Important editorial note:

The annotations on this website—candlelitscene.github.io—are a composite of both Cliffe's British and American edition annotations. You can read more about this on the Brideshead Homepage. This introduction is provided for its information on the differences between the two publications, but there is no seperate set of "American annotations" on this website!

I placed my Companion to Brideshead Revisited on the internet in August 2000. The edition I used was the one revised by Evelyn Waugh in 1959 and published by Chapman and Hall, London, in 1960. I gave little further thought to the matter of editions. It was only when I re-read part of Douglas Lane Patey’s biography of Evelyn Waugh in March 2001 that I fully realised the significance of his using what seemed to me to be the older, first edition for his quotations. In a foot-note he explained that only the first edition was sold in the United States. Professor Robert Murray Davis kindly confirmed this fact for me, and I realised that it had implications for my web-site.

I found to my amazement that readers of Brideshead in the U.S.A. could not buy the edition that Waugh himself had finally approved, and readers in Britain could not now buy the original edition! I was even more surprised that no American correspondent (and I have had a good number, to each of whom I render my thanks and my greetings) had queried my apparently quixotic numbering. They expressed their gratitude or asked for clarification, but not one complained that I seemed to be careless in such an important matter. I was touched by this generosity of spirit and resolved to do something to improve the situation.

The result is this second site. I rejected the idea of running the two editions side by side on one page, or of trying to interleave them. Keeping them separate would make the information much clearer, I thought. So here is the Companion to the American edition, entirely separate from the original version of my website.

Readers may wonder if there is much difference between the two editions of Brideshead Revisited. In one sense, there is not, and in a cursory search you might not find any difference. The story remains entirely untouched. The reason why Evelyn Waugh thought it necessary to revise the text was his growing dissatisfaction with its literary style. In later years he found the novel too lush, too decorative or ornamental in too many places. He admitted to Graham Greene and to Nancy Mitford that he was ashamed of the novel. In his Preface to the Revised Edition, which is always printed in British editions now, he puts the blame for this lushness of prose on the circumstances in which the novel was written. It was wartime, a time of austerity and bleakness when a departed period of magnificence, beauty and gracious living seemed even more attractive than it had been before the war. Moreover, he suspected that the Age of Hooper had arrived with a vengeance. A nostalgia overcame him which in later years he found repellent.

But he realised that he could not destroy the book in his rewriting of it. He knew that the more rhetorical and ornamental passages could be toned down but not eliminated. They were of the essence, required to stimulate the reader’s understanding of the background, attitudes and situations of the characters. So he actually replaced very few passages; perhaps the most significant is the description of Charles and Julia’s first night of love, and no one, I believe, can say that he improved it second time round. He corrected a few little mistakes (like the name of the red wine drunk with Rex in Paris), adopted a few alternative spellings (icon instead of eikon, for instance) and he cut a number of ornamental phrases or sentences (perhaps sixty of them) which seemed extraneous rather than organic. The two great set passages near the end of the novel (Julia’s hysterical speech and Lord Marchmain’s bed-ridden rumination), despite his and many critics’ misgivings, were altered only a little.

The American edition, published by Little, Brown and Company of Boston in 1945, is not quite the same as the first British edition of the same year. Little, Brown had their own conventions which were not the same as those of Chapman and Hall in London, and one or two entirely unfamiliar Britishisms were altered; for example, the consul in Fez calls Kurt ‘a bad lot’ rather than ‘a bad hat’. For some reason a coffered ceiling at Brideshead becomes ‘a tricky ceiling’. But in general the two editions are the same.

Little, Brown appear to have refused to print the revised edition of 1960. Opinion in the United States, they thought, was firmly in favour of the original text. In this view they were amply justified. The novel with all its sweetness intact has never lost its charm for American readers, and it attracts more admirers every year. There are not a few British readers with knowledge of the first edition who wish it was still generally available in Britain, myself among them. O.K., it has purple passages; so what? Tastes may change again. These passages help to evoke in a special way an age and a society which has all but disappeared now.

I have of course kept entirely to the American edition of Brideshead Revisited for this website. Some of my entries in the original Companion (which is still extant on my British site, of course) have had to be modified or eliminated for the American edition, and I have also had to make a few additions. It may be that I have misjudged the comprehensibility of some obscure British references which remain unexplained in the American Companion; please let me know if this is the case and I will attempt better elucidation.

The page numbers refer to the Little, Brown edition of the novel. You have probably seen the paperback cover on the first page of this site, along with a representation of the first edition’s dust-cover. I have naturally used the book and chapter divisions of this edition; it has the two-book plan used in 1945 in both Britain and the U.S. (The 1960 revised version divides the novel into three books.)

I use only three abbreviations :

ALL A Little Learning, Evelyn Waugh’s autobiography which goes up to the time when he was a schoolmaster and therefore gives an account of his Oxford days in the 1920s.
BR Brideshead Revisited
EW Evelyn Waugh

All other books and people I mention in full.

I have not changed my text to take account of American spelling or usage. Indeed I have changed as little as possible from the British edition. Firstly, the novel is the work of a recognisably British writer, and when Little, Brown published it they kept to British spelling conventions; and secondly, my own style is, I believe, characteristically English and I do not think myself capable of suddenly acquiring a convincing American manner. I did think of using an American spelling and grammar check to help me make such changes, but I realised (realized!) that the result would be a mid-Atlantic mish-mash of no conceivable conviction for anybody.