"I WILL NOT HAVE MY WORDS MISCONSTRUED": THE TEXT OF "OUR MUTUAL FRIEND"

In the Norton Critical edition of Bleak House, Ford and Monod claim to find, by means of a "word-by-word comparison" of the first edition with the Charles Dickens edition, 462 differences (p. 807) -- though the phrase "word-by-word" suggests that they too may be overlooking matters of punctuation, spelling, and capitalization. [...]other changes make the reader's task more difficult; the comma added after the first word in the phrase "Not, gold, not silver, not bank notes" is clearly unacceptable, for example (419.37 ), and will require emendation. 4 The vast majority of the changes with respect to commas are neither commendable nor deplorable, altering meaning only slightly; 42 of these are commas added after the ejaculation "Oh," for example. In all such cases -- and, in fact, in all cases where the reading in the Charles Dickens edition does not make the reader's interpretive task overly difficult -- I retain the reading of the 1868 copytext. 5 After commas, the largest number of punctuation variants concern hyphenation. [...]a list, including all emendations, has never, I think, been published in an edition of Dickens -- certainly not in a paperback. 5.5 In almost all cases, the manuscript supports my position where I emend the 1868 reading and restore the reading of the first edition.