Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexBell
Would you really read Walpole's book in its original version, using 'the long s'? It's in the Internet Archive.
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It wouldn't bother me to do so; I'd regard that more as typography than spelling, and it was commonplace as late as authors such as Austen. But equally, I wouldn't deliberately choose an edition that used a long s over one that didn't. I'm not that much of a "purist"
. I do, however, have a strong preference when reading an author such as Austen to retain early 19th century spellings such as (to pick two random examples) "chuse" and "clew", because that's the way the English language was used then. For that same reason, I would not personally wish to change either of the examples in your original post.