Dickens

This repository contains transcriptions of early editions of some of the novels of Charles Dickens, including Pickwick Papers, Bleak House, David Copperfield, and several others. The transcriptions include all the paraphernalia of the original sources, including advertisements, etc.

They were apparently prepared as part of the "Documenting the American South" project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (https://docsouth.unc.edu/), though there is no link to them from the current website, nor from that of the UNC Library (which holds the original printed editions used for them in its Rare Books Collection). Or none that I have found so far anyway. They appear to be orphaned, which seems a shame.

I downloaded the XML files in November 2018, and converted them from TEI P4 to TEI P5.

The scripts I used:

• grabDickens : shell script to download the files
• p5ify : shell script to do the conversion
• Makefile : make driver creates a driver file to permit processing all the files at once; make validate validates each file against a local copy of the current release of the tei_all RNG schema

The changes I made:

• I edited the doctype statement of each file so that it referenced a local copy of the P4 teixlite.dtd used for the originals; I needed this to expand the named character entities in the files
• The stylesheet p4top5.xsl is mostly self-explanatory: it removes default attributes, changes @id to @xml:id, turns all numbered divs to unnumbered divs, wraps corr elements in a choice, and tries to sort out changes to the teiHeader

After processing all the files, I first validated them against the P5 TEI_all schema. This showed up a small number of residual problems which I fixed by hand. Check the history of the individual files to see what needed to be fixed: most of them are trivial syntactic slips or mistaggings which show up in the P4 sources as well.