What happened to Harriet’s exclamation marks?

Harriet Smith is seventeen and easily delighted. When she discovers that she and Robert Martin have birthdays a fortnight and a day apart, the first edition lets her say so the way a seventeen-year-old would:

“just a fortnight and a day’s difference! which is very odd!”

By 1833, when Richard Bentley reprinted Emma for the first time — in a single volume — she had calmed down considerably:

“just a fortnight and a day’s difference; which is very odd.”

That isn’t a one-off. In Chapter IV alone, Harriet has fourteen exclamation marks in 1815. Bentley keeps seven, and later editions, including Macmillan’s illustrated edition of 1896, followed Bentley’s text. The ones that go are her reactions: her delight at the coincidence, her horror that Mr. Martin might wait until he is “thirty years old!”, the little gasp in “Oh! yes”. What survives is mostly Harriet describing other people, not Harriet feeling things.

Read the later version and she seems a little dull. Read 1815 and she’s bubbly, impulsive and very young, which is exactly the girl Emma thinks she can mould.

Bentley’s was also the edition that first put all three volumes of Emma between one pair of covers. Harriet lost her voice in the same edition that lost the volume breaks.

This edition gives Harriet her exclamation marks back.