[In the following essay, Christmas suggests a correction to a misprint in Collier's best-known poem, basing his arguments in part on the poem's themes. ]

Since 1985, five full-text, modern-type editions of Mary Collier's important poem, ‘The Woman's Labour: An Epistle to Mr. Stephen Duck,’ have been published, largely in revisionist anthologies of eighteenth-century literature.¹ With the exception of Ferguson, Collier's editors appear to agree that the 1739 text, the first edition of the poem, should be considered as the copy-text.² However, there has been a great deal of confusion over the treatment of the one significant accidental that occurs in this text. Line 61 of the 1739 text reads, ‘Nay, rake and prow it in, the Case is clear;’.³ As every conscientious editor of the poem has noted, ‘prow’ does not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb. The offending word has occasioned sometimes amazing editorial speculation as to Collier's original intention. Rogers and McCarthy footnote ‘prow’ and suggest ‘pull?’, the question mark indicating their collective discomfort with their own suggestion (384). DeMaria also flags the line, and notes that ‘prow’ is ‘not in OED’ before going on to suggest ‘“plough” or “drow” (a dialectical form of “draw”) if the p is actually an upside-down d’ (945). Though they agree that ‘prow’ must be a misprint, neither Rogers and McCarthy nor DeMaria emend the text. While Thompson and Sugden also follow the 1739 text, their edition does not include annotations, and so ‘prow’ passes by without comment. Most recently Fairer and Gerrard substitute ‘prong’ for ‘prow’ and provide the following justification: ‘An emendation to “prong” is warranted by the reference in The Thresher's Labour to which Collier is responding: “And were their hands as active as their Tongues, / How nimbly then would move their Rakes and Prongs?” (Duck, 168-70)’ (258).

This emendation, I believe, is incorrect, and continues the problem of textual corruption—now all the more serious because a change in the copy-text has been sanctioned by scholarly authority and reproduced for educational purposes. The correct emendation should be ‘row’, so that the line reads: ‘Nay, rake and row it in, the Case is clear;’. This change is warranted by careful collation of the 1739 text with the last version of the poem to appear in Collier's lifetime⁴ in Poems, on Several Occasions (1762), an edition which none of Collier's editors after Ferguson appears to have consulted. In addition, ‘row’ proves the more accurate term when the full context of its appearance, the nature of Collier's response to Duck, and the poetic integrity of the line are considered together.

Despite the twenty-three year gap between publication, the 1762 text is not substantially different from its 1739 predecessor. The fact of its existence, however, requires collating it against the 1739 text in order to establish an authoritative copy-text. Samuel Johnson reminds us, with characteristic didacticism, that ‘The duty of a collator is indeed, dull, yet, like other tedious tasks, is very necessary …’.⁵ ‘The Woman's Labour’ appears as the lead poem in the 1762 volume, and constitutes a different text because it modifies and corrects the 1739 text without substantially changing its essential character. I count forty-three variations, of which thirty-four are merely typographical (italics, capitals, apostrophes, punctuation). Several of these changes have the effect of regularizing or correcting aspects of the 1739 text that were the printer's responsibility. For example, the word ‘Care’ appears as an end-rhyme six times in the poem, but is capitalized in only four instances in the 1739 text. In 1762, the printer (or Collier herself) made the capitalization of ‘Care’ consistent throughout. Of the remaining nine variants, there are five that are slight but intentional: ‘their Work’ at line 47 of the 1739 text has become ‘the Work’ in 1762; line 106 of the 1739 text reads ‘Alas! we find our Work …’ which has been changed to ‘We find again our Work …’ in 1762; ‘declare’ has become ‘describe’ in line 140; ‘not’ has become ‘nor’ in line 176; and ‘an’ has become ‘no’ in line 215. This amounts to rather light revision. The 1762 text also introduces its own corruptions: the word ‘safe’ in line 98 of the 1739 text is misprinted as ‘save’ in 1762; ‘Charing’ is misspelled as ‘Chairing’ in line 138; and ‘piece’ is likewise misspelled as ‘peice’ in line 193. The final variant appears to be a simple correction of line 61 of the 1739 text. The revised line reads, ‘Nay, rake and row it in, the Case is clear;’ in the 1762 text.⁶

It is difficult to say whether this correction, or any of the other revisions, were made by Collier or by her printer. Because there is no extant manuscript of ‘The Woman's Labour,’ it is also impossible to tell whether ‘prow’ was an authorial accidental followed by the printer, or a corruption introduced into the poem when it was brought to press. While there is no surviving evidence to help us clarify these issues, there is also no evidence that ‘prow’ was a rustic, or even regional, dialecticism of the period. Its appearance in the poem, therefore, cannot be said to serve Collier's intentions in any way.

Following the assumption that ‘prow’ is a misprint, Fairer and Gerrard build a case for emending ‘prow’ to ‘prong’ by focusing on the dialogic nature of Collier's poem. ‘The Woman's Labour’ is, amongst other things, a sometimes playful and sometimes angry reply to Duck's wholesale denigration of female agricultural labourers in his poem, ‘The Thresher's Labour’ (1730). Duck's misogyny is difficult to account for, but one of the ways he furthers his argument against female workers is by deploying references to agricultural tools along gender lines. Male labourers wield ‘Threshall[s]’ and ‘Scythes’ and sweat at their work, while the women are consistently associated with ‘Rakes and Prongs’, and, according to Duck, talk more than they work. In her response, Collier avoids direct references to tools, preferring instead to call her readers' attention to the acts of using them. This strategy serves her counter-argument that eighteenth-century women worked as hard as men in the fields. Collier's women workers are seen ‘throwing, turning, making Hay’ (8), though we are left to infer that this is accomplished with rakes and prongs (pitchforks). They also ‘rake and row’ (8) the cut grass, ‘help reap the Wheat’ (9), and ‘cut the Peas’ (11). In each case the emphasis is on the action, the work itself, not on the implement being employed. Fairer and Gerrard appear to be aware of this essential feature of Collier's poem as they suggest an emendation that seems to fulfill the spirit of Collier's rebuttal to Duck, given that prong does appear in OED as a transitive verb—‘to pierce or stab with a prong; to turn up the soil with a “prong” or fork; to fork’. But, significantly, OED provides no evidence of eighteenth-century usage; its examples date currency in the mid-nineteenth century.

By contrast, OED gives two examples of eighteenth-century usage for row under the definition ‘to arrange, put in place in a line of row’. Collier's use of the term appears within a fourteen-line section of the poem that describes the hay harvest, a passage that pointedly rebuts the following lines from Duck:

And little Labour serves to make the Hay;
Fast as 'tis cut, so kindly shines the Sun,
Turn'd once or twice, the pleasing work is done:
Next Day the Cocks appear in equal Rows,
Which the glad Master in safe Reeks bestows.

(22)

Collier's response to this brazen erasure of female labour includes a specific description of what labouring women do during the hay harvest, and uses Duck's own image of self-generating hay cocks against him: ‘And nimbly turn our Hay upon the plain: / Nay, rake and row it in, the Case is clear; / Or how should Cocks in equal rows appear?’ (8).⁷ No doubt Collier's female haymakers employed both rakes and prongs as they were involved in the process of tedding; that is, spreading the cut grass to dry in the sun before forming the rows of cocks, or small piles, that protected the hay from foul weather overnight. The work of drying the hay often continued for days until the hay was ready to be stacked in larger ricks (Duck's ‘Reeks’), or moved into the barn. Thus Collier's female haymakers were raking and rowing the hay as they followed the male mowers. Moreover, ‘row’ re-establishes the aural sense of the line—the alliterative connection between the verbs ‘rake’ and ‘row’ symbolically preserving something of the connection between the acts themselves—and we do Collier a disservice as a poet to assume that she would not, as a washer-woman, be concerned with such aesthetic issues.

An emendation to ‘row’, then, is justified on the grounds that the term results from a confirmatory reading from a later, authorized text. This is a rare occurrence in textual scholarship, and one of the only ways to verify the conjecture and guesswork often involved in textual emendation. Oddly enough, to date no editor has suggested ‘row’ for ‘prow’, perhaps because all have been thrown off by the misleading p. It turns out that ‘row’ represents not only a less intrusive, but also a more accurate emendation with regard to the related contexts of Collier's reply to Duck, and her concern in ‘The Woman's Labour’ for specifically (and poetically) representing women's essential contribution to the hay harvest.

Notes

1. A standard edition of The Woman's Labour has not yet been produced. Recent trends in eighteenth-century studies have, in effect, made a group of competing anthologists Collier's primary textual editors. To date, Collier's complete poem has appeared in the following collections discussed [above]: First Feminists: British Women Writers, 1578-1799, ed. Moira Ferguson (Bloomington and Old Westbury, 1985), 257-63; The Meridian Anthology of Early Women Writers, ed. Katharine M. Rogers and William McCarthy (New York, 1987), 382-9; The Thresher's Labour by Stephen Duck, The Woman's Labour by Mary Collier: Two Eighteenth Century Poems, ed. E. P. Thompson and Marian Sugden (London, 1989); British Literature 1640-1789, An Anthology, ed. Robert DeMaria (Oxford, 1996), 942-9; Eighteenth-Century Poetry, An Annotated Anthology, ed. David Fairer and Christine Gerrard (Oxford, 1999), 257-62.

2. Ferguson notes that she used the 1739 text as one of her ‘primary sources’ (264), yet her edition actually reproduces the 1762 text, complete with most of its corrections of the 1739 text, but also including its typographical corruptions as well. Though Ferguson's impulse to collate the two texts is correct in the main, it is difficult to discern what principles guided this process.

3. Mary Collier, The Woman's Labour: An Epistle to Mr. Stephen Duck; in Answer to his late Poem, called The Thresher's Labour (London, 1739), 8.

4. Collier's burial date has been recently established through parish records as 20 October 1762. See H. Gustav Klaus, ‘Mary Collier (1688?-1762)’, N & Q, ccxlv (2000), 202.

5. Samuel Johnson, ‘Preface to Shakespeare’, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven and London, 1968), VII, 94.

6. Mary Collier, Poems, on Several Occasions (Winchester, 1762), 8. I should note that the third edition of The Woman's Labour, which appeared in 1740, also includes this revised line, further suggesting that ‘prow’ was a printer's error that was caught well before the 1762 edition went to press. See Mary Collier. The Woman's Labour: An Epistle to Mr. Stephen Duck; in Answer to his late Poem, called The Thresher's Labour, 3rd edn (London, 1740), 8. David Foxon indicates that a second edition appeared in 1739.

7. I have also added to this passage a typographical change that appears in the 1762 text. This printer regularized the use of italics to highlight obvious references to Duck's poem.