The Good Soldier_ A Tale of Passion - Ford Madox Ford [20]
By far the most important change this edition makes is to follow Martin Stannard’s Norton Critical Edition in amending the first edition’s ‘Branshaw Teleragh’ to ‘Bramshaw Teleragh’ throughout the text. In his ‘Textual Appendices’, Stannard notes that ‘Bramshaw’ was Ford’s preferred spelling in the manuscript and that an error seems to have crept in between the typing up of the manuscript and the compositor’s setting of the novel from the ensuing typescript. ‘Although’, Stannard writes, ‘later consistently corrected in MS and TS to “Bramshaw Teleragh”, the compositor takes the typist’s first mistranscription as the standard and prints “Branshaw” throughout’ (p. 197). ‘One might argue that the corrupt forms [unlike this edition, Stannard also alters the name of one of Ashburnham’s tenants from “Mumford” to “Mudford”] received Ford’s tacit approval at proof stage,’ Stannard acknowledges elsewhere, ‘but it would have been wearisome (and costly) to go through the whole text altering the names… [and] there is a strong argument for removing textual corruption here as the product of external agency (the typist) and economic factors’ (p. 192).
Stannard’s argument is persuasive enough in its own right, but its strength is only fortified when we also take into account something he does not mention: that is, that Bramshaw (unlike ‘Branshaw’) is a real place in Hampshire. Parts of The Good Soldier are set in a specific area of that county, and Bramshaw is at the heart of the locality in question.
Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford1
My Dear Stella,
I have always regarded this as my best book – at any rate as the best book of mine of a pre-war period; and between its writing and the appearance of my next novel nearly ten years must have elapsed, so that whatever I may have since written may be regarded as the work of a different man – as the work of your man. For it is certain that without the incentive to live that you offered me I should scarcely have survived the war-period and it is more certain still that without your spurring me again to write I should never have written again. And it happens that, by a queer chance, The Good Soldier is almost alone amongst my books in being dedicated to no one: Fate must have elected to let it wait the ten years that it waited – for this dedication.
What I am now I owe to you: what I was when I wrote The Good Soldier I owed to the concatenation of circumstances of a rather purposeless and wayward life. Until I sat down to write this book – on the 17th December 19132 – I had never attempted to extend myself, to use a phrase of racehorse training. Partly because I had always entertained very fixedly the idea that – whatever may be the case with other writers – I at least should not be able to write a novel by which I should care to stand before reaching the age of forty; partly because I very definitely did not want to come into competition with other writers whose claim or whose need for recognition and what recognitions bring were greater than my own. I had never really tried to put into any novel of mine all that I knew about writing. I had written rather desultorily a number of books – a great number – but they had all been in the nature of pastiches, of pieces of rather precious writing, or of tours de force. But I have always been mad about writing – about the way writing should be done and partly alone, partly with the companionship of Conrad,3 I had even at that date made exhaustive studies into how words should be handled and novels constructed.
So, on the day I was forty I sat down to show what I could do – and The Good Soldier resulted. I fully intended it to be my last book. I used to think – and I do not know that I do not think the same now – that one book was enough for any man to write, and, at the date when The Good Soldier was finished, London at least