You’ve Read the Novel (Now Read the Footnotes)

I just ran across this article from the New York Times in 2007 about an annotated version of Pride and Prejudice creatively entitled The Annotated Pride and Prejudice.  The writer strangely lumps Austen in with the Victorians, but besides that,

Footnotes in Reade’s Hard Cash (Sierra’s booknotes)

While reading Hard Cash, I was struck by how Reade used “paratext” as a space to extend the narrative. His footnotes range from slightly snide narrative asides to detailed references to historical events, terminology, or further reference texts. Below I’ve included