Overly active editors

I perceive editorship as a very responsible job. But it does annoy me when an editor, no doubt with the best of intentions, believes that he can present the author to the reader better than the author himself did.

I'm not talking about such obvious examples as The Picture of Dorian Gray. There, at least, the editor could argue that without his deletions both Oscar Wilde and himself might have ended up in gaol (although even so it would have been decent to consult the changes with the author, instead of simply making them).

There are less conspicuous, but no less irritating approaches. I've recently read What's Wrong with the World by G. K. Chesterton. In my opinion one of his best non-fiction books, but unfortunately the edition I downloaded was an American one - with American spellings. Seeing things like color in a text by Chesterton seemed as inappropriate as colour would be in a text by Mark Twain. Why on earth 'translate English into English'? Did the editor think his audience was stupid enough to mistake the original spellings for typographical errors and blame the publisher for sloppy work?

This particular case is the more ridiculous as, for instance, they kept the expression public school, with the meaning it has in England. Not that I would have it otherwise. Ian Rankin complained in one interview that when his books were published in the US, his Scottish hero, while remaining in Edinburgh, didn't talk about a car's boot, but about its trunk and so on. I get the shivers when I imagine Trainspotting still happening in Leith, but 'translated' into Cockney, lest Londoners found it hard to understand.

Not that today's British editors are guiltless. Take the 21st-century edition of The History of Mr. Polly I bought to replace the one I had given to a friend. In an introductory note the editor admits he made changes like omitting the full stop after titles (so Mr. Polly himself becomes Mr Polly), reducing hyphenation (for instance today for to-day), and so on, the idea being 'to make the text more accessible to the reader'. I find it hard to imagine a reader who can enjoy this particular kind of old tale, yet prefers replacing the endearing quaintness of the old orthography with something 'more accessible'.

In short, I dread the day when Alan Breck asks David Balfour 'And hey, dude, am I not a cool fighter?'