Item 46 - Letter from Alice Walker to R. B. McKerrow

1 single sheet

2 Bankfield Lane, Southport.—Sends 3 Henry VI, Act IV, and comments on her queries.

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Transcript

2 Bankfield Lane, Southport.
5 July 1936.

Dear Dr. McKerrow,

Herewith Act IV of 3 Henry VI. Most of the fairly numerous slips concern small adjustments in names etc. that still want making in the text. There is only one thing in this act that has seri-ously disturbed me and that is finding Pope bracketed in the note at V. vii. 76. Somehow I had got the idea firmly fixed in my mind that small adjustments in wording were ignored when the collation note concerned line division. How I got this notion I can’t think. I suppose I must have seen from the Cambridge collation notes that in a similar case Pope had eliminated a syllable or a word to satisfy his own taste in the decasyllabic line and as his reading wasn’t in brackets probably assumed that his manipulation of the text didn’t matter. Ought verbal omissions, alterations etc. to be indicated in such cases? I will look back through the Cambridge notes and try to find out what fixed this conviction so firmly in my mind—but it is not worth while holding back Act IV while I do this.

Yours sincerely,
Alice Walker.

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Typed, except the signature.

Sent with MCKW A4/47.