AN EDITOR REFLECTS

A page of pesky footnotes, from volume XVIII.

And so, with all the research done and all the text in, two important tasks remain for the VCH editor before we can kiss our work goodbye and send it away for critical scrutiny. Both involve reading, re-reading, and re-reading again.

               The first involves checking for consistency and uniformity. Some of the almost quarter-million words, inevitably, will have misbehaved, their spelling garbled, presented in the wrong order or disagreeing with each other. Or they will have rebelled against the book of house rules which our VCH masters lay down. Footnotes are the most disobedient, forgetting to end with a full stop, putting commas in the wrong place, not leaving spaces properly, turning the wrong words into italics. And there are some 6,000 of the blighters. But the text can be unruly too – disagreeing over where the ford at Christian Malford was, how to spell Bayntun, what Tytherton means. All these little conflicts have to be adjudicated and if they can’t be resolved, politely fudged.

               I’m still not good at it, but I learnt the craft (and he is not to blame for my shortcomings) at the feet of – or rather sitting alongside the keyboard of – Douglas Crowley, who edited VCH Wiltshire for his entire career (he has just turned 80). He knew all about putting commas in footnote references, the uses of ibid., the difference between f. (folio), m. (membrane) and rot. (rotulet), where to put a space in a TNA reference, and other academic curiosities. We even, famously, once discussed over lunch the possibility of identifying an italic full stop. And (don’t tell anyone) he explained how to insult a fellow scholar in a footnote – the most damning word, he told me, was ‘unsound’ – and I think he used it once in vol. XIV. Oh and Roman numerals, don’t get me started.

               So, over and over, one reads, trying to make everything flow, all prolixities docked (as someone once said), inconsistencies banished, and all the notes in the right order (to misquote Morecambe and Wise). It’s not perfect yet, and never will be, but it is improving, and I hope that most of its shortcomings now will only offend the pedant.

               So that is one task. The other is very different – to write the introduction. If we imagine them as grains of sand, all those facts and figures that my fellow-researchers and I have so lovingly garnered, then my task (like William Blake) is to see in them a world – in this case a Chippenham-centred world. Recent VCH red books (for the last two decades or so) have treated introductions as a kind of summary of the book’s detailed contents, an hors d’oeuvre to serve up to the prospective reader, so as to prepare them for the main course. So the introduction has to pull out from the text that it precedes all that is most significant, characteristic and influential about the area being studied. To change the metaphor, it is a kind of artform (if that’s not too pretentious) rather like creating a mosaic out of tesserae, or a pointillist painting. Not an art, perhaps, but more of a craft, and no less worthy for that.

               I relish this kind of challenge, and twice before I have been allowed to indulge myself in it (Wilts XVIII, Glos XIII). I was encouraged by a former VCH general editor, John Beckett, who sent me a copy of a recent East Riding volume and told me to try to emulate its introduction. I’m still not particularly good at it, but I did thoroughly enjoy myself. Writing VCH text can feel like struggling in a strait jacket, stringing together precise, pedestrian sentences. But writing the introduction is liberation of a sort, let loose to try to see the wood for all those trees. And, more importantly, trying to infect the reader with one’s own enthusiasm for the places we’ve been studying over the last decade. Most important of all, it is trying to do justice to all the expertise and hard work that my wonderful colleagues have contributed to the project, and the support that we have all received from our friends, trustees, archivists, librarians, curators and supporters. So thank you, everyone!!

By John Chandler