Robert Hirst's “Simple Idea”: A Brief Appreciation of Plain Text

Scholarly editing is quiet work. It takes place behind the scenes, while emerging critical discourses and daring rhetorical interventions take center stage. Lately it has been conflated with left-or-right politics, burdened by demands for equity and more democratic, less authoritative conceptions of texts. Meanwhile, Robert Hirst has been hard at work curating the world's largest collection of Mark Twain manuscripts and editing every word the author wrote. His labors have not only served Twain scholars but also quietly maintained the art of scholarly editing for nearly a half century.The opportunity to sing the praises of a scholar like Hirst, whose infinitely curious, scrupulous, and creative editorial labors span the past half century of tumultuous change in the humanities, is welcome to someone like me, a full-time editor at the Mark Twain Papers and Project. It is an opportunity to ignore fashion and to celebrate, finally, the slow and patient labor, the courage and innovation that a scholarly editor contributes to the ongoing (one hopes) investigation of America's cultural history and literary inheritance. Among the various contributions Hirst has made to Twain studies and scholarly editing, I limit myself to one that I believe editors and readers may take for granted.In a 1994 lecture-turned-essay titled “Editing Mark Twain, Hand to Hand ‘Like All D–—d Fool Printers,’” Robert Hirst discusses a “simple idea”: “the idea that Clemens’ letter manuscripts are permeated by typographical signs and conventions, even though the letters themselves were never intended for publication.”1 At bottom, the idea was simple, but its implications and consequences were not. The implications were that we couldn't fully understand what Clemens wrote down without understanding the influence that the visual language and formal properties of typesetting had on him from his early adolescence. In the author's mind, a double-underscored word or phrase meant small caps; a line of asterisks between paragraphs was a printer's convention, not a whimsical manuscript gesture; and various types of cancellations were meant to be read in various ways and had to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis and with great care. The consequences of this idea were huge, necessitating that manuscripts be transcribed not only as they appeared in the source document, but also as Mark Twain understood them. How the handwritten signs existed in the mind of the author, not just the way we see them in a manuscript letter, was how they must be represented in an edited text.This simple idea evolved into a comprehensive method for the typographic representation of Mark Twain's manuscripts and, most importantly, what the manuscripts mean. The method would be called “plain text.” Aside from getting readers into the author's head, plain text made an even more fundamental contribution to the legibility and thus accessibility of letter texts. Edited in the decade preceding Hirst's stewardship of the Mark Twain Project, the three volumes of Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals (1975–79) rendered cancellations with angle brackets (i.e., <cancelled>) and up-down arrows for insertions (i.e., ↑inserted↓). To the editors’ credit, these were the prevailing typographic symbols used for the diplomatic transcription of nineteenth-century manuscripts in the 1970s. Yet, like so many other scholars, Hirst wasn't satisfied with these cryptic renditions, which were so divorced from anyone's experience of writing with pen and paper, and he was one of the few to propose an alternative transcription method after he became the director of the Mark Twain Papers and Project in the early 1980s. Beginning with Mark Twain's Letters, Volume 1 (1988), the plain-text method made letter texts more legible to every reader, in the first place, by adopting graphic signs that were derived from the manuscripts themselves: strikethroughs for cancellations and flanking carets for insertions (i.e., ^inserted^). Today, we expect to see this type of markup in the texts of manuscripts, but in 1988 it was an argument against the editorial status quo.Plain text's typographic renditions of manuscripted phenomena became the basic instruments of a transcriptive toolkit that evolves to this day. Plain text has developed into a system of rules for rendering various emphases marks, rules and ornaments, writing instruments and formats (pen, pencil, typewriter, and telegraph), as well as the nuances of mere self-correction and significant self-revision. Renditions in plain text help readers understand the kind of writer Mark Twain really was: what shaped his mind, how his mind worked, and thus how his writings came to be what they are. Plain text undoubtedly requires interpretation on the part of the editor but its goal is precision based on evidence. More archivally than hermeneutically driven, it demands interpretation deeply informed by historical research. In short, it makes transcription a scholar's art. The clear benefit for readers, meanwhile, is that they have a legible and comprehensible text of a document.Proof of plain text's utility for editors lies in the six published volumes of letters and the ongoing effort of their transcription and publication on Mark Twain Project Online <marktwainproject.org>. Further proof can be seen in the fact that plain text has been taken up and customized for use by other editorial projects, such as The Letters of Henry James (2006–present). Plain text is one of the very few well-defined and sustainable transcription methods used for the editing of literary-historical documents.Aside from his contributions to Mark Twain scholarship and appreciation in general, plain text is a significant part of Hirst's legacy as one of the most significant and influential twentieth-century editors of nineteenth-century American literature. I champion it now in Hirst's honor because it is a fairly quiet part of his legacy, one of those major innovations that has faded into the background as everyone eventually caught up with it in some form. Meanwhile, the system grows and evolves as the editing of Mark Twain continues, changing with the author's changing material context and writing habits. And so it will continue as Hirst intended, for as long as the editing of everything Mark Twain wrote continues, undoubtedly with the high standards, courage, and imagination that Hirst established as precedent.