1. Introduction

The Editorial Institute at Boston University, which began instruction of students in 2000, was formed with the conviction that the textually sound, contextually annotated edition is central to the intellectual life of many disciplines. Its primary aims are the promotion of critical awareness of editorial issues and practices and the provision of training in editorial methods.

The Institute offers advanced degrees (M.A. and Ph.D.) to students who successfully prepare either editions of important writings, with textual apparatus and annotation, or monographs concerned with editing or textual bibliography. See also Thesis and Dissertation Proposals. Guidance to students is provided through courses that cover such topics as: establishing an authoritative text; the practice of annotation; current technologies for storing, disseminating, or editing information; legal and professional considerations concerning copyright and intellectual property; historical changes in the concept of authorship; the practice of annotation; and recent theorizing about texts.

Students are encouraged to think widely about the applications of editing: to letters, sound archives, oral transcripts, music, manuscript fragments, legal and historical documents, journalism, notebooks, anonymous writings, and marginalia, as well as to the literary and philosophical writing most often associated with the idea of the edition.

The Institute enjoys the cooperation of the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center in the Mugar Memorial Library at Boston University. Some of the remarkable holdings include The Historical Manuscript Collection, which consists of literary and historical letters, documents, and manuscripts with particular strengths in British literary manuscripts of the nineteenth century, and in letters and documents of American statesmen from the revolutionary period through the twentieth century. Two examples of highlights of the Collection are seven short poems in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s own hand, and a letter in the hand of John Jay, first Chief Justice of the United States. The Abraham Lincoln Collection includes books and pamphlets by Lincoln, as well as some seventy manuscript letters and documents. The Alice and Rollo G. Silver Collection is composed of private press books, a superb Walt Whitman collection, and a fine group of works by and about Joseph Conrad. The Richards Collection contains manuscripts, etchings, engravings, signed photographs, and historical readings from such notable literary figures as Carlyle, Coleridge, Hardy, Lawrence, Stevenson, Tennyson, and Yeats.

The School of Theology Library at Boston University has its own archival collections: most noteworthy are the Early Printed Bible Pages collection and the Medieval Manuscripts collection. Additionally, the cities of Boston and Cambridge offer a remarkable range of libraries: among others, the Houghton and Widener Libraries at Harvard University, the Boston Public Library, the Boston Athenaeum, and the Museum of Fine Arts. Further, there is in Boston and its environs a larger scholarly and cultural community alive to editorial concerns: in universities, museums, publishing houses, literary agencies, and the scholarly book trade.

The Editorial Institute is affiliated to a wide range of academic disciplines within the University, and its work will prove pertinent to a variety of fields, including publishing, serious journalism, and librarianship.

Graduates have moved on to jobs in publishing, teaching, and bibliographical and archival work. Several publications derived from their MA and Ph.D work have appeared or are under contract with publishers, including Elected Friends: Robert Frost and Edward Thomas to One Another, an edition of letters, poems, and reviews related to the friendship between the two poets; a contribution to Pickering and Chatto’s Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning; an annotated Wind in the Willows; a collected poems of John Crowe Ransom; and a discography of the Harvard Vocarium.

2. T. S. Eliot Comes Home to Boston

The Editorial Institute is pleased to announce that one of its Directors, Professor Christopher Ricks, has been invited to prepare a full critical edition of the Poems of T. S. Eliot. The undertaking will complement publication of Eliot’s very extensive critical writings and of his letters, which are being edited elsewhere.

Although Eliot was perhaps the foremost English language poet of the twentieth century and died more than forty years ago, his writings have never been collected before, and many manuscripts have been in restricted archives. The Complete Poems, to be published by Faber & Faber in Britain, will contain not only Eliot’s masterpieces such as The Waste Land and Four Quartets but also his Practical Cats, his translation of St.-John Perse’s Anabase, and a number of unpublished or neglected verses.

T. S. Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He was educated at Harvard, and as a young man moved to Europe, where he studied in Paris and Oxford. His first volume of poems, the tantalizingly titled Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917 in London, and he soon made his name as an influential reviewer and critic. The Waste Land was a publishing sensation in 1922-3 (the British edition was published by Virginia Woolf), and Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948.

Christopher Ricks’s transatlantic career began on the other side: he taught at both Oxford and Cambridge before coming to Boston University in 1986. He is in the middle of a five-year term as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and is a leading Eliot scholar and critic. In 1963 he reviewed the last edition of the poems published in Eliot’s lifetime, in 1988 he published a critical study of T.S. Eliot and Prejudice, and in 2002 he gave the Panizzi Lectures in Bibliography at the British Library on revisions in Eliot’s critical prose.

Ten years ago, his edition of the early poems, Inventions of the March Hare, led Helen Vendler to write "I wish Ricks would annotate the Complete Poems so that we could know them as well as we now know the unpublished verse." In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane recognized that the edition was itself a work of criticism, calling it "the best book ever written on Eliot," and now Ricks jokes that it is exciting to be working on "the best book ever written by Eliot."

The enterprise is the latest of a number of important literary editions to be undertaken at the Editorial Institute, including the recently published Letters of A. E. Housman, edited by Institute Co-director, Archie Burnett, and an edition in eleven volumes of the writings of the Victorian lawyer and controversialist James Fitzjames Stephen, of which Christopher Ricks and Frances Whistler of the Editorial Institute are General Editors.

3. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen: A Selected Edition (11 volumes)

To be published by Oxford University Press

Thanks to the generosity of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Editorial Institute is home to a major edition of a Victorian writer who has never been substantially edited until now. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen was a judge, a codifier and historian of the law, and a prolific essayist and reviewer: his short General View of the Criminal Law of England presented the first textbook account of its subject, and his 3-volume History of the Criminal Law of England its first comprehensive history, while his polemical Liberty, Equality, Fraternity remains of great interest as the most effective contemporary attack on J. S. Mill’s arguments in On Liberty. In his essays he wrote with remarkable authority on such matters as slavery, capital punishment, and criminal responsibility, but also on contemporary French and English fiction, church and state, history, liberalism, India, and America.

The eleven volumes of the Selected Edition, which for the first time brings together Stephen’s major writings and important essays and journalism in authoritative texts with scholarly annotation, will involve scholars worldwide as well as enabling student participation in the research. It will be published by Oxford University Press.

The edition is being overseen by Christopher Ricks and Frances Whistler as its Directors of Publication. The following scholars are on its Advisory Board:

Rosemary Ashton (University College London)
Stefan Collini (Cambridge University)
Bryan A. Garner (editor-in-chief of Black’s Law Dictionary)
Tony Honoré (Oxford University)
H. J. Jackson (University of Toronto)
Robert Morrison (Queen’s University, Ontario)
Lisa Rodensky (Wellesley College)
Alan Ryan (Oxford University)
David Seipp (Boston University; on the board of the American Society for Legal History)
A. W. Brian Simpson (University of Michigan)
Quentin Skinner (Cambridge University)

The volumes

A General View of the Criminal Law of England (1863, revised 1890)
Editor: K. J. M. Smith, Cardiff University, author of James Fitzjames Stephen: Portrait of a Victorian Rationalist (1988).

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873, revised 1874)
Editor: Roger Kimball, Managing Editor of The New Criterion and editor of Walter Bagehot: Physics and Politics (Ivan R. Dee, 2000).

A History of the Criminal Law of England (1883); three volumes
Editor: Jula Hughes, Faculty of Law, University of New Brunswick.

The Story of Nuncomar and the Impeachment of Sir Elijah Impey (1885)
Editor: Lisa Rodensky, Wellesley College, author of The Crime in Mind (OUP, 2003).

The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1895), by his brother Leslie Stephen
Introduction: Hermione Lee, Oxford University. Editor: Christopher Tolley, Winchester College.

Essay volumes:

On the Novel and Journalism
Editor: Christopher Ricks.

On Justice and Jurisprudence
Editors: Michael Lobban, Queen Mary College, University of London, and Paul Mitchell, Kings College London.

On Society, Religion, and Politics
Editor: Thomas E. Schneider, Boston University. Advisory Editor: Alan Ryan, Oxford University, co-editor of The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought (1987).

On History and Empire
Editor: Sandra den Otter, Department of History, Queen's University, Ontario.

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