T. C. Croker's Researches in the South of Ireland (1824)

Editorial Notes

Source

This edition is based on the digitised version available at CELT online and edited in the light of PDF and text versions available at Google Books at the Internet Archive [online; all accessed 8.11.2010.]

Note on editions

While the Google and Gutenberg versions are based on copies of the 1824 edition, the CELT edition is based on the Irish University Press facsimile of 1969 with an introduction by Kevin Danaher (not reproduced therein). All text versions - as distinct from photograph .pdfs - are inclined to faults due to scanning and related OCR error, and the elimination of these is an arduous task for any editor.
The CELT version, though sound in the main, shows several faults including the wholesale omission of page two (p.2) of the original and the renumeration of the pages without taking account of this loss. Footnotes are accuratedly supplied - though the geneological charts are not produced in either graphic or in table format as in the original - while, arguably, the use of Java software to bring up each footnote in a fixed-scale new window is an instance of technological overkill, given the limited benefit to the reader relative to the loss to this copyist or another like him.
These peculiarities alone justify a new internet edition, just as they necessitate a return to the originals, whether in book-form or in the equally reliable for of .pdf supplied by Google Google Books via Internet Archive. In editing the current version I have simply copy-proofed the CELT version in the light of the last-named.
Pagination in the CELT edition is broadly correct excepting the first three pages, as stated. Page-breaks are indicated using a horizontal rule - with the corresponding page-number from top-of-page in the original attached. This occasions line breaks which register the location of the same in the original though without justifying the broken line at the end-of-page.
Probably the oddest vagary of the CELT edition is the interpolation of an unrelated book title in the text - viz.

Walter Thornbury, Old and New London: A Narrative of its History, its People and its Places. Illustrated with Numerous Engravings from the Most Authentic Sources. Volume 6 London, New York, Cassell, Peter & Galpin (1872-78)

at p.114. Needless to say - given the anachronism - this is no part of Croker’s original or any practically related text.
Some further vagaries of that edition are: the occasional omission of italics and the occasional substitution of underlining for italics in the original; the insertion of numbered indents at the start of any verse stanza, whether prefaced to or inserted in the body of a chapter. This appears to have arisen from the intermediary use of a word-processor, as the survival of some remnants of MS Word style-sheet codes embedded in the source-text reveals.

Ricorso editing notes

In the present edition, occasional notes are listed numberically per chapter and given at the end, in place of the foot-of-page format with asterisks, &c. for reference, used in the original. Footnotes are linked to their proper place in the text by means of the consecutive numbers in square brackets - the seeries beginning again with [1] in each chapter where notes occur. Page-numbers in the original 1824 edition and all facsimiles of it are indicated here by double-bows {} with the appropriate page number inserted - e.g., {3}.
In the original edition and facsimiles of the same, however, the page-numbers appear at top-of-page, left and right, with a short title proper to the chapter in question; here the bracket marking a page break contains the number of the page now concluding rather than that of the page now beginning. This is in conformity with the general rule in RICORSO and, of course, the majority practice with modern academic publishers.
I have retained double quotations for all quoted materials, using single inverted commas for quotes within quotes. The longer quotations that form a single paragraph have been indented, contrary to the style of the original. For visual (or arbitrary?) reasons, I have change all instances of ;” to ”; - though I have not treated commas similarly. Where titles of printed texts are cited as such, I have italicised them for bibliographical consistency.
In view of the scale of the text, the whole has been divided 14 successive files, each linked forwards and backwards in a footer, and with a prominent link to the table of contents of Researches from within each file. For purposes of whole-text searching, a single-file version (666KB) is supplied as an attachment. [BS - Nov. 2010.]

Postscript: Returning to this "edition" in October 2016, I found it lacking the appendix which is supplied in the Internet Archive edition, though not in CELT. Otherwise, the present copy is flawed by the omission of footnotes and by the occurrence of numerous broken html links - chiefly those relating to the footnotes give in Java windows in the CELT edition and not easily excavated in the Internet Archive edition. All this betokens more work in the future! [BS - Oct. 2016.]