The photo above has a story that exemplifies what bibliographical detective work can reveal.
First, I must introduce you to John Mitchell Kemble, one of my favorite Victorians. He was one of the first modern scholars of Old English — he produced the first British edition of Beowulf — and he did a lot to bring good practices to translation and interpretation. He also didn’t mince words when he thought other scholars had blundered. This, as you can imagine, didn’t do much for his career.
Kemble was effusive in talking to his friends about his latest enthusiasm, be it a fad diet or a poetic edda. Many of his friends were fellow members of a secret society known as the Cambridge Apostles, whose membership included the poet Alfred Tennyson and Arthur Hallam (the subject of Tennyson’s masterpiece In Memoriam).
In 1833, Kemble published a pamphlet entitled On English Præterites and sent it to various friends. But to his great frustration, there was a typo. Kemble must have ranted about this error with his usual passion, because Hallam wrote back assuring his friend that he would “cheerfully […] make with pencil or pen that important alteration of swylce for swylke on which the destinies of mankind may be reasonably supposed to depend.” The question is, did Hallam actually follow through?
By great good fortune, Professor Simon Keynes of Trinity College Cambridge (Kemble’s, Hallam’s, and Tennyson’s old college) owns the copy of this pamphlet that Kemble sent to Hallam. And indeed someone has made a correction in the margin! But if you’re paying close attention, you’ll notice that Hallam was slightly confused. In the printed text, Kemble was correcting an earlier scholar’s transcription of an Old English manuscript from swyke to swylce (k –> lc). However, the printers goofed and swapped the y and the l in the printed correction, thereby introducing a new error. It must have been maddening for the meticulous Kemble. I can’t tell you for sure whose handwriting adds the additional change, but my guess is Kemble did it himself before he mailed it off.
This marginal correction — five strokes of someone’s pen — reveals a story of Victorian Anglo-Saxonism, academic enthusiasm, and recognizable personality quirks.