←Menu of Letters of George Moore

Throughout his life, George Moore addressed thousands of letters to family, friends, business associates, and the editors of newspapers. The letters were variously handwritten, typed by secretaries, and some were printed.

Each letter on GMi has a unique URL. A WordPress page (light text on dark background) identifies and explains the letter, and facilitates navigation. An embedded Google Doc (dark text on light background) has my transcription of the letter.

My transcriptions are “medium fidelity” rather than diplomatic. They are intended to make letters useful to more people, not replace the primary source materials.

To enhance readability and searchability, I standardized layout, added paragraph breaks, emended illegible handwriting, typos, and careless spelling errors. I bracketed text that I inserted and omitted non-textual elements.

Letters are listed on cascading menus in chronological order by decade, then by year, then listed by calendar date and recipient. When possible I dated undated letters based on internal or contextual evidence.

In the heading of each WordPress page, my standardized numerical date format is year-month-day (0000-00-00) when the full date is known; year-month (0000-00) when the day is unknown; and year-period (0000-early) when both month and day are unknown. Within my transcriptions the date is as written by George Moore but often with bracketed insertions for clarity.

To preserve narrative flow, I do not chop up letters with footnotes; instead I place explanatory notes above and hyperlinks within each letter as needed.

See the page Editing Letters for a discussion of how I and others transcribe letters.