‘The Marchbanks Archive’: Editing the Marchbanks Series

In his introduction to the 1985 omnibus edition of the Marchbanks series, Robertson Davies promised to ‘equip the work of Marchbanks with what is called “a scholarly apparatus.”’ The apparatus to that volume is the closest that an ‘editor’ has come to producing a scholarly edition of Davies’ fiction. Editors have compiled selected volumes of his non-fiction, his correspondence, and his quotations, but none of his editors has attempted to play the scholarly role that the author himself so thoroughly – albeit gently – mocked in the final instalment of the Marchbanks series. Despite Davies’ evident amusement at the idea of equipping his writings with a scholarly apparatus, this essay foolishly proposes a theoretical model for a scholarly edition of the Marchbanks series.