Capitalization of "wretch"

[domenic]

"Wretch" is inconsistently capitalized in Ward.

It's mostly un-capitalized through Shadow 5.8. (However, there are exceptions, such as Shadow 5.4.)

Starting in Shadow 5.9, it's mostly capitalized. However, there are many exceptions; eyeballing the search results, I would guess 30 or so.

There doesn't appear to be a pattern. For example, you could imagine that when used as a proper name, it's capitalized, and otherwise it's not. But both "the wretch" and "the Wretch" are often seen, even in later chapters. There is one instance of "Wretch" (no "the") in Pitch 6.6, but it appears to be the exception, and probably should be fixed.

I'm unsure whether this shift in capitalization represents a narratively-significant change in how Victoria thinks, or an author style update that wasn't back-applied to earlier chapters, or what.

A few options are:

• Always un-capitalize. This generally fits better with English grammar, since it's not a proper name, and is often prefixed with "the".

• Always capitalize. I.e., treat "the Wretch" is an entity whose proper name somehow includes a lowercase "the". This might best preserve authorial intent if we assume that "the Wretch" is the intended name throughout, and the author just never went back and corrected earlier instances.

• Enforce capitalization after 5.8, fixing the ~30 un-capitalized instances. The idea here would be that the capitalization represents a narratively-significant shift in how Victoria thinks of the wretch/Wretch, and we assume that instances where it got left as lowercase later in the book were accidents. It seems weird to use capitalization this way (i.e., it seems like it's just going to cause the reader's eyes to stumble each time, instead of making them see the Wretch as more of a named entity), but it's possible this best preserves authorial intent.