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All textual materials are numbered and interleaved, magazine and newspaper articles usually by date of publication, letters and postcards strictly by the dates on which they were written. For the correspondence, the names of the writer and the recipient are then given (and the notation “Postcard” where it is applicable). Item numbers of the Whitman letters are those of the Ingram Poe Collection, which is described in my book John Henry Ingram's Poe Collection at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1960). Mrs. Whitman addressed all of her letters from Providence, Rhode Island, and her address is given only once; after his first letter, Ingram's address is given only when it is not that of his previous letter.
I have made every effort to reproduce the materials as their authors wrote them. Establishing the texts of John Ingram's letters presented many problems. He wrote with a stub pen on both sides of very thin pages, and the black ink frequently bled through, obscuring the obverses. Over the years many of the pages have crumbled at their edges, making it difficult if not impossible to read exactly what he wrote. In some cases I have supplied educated guesses at what I thought he intended to write, but these are always enclosed in square brackets. Mrs. Whitman's letters offered their particular difficulties too. She was wildly inconsistent in using or omitting the ordinary, expected marks of punctuation, but she was consistent in misspelling several words: received, weird, separate, and enemies. She often opened a quotation with its mark but forgot to close it, and she occasionally used double quotation marks within double marks or misplaced them. These obvious errors I have silently corrected, in addition to other changes detailed below that I felt clarity required.
In both sides of the correspondence I have silently corrected and regularized the spelling of all proper names. When either writer used an opening initial or wrote only the initials of a person and I thought there was any chance of misunderstanding, I have supplied the missing letters in brackets. Superscripts are written out but abbreviations are retained [page xxiii:] and periods supplied. Full titles of magazines and newspapers and of published and therefore known works are corrected and regularized, but the writers’ short titles are retained when it is clear what magazine or book they refer to. Variant spellings (American versus British) have not been regularized, and individual variations have been retained, as in Mrs. Whitman's shifting back and forth in using i's and e's to begin enclose, entrust, or enquiry. Ingram's spelling of Lotos and Mrs. Whitman's variant Lotus are preserved in the case of William Fearing Gill's book Lotos Leaves.
I have lightly regularized punctuation within sentences and silently supplied missing terminal marks and opening capital letters. Both writers vacillated between underlining and quoting (or not marking) titles of works; I have regularized these. Also, as he himself admitted, Ingram underscored for emphasis far too much. I have retained (as italics) only the emphases that seemed reasonable and (when it was possible to determine) that were not added by Mrs. Whitman or Ingram as they read and reread the letters.
Capitalization has been modernized and correct dates supplied whenever possible. Inadvertent repetitions, such as “Had I been wealthy, long ere this I’d have properly have investigated the whole subject,” are silently corrected.
All editorial interpolations are enclosed in square brackets; authorial insertions in quotations are enclosed in ornamental brackets. Ellipsis points have been modernized. Long quotations in the letters are printed as extracts.
Neither writer paid much attention to paragraphing, Ingram especially feeling that the large amounts he paid for transatlantic postage justified using all possible space available. Occasionally, when the subjects discussed obviously switched and the new one was carried on for some length, I have arbitrarily broken the discourse into paragraphs, but I did not do so with many of the brief reportings of details.
I have reproduced surviving enclosures in the letters that have direct bearings on matters concerning Poe, Mrs. Whitman, or Ingram. When these enclosures were holograph letters, I have printed them as written, without regularization; the same procedure is employed in letters reproduced in the notes. Nonpertinent enclosures are listed and described in my 1960 book.
The magazine and newspaper articles are reprinted verbatim except for the modernization of ellipses and the numbering of footnotes. Typographical errors in these articles are silently corrected.
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Notes:
In preparing this text for online presentation as XHTML/CSS, a number of mostly minor changes have been adopted. In the original printing, the introductory sections were rendered as fully justified text (with left and right edges aligned), but the letters as left-aligned (with a ragged right edge). That inconsistency seemed to offer not particular advantage, and thus all text has been rendered as fully justifed. Textual errors in the original printing have been corrected by the addition of material in double square brackets. Rather that resorting to the use of smaller type, block quotations have been indented. Slight inconsistencies in formatting in the book form, such as the indentation of the first entry heading, have been normalized. In the printed version, a number of items appear on the same line, with one element being left justified and the other right justified. (An example of such formatting is for most of the letter salutations and dates. That choice saves a bit of space in a printed book, but does not work well in XHTML, and these elements have consequently been presented on separate lines. Endline hyphenation has not been retained, and where a word breaks across pages, that word has been given in its full form and pushed back to the prior page. Because footnote marks in the text have been rendered as numbers with parentheses, the occassional use of that format in the text has been altered to use square brackets.
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[S:1 - PHR, 1979] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Poe's Helen Remembers (J. C. Miller) (Editorial Method)