“Ethical” or “Ethnical”?: Some Textual Errors in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

Abstract

One of the most distinguished American scholars of the mid-20th century, F. O. Matthiessen was fascinated by that strange, suggestive phrase “soiled fish of the sea” in Herman Melville’s fifth novel White-Jacket. Matthiessen was so taken with the phrase that in his American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, he provided a metaphysical and detailed interpretation of the fish. The phrase turned out to be, however, a mere typographical error of “coiled fish of the sea,” the mistake that an unimaginative typesetter inadvertently created, not Melville. The renowned textual scholar Fredson Bowers demonstrates this as an apposite illustration of the extent to which textual criticism is a most important and fascinating branch of study. This scholarly episode clearly shows that it is all too easy, without a reliable text, to build a scholarly castle in the air. This particular issue related to textual criticism is, by and large, not solely applicable to classic literary works but also to what has been oxymoronically called “modern classics”. It is all too easy to forget that more recently published works are not free from typographical error and mistakes. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), inarguably one of the best-known (and most widely read) books in the United States, provides an excellent illustration of how extremely difficult it is to establish a reliable, authoritative text. First published in 1960 by J. B. Lippincott, the book has sold more than 40 million copies globally, and continues to sell more than a million copies a year and has been translated into more than 40 languages. Unfortunately, however, the novel contains a few textual errors, which have been overlooked by literary critics and scholars. The two standard texts of To Kill a Mockingbird are a hardcover 40th Anniversary edition published by HarperCollins in 1999 and a paperback Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published in 2002 by HarperCollins—including a mass market paperback edition published in 1982 by Warner Books, replaced by Hachette Book Group in 1988 and the electronic version of the text published in 2014 by HarperCollins. In Harper