The copy of “Weighed and Wanting” is furnished by me to the “Cottage Hearth Magazine” of Boston, United States. And this American periodical is authorized to publish the same.

George MacDonald.

The triple decker book edition was published by Sampson Low late in 1882, probably in December as soon as the U.K. serialization was completed. (The first review of the book appeared in late November.) As mentioned in the introduction to Castle Warlock, the same publishing players were involved. Exactly as we saw with Castle Warlock, the Table of Contents varies significantly, with many differently-titled and combined chapters—60 chapters in the U.S. edition, 58 in the U.K. The text of the two editions, however, is almost identical except for U.S. spellings and punctuational changes.

The second sentence of the U.K. Sampson Low edition of Weighed and Wanting, for example, reads, “The sky and the sea were almost of the same colour…” The U.S. Lothrop edition changes colour to color.

Six sentences later, the U.K. “…to the labour-weary…” is changed in the U.S. edition to labor weary—including the spelling change and omitting the hyphen.

Obviously these are tiny changes. But there are other oddities and irregularities as well. Skipping ahead to the very end of the book, the last sentence of the U.K. edition, which reads, “…the woman who spends her strength on the poor…” is changed in the U.S. edition to, “…the woman who spends her strength for the poor…”

How many more such small word substitutions might there be is anyone’s guess. And given the sequence of publications for Warlock, on the other hand, if the U.S. edition of Weighed and Wanting came first, it may be the U.K. edition that was “changed.”

I have noted elsewhere the inconsistent use of capitalizations, both between U.K. and U.S. editions, sometimes because of the apparent need U.S. publishers felt to capitalize God and Jesus pronouns, but also resulting from MacDonald’s own varying usages. (This is a particularly fascinating case, MacDonald himself once insisting to a publisher that not so much as a single capital letter was to be changed. Yet alongside his insistence that every Capital or lower-case letter use mattered, must be placed his own inconsistent use of capitals visible throughout his books. That is, unless these inconsistencies are not his at all, but are the result of publisher changes!)

The following sentence occurs in the U.K. triple decker of Weighed and Wanting: “…her thoughts kept rising to him whose thought was the meaning of all she saw, the centre and citadel of its loveliness.”

It is changed in the U.S. edition to, “…her thoughts kept rising to Him whose thought was the meaning of all she saw, the center and citadel of its loveliness.”

Even the changes, however, are not made with complete consistency. Notwithstanding the examples noted, color and labor and center and neighbor, etc. are not consistently changed from U.K. spellings—colour, labour, centre, and neighbour exist throughout the U.S. Lothrop edition too.

These spelling and punctuational distinctions and inconsistencies exist in all MacDonald’s titles. Most of them are so infinitesimal as not to be worth mentioning. I mention them here as illustrating how imperfect is the science of trying to analyze MacDonald’s texts for uniformity. Irregularities are intrinsic to publishing—which itself is an inexact science.