Why don’t literary classics have numbered-paragraph versions?

The Bible and Shakespeare have been provided with foolproof systems of citation (chapter and verse, or act, scene and line) — which makes sense, since they’re our greatest sources of literary references and quotations that people may wish to cite or look up.

Still, it’s odd that no one ever seems to have thought of providing paragraph numbers in the margins of literary classics. You wouldn’t want to have these included in every edition, of course. But a standard numbering in scholarly editions would certainly have aided literary criticism and research greatly through all the past centuries. How much easier for all if a writer could give the exact location of what’s being discussed — so that readers would not have to flip through all the pages of a fat Dickens chapter, for example. 

Today, of course, the classics are increasingly available online, so that their text is searchable — but computer text searches still don’t provide the kind of search clarity that paragraph numbering would allow. A Pride and Prejudice critic might have noted that toward the end of Chapter number so-and-so, Elizabeth finds Darcy particularly irritating. To find that area, you’d still have to hunt for “Darcy” through several pages — and even then you might not be sure you’d found the reference. How much handier if a critic could mention that this occurs in Chapter so-and-so, paragraphs 390 and 411-15.

Another quibble with this suggestion might be that paragraphing is not always standard. But in many — probably most — classics, it is, indeed.

Why hasn’t this ever been done? With online texts, it would be relatively easy to add, of course, so that even if not ever adopted in hard copy — or if hard copies become extinct — this practice could be applied online and might help writers and readers in the future.