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Latest comment: 26 days ago10 comments2 people in discussion
My name is Heidi and I am employed and paid hourly by the Harold B. Lee Library at BYU to edit Wikipedia. My supervisor is Rachel Helps (BYU) and I will be drawing upon the library's Louisa May Alcott collection as I expand this article. I've decided to work on this one because in its current state it has very little in the way of plot or background. I'm going to expand the plot and add sections that include publication history, background, and themes. Feel free to join me or ask questions—I'd love to collaborate together! P.S. My COI declarations are on my userpage. Heidi Pusey BYU (talk) 18:43, 26 July 2024 (UTC)Reply
@ Rachel Helps (BYU) I'm still researching for the themes and working on the reception section, but I thought I'd add the background/publication and plot sections in the meantime. When you have time, could you look over what I have so far? Or you can wait until I add the other sections. Heidi Pusey BYU (talk) 22:22, 12 August 2024 (UTC)Reply
Heidi Pusey BYU, yes, I would be glad to. Here are my notes:
Background section
a very interesting section! I learned a lot!
whoa, she wrote so hard she paralyzed her thumb? Is impression paper a kind of carbon paper? I would like a wikilink to Carbon paper if it is.
I remember that Alcott knew Thoreau in real life, so it makes sense that she would base a character on him. Did she also know Harriet Tubman in real life?
Does Work support or contradict the ideas in "The Public Function of Women" (does industrialization decrease Christie's domestic labor)? Depending on what you find, it might make sense to include a deeper discussion in the themes section.
what is the [sic] referring to in "To My Mother, Whose Life [sic] has been a long labor of love."?
go ahead an write a topic sentence for the first paragraph explaining how the work on the novel was broken up into several intense writing sessions over ten years.
were the Eytinge illustrations done for the book version, or were they part of the serial version?
"In 1875 Sampson Low published Beginning Again. Being a Continuation of Work, which consists of the last eleven chapters of the Roberts Brothers edition." - I need a little more information here (which maybe you don't have). Is there any indication why the last eleven chapters were published alone? Was the beginning of the novel weak?
Plot section
"When he proposes, she refuses because he is patronizing." It seems like it would be more NPOV to say that she perceived his proposal as patronizing. Maybe there's a different way to say it, like, he didn't see her as an equal? You know the story, so you can figure out if that would make sense.
Shades of eugenics in the Helen story... I'm curious if that will come up in the themes section later.
When Christie contemplates suicide, is she on the brink of homelessness? That seems like a significant causal factor.
End of the third paragraph: does Christie return to the Sterling household? cliffhanger!
"A year after the American Civil War begins" - does this indicate that some time has passed in the novel? Or is the American Civil War ongoing during the whole novel?
Thank you! I just did the "[sic]" to indicate that's how Alcott did the capitalization (in case someone coming in to copy edit thinks it's a typing error). Do you think it's unnecessary? If so, I can take it out. I'm not sure why Sampson Low published the book in two volumes; I haven't come across much besides the bare fact, but perhaps I could find something else with a bit more digging. Several reviewers did consider the first part of the novel weak because it is so episodic (which will come up in the reception section), but it hasn't been related to the existence of two different volumes in the British edition.
Hmmm. Your question about the use of [sic] led me to the Manual of Style (MOS). MOS:SIC says that "insignificant spelling and typographic errors should simply be silently corrected". So I think you could take out that [sic] and modernize the capitalization, based on MOS:CONFORM, which says "Formatting and other purely typographical elements of quoted text[m] should be adapted to English Wikipedia's conventions without comment, provided that doing so will not change or obscure meaning or intent of the text."
I know that it was a common practice in the 19th century to publish long novels in multiple volumes (to make binding easier). For example, North and South (Gaskell novel) was published in two volumes. Gaskell added two chapters to her novel when it was published as a book. Was there any mention of Alcott changing the text between the serialized version and the book publication? Maybe that would explain the renaming of the publication of the second volume (like if it had extra material). Something to look for as you write the other sections of the page. Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 17:45, 13 August 2024 (UTC)Reply
Okay. I'll go ahead and modernize it, then. There wasn't any mention of Alcott changing the text in the things I read, but I could specially look into it. Heidi Pusey BYU (talk) 17:56, 13 August 2024 (UTC)Reply
Rachel Helps (BYU), I can't find anything directly explaining why Sampson Low published the book in two volumes, but I found a general explanation as to why publishers broke books into multiple volumes, here and here. Would it be considered original research if I wrote something like, "In 1875 Sampson Low published Beginning Again, a Continuation of Work, which consists of the last eleven chapters of the Roberts Brothers edition. It was common practice for British publishers to break a novel into two or more volumes for publication"? I would use these websites to support it. Heidi Pusey BYU (talk) 19:03, 13 August 2024 (UTC)Reply
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