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The Curious Power of Punctuation
Do you know the first sentence of “Pride and Prejudice”? You probably think you do, but I bet you don’t. The answer is “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Did you remember to put in the commas?
What are those commas doing there, anyway? By modern usage, they should mark off a non-restrictive clause, but they don’t. Nor are they marking items in a series or natural pauses in speech. Did Jane Austen even write them? Probably not. Judging by her few surviving manuscripts, Austen didn’t much use commas (or paragraphs). She used dashes.
Here is a passage from the manuscript of her last finished novel, “Persuasion”:
“To see you, cried he, in the midst of those who could not be my well-wishers, to see your Cousin close by you—conversing & smiling—& feel all the horrible Eligibilities & Proprieties of the Match!—to consider it as the certain wish of every being who could hope to influence you—even, if your own feelings were reluctant, or indifferent—to consider what powerful supports would be his !”
“To see you,” cried he, “in the midst of those who could not be my well-wishers, to see your cousin close by you, conversing and smiling, and feel all the horrible eligibilities and proprieties of the match! To consider it as the certain wish of every being who could hope to influence you! Even if your own feelings were reluctant or indifferent, to consider what powerful supports would be his!”
And so on. The published version replaces five dashes and three ampersands, and lowercases four capitalized nouns. It sounds more like Austen, but maybe Austen really sounded like Virginia Woolf.
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Austen must have made some of these revisions herself, but it is believed that the grammar and punctuation in her later novels were cleaned up by a man named William Gifford, who was an editor at Austen’s publisher, John Murray. (“Pride and Prejudice” was an early novel, published by a different house.) Which might mean that the polished, quasi-epigrammatic sentences we find so Austenian may not be sentences Austen actually wrote.
Florence Hazrat, the author of “On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World” (Basic), would wish to point out that the difference for the reader in these two versions of “Persuasion” is entirely a function of the punctuation. Change dashes to commas, smooth out the prose, and the whole Austen experience is altered. What was pell-mell and excited becomes thoughtful and decorous.
Hazrat’s book is a history of punctuation—or some punctuation, since it barely mentions the apostrophe, the serial comma, or quotation marks. “On the Mark” is a “the X that changed the world” book, which is a popular genre. Its claim is that “the history of punctuation is the history of humanity.”