George A. Newman’s A Miserable Revenge survives in a 480-page, numbered manuscript held in the Ruth and Lowell Toliver Collection of Newman Family Papers at James Madison University. Several pages are missing from this manuscript, and a handful of others have incurred damage that made portions of the pages unreadable (see, for example, the facsimile of the final page of the manuscript, among the most heavily damaged pages, reproduced on page 285 of this edition). Where parts of the novel are missing, we have indicated the number of missing pages using curly brackets.
The manuscript presented us with several additional editorial challenges, in large part because it had received little to no editorial intervention after its initial composition. Because the original manuscript is available digitally through James Madison University, we sought to make our edition of the novel as reader-friendly as possible. Those interested in the finer details of the manuscript can access the original online for comparison. Our approach meant standardizing the manuscript’s many fascinating quirks. For example, the original contains very little punctuation; we added this where it was necessary to sort out what we determined was Newman’s intended meaning. We also corrected the misuse of punctuation (for example, an inconsistent use of apostrophes for possessives and contractions, and an inconsistent use of single and double quotation marks). We did the same with Newman’s inconsistent capitalization of words and formatting of other textual elements (like decorative section breaks, letters, and notes, which feature prominently in the novel’s narrative). We have standardized the formatting of these letters—often, though not always, indented in the original manuscript—and represented them in italics to offset them from the primary text. Words that were underlined in Newman’s manuscript are also represented in italics; we removed emphasis only in the rare cases where retaining it might cause confusion. When spelling was clearly incorrect or inconsistent, we sought to standardize this; we did the same with Newman’s unusual use of compound words (for example, “every thing” and “grave yard”) and place names (“Harpers-ferry,” “Rock-bridge Alum”). In a few cases where additional words or parts of words were needed for the passage to be comprehensible, we added material in square brackets. When we encountered damaged pages and had enough context to speculate as to what words might have been in the missing sections, we added these in curly brackets. For other cases when errors were present and we did not make changes, we added [sic] to note the error was in the original.
Newman’s use of paragraph breaks was inconsistent and occasionally difficult to determine due to the spacing of his handwriting. In a very few cases, we added paragraph breaks where his original paragraphs were unusually long and wide-ranging. We maintained antiquated spellings and word usage, as well as a number of stylistic conventions that were common at the time the novel was written. These include introducing speech and speaker in one paragraph and beginning a new paragraph with the speech itself, and the frequent use of em dashes and blanks, though they are sometimes difficult to tell apart in the original manuscript. We have elected to use em dashes when a thought or dialogue is interrupted, and blanks when a word appears to be spoken by a character or the narrator but is intentionally kept hidden from the reader. Newman used an antiquated punctuation mark, the obelus (÷), with some frequency in the early part of the manuscript. We maintained this mark in our edition, with a footnote to explain what appears to be its intended usage, and with the addition of contemporary punctuation for the sake of readability. When Newman uses obscure words or unexpected punctuation—such as (?) to indicate irony, duplicity, or pretense—we have provided explanatory footnotes.
Character names also presented a couple of minor problems. Early in the manuscript, Newman spells Ella’s last name Armistead, but he soon shifts to Armstead and remains consistent throughout the remainder of the novel. We used Armstead throughout. Sowers was occasionally written as Sower, which we corrected. Dr. Maltby presented a stranger challenge. After his introduction, Dr. Maltby is given the name Robert in chapter 13. However, in chapter 14, Newman begins referring to him as “William Maltby,” and does so consistently thereafter. Because the novel’s hero is also named William and one of its principal villains is named Wilson (which Newman also mistakenly rendered as William on one occasion), portions of the novel featuring these characters together become especially confusing. To ensure that readers can follow these sections, we corrected Wilson’s name when it was misrendered, and used the name Robert for Dr. Maltby throughout the text.
The reader will also encounter a significant use of dialect in the manuscript. Dialect remains a complicated subject in nineteenth-century literature, and it has historically been used as a signifier of racial difference and education in a manner that can dehumanize non-white characters. Newman clearly intended for his enslaved characters to use dialect in their speech, and their speech is represented differently from both the freeborn Black character George and the novel’s many white characters. However, in the manuscript, the speech of Newman’s white characters also occasionally contains grammatical errors (verb tense or number agreement, in particular). Correcting the speech of his white characters while leaving his enslaved characters speaking dialect struck us as problematically reinforcing the white supremacist politics of nineteenth-century dialect literature. Additionally, it is entirely possible that Newman intended for all of his characters to speak in variations of dialect appropriate to the Shenandoah Valley in the 1850s. Because of this, we maintained grammatical errors of this kind if they appeared within character dialogue and did not include [sic] to indicate an error. In a few rare cases where grammatical errors within dialogue impeded readability and seemed highly unlikely to be intended to indicate dialect, we have marked our corrections with square brackets or footnotes.
Readers should also be advised that the novel features racial epithets and demeaning language. In some cases—particularly with anti-Black language—Newman places this in the speech of his white, slave-holding characters, indicating their complicity in Virginia’s slave economy and the white supremacist ideology that underwrote it. However, Newman also uses language that demeans Indigenous people in both the novel and his essays, which reflects common negative stereotypes during the period. One character, masquerading as an Irishman, also exhibits a host of exaggerated stereotypes meant to be comic, but now widely recognized as part of an anti-immigrant, xenophobic sensibility that permeated nineteenth-century America. We have used footnotes to identify such stereotypes and racial epithets.
Newman read widely and adapted many literary themes and references in A Miserable Revenge. He quotes extensively from British poets, American humorists, and others, and he makes several references to the Bible and to classical history and literature. We have included explanatory footnotes that show Newman operating in dialogue with literary figures like Shakespeare and Robert Burns and engaging with historical events. Newman’s novel weaves in these literary references with a commitment to place—namely, the region of his early childhood. Newman uses many historic sites in and around Winchester, Virginia, as settings for the action of his novel, and his descriptions are so precise that many actual sites (even the Sowers estate and mill) can be confidently located. We have attempted, wherever possible, to provide footnotes for such local sites and features of interest. Overall, in our editorial approach, our goal has been to highlight and preserve Newman’s stylistic innovations and eccentricities alongside his grounding in the literary and regional realities of his time, while making these varied aspects of the novel as accessible as possible for the contemporary reader.
