and date of the month: year: location. E.g. Sexagesima, Sunday, February 7th, 1920. Lambeth Palace.
- paragraphs are given in ‘block’ style rather than with an indented first line
- underscores between words are presented as hyphens
- = is presented as a colon throughout
- + is presented as an ampersand (&) throughout
- Henson’s archaic presentation of a double ‘s’ as ‘fs’ – for example ‘afsure’ – has not been followed
- quotation marks are placed inside punctuation except where a sentence is quoted in full
- paragraph breaks denoted by a large space in the middle of a line commence on the next line
Consistent corrections made to the text
- dates, and page numbers which are out of sequence
Henson’s corrections and additions
- where amounting to more than simple errors, the text that was struck through at the time of writing has been retained, marked by strikethrough
- text struck through at a later date (i.e. in coloured crayon) is rendered in bold
- text added at a later date is inserted between bold subscript symbols ^…^
Editorial interventions
- Occasional explanatory notes, missing words, translations, correct spellings of names, and missing quotation marks are placed in square brackets
Changes to the text
The following changes have been made within the constraints of a typed and webpage text:
- Henson’s two dots under the superscript part of personal titles following the initial capital letter has been replaced with underlining: e.g. Mrs, Dr, etc.
- omission of underlining of superscript in titles where the passage in which it occurs is itself underlined, e.g. ‘Mrs Wilson, the wife of a local doctor…’
- triple underlining is rendered as double
- double vertical lines are rendered as single
- numbers and letters within circles have been placed within round brackets: e.g. (1), (a), etc
The following change has been made to avoid confusion with editorial interventions:
- replacement of Henson’s square brackets with curled brackets: e.g. [ ] with { }
Henson’s mark-up to assist the writing of the Retrospect
Because of software limitations in reproducing colour, Henson’s mark-ups have been rendered differently from their appearance in the Journals. No attempt has been made to discriminate between the different colours he used in the categories of editing given below. As this feature refers to the composition of the Retrospect, it is outside the boundaries of the Henson Journals project.
- passages which are underlined in coloured crayon are rendered in bold with black underlining. (However, in the occasional case of thin underlining in red pen, suggesting that it was added at the same time as the text was written, the underlining is rendered in black without the bold.)
- passages with coloured strokes in the margin are rendered in italics
- passages with both coloured underlining and marginal strokes are rendered in bold and italics with black underlining
- the symbols Henson used to assign relevant volumes and sections of the Retrospect to different passages in the Journal are rendered by the word ‘symbol’ underneath the date of the entry, however many symbols lead the text
- coloured square brackets and associated symbols (e.g. / and | ) are rendered in bold