Thomas Hardy. A text to be fought over. http// Tess of the d Urbervilles. Cedric Watts

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1 Running Head 1 http// Literature Insights General Editor: Charles Moseley Thomas Hardy Tess of the d Urbervilles Cedric Watts A text to be fought over

2 Publication Data Cedric Watts, 2007 The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act Published by Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE Reading Options * To use the navigation tools, the search facility, and other features of the toolbar, this Ebook should be read in default view. * To navigate through the contents use the hyperlinked Bookmarks at the left of the screen. * To search, expand the search column at the right of the screen or click on the binocular symbol in the toolbar. * For ease of reading, use <CTRL+L> to enlarge the page to full screen * Use <Esc> to return to the full menu. * Hyperlinks appear in Blue Underlined Text. To return from an internal hyperlink use the previous view button (more than once if need be). * For a computer generated reading use <View>Read out loud> Licence and permissions Purchasing this book licenses you to read this work on-screen and to print one copy for your own use. Copy and paste functions are disabled. No part of this publication may be otherwise reproduced or transmitted or distributed without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher. Making or distributing copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and would be liable to prosecution. Thank you for respecting the rights of the author. ISBN

3 Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d Urbervilles Cedric Watts Literature Insights. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007

4 Contents A note on the author 1. Preliminary Matter 1.1. Editorial Note and Acknowledgements 1.2. Abbreviations 1.3 Foreword 2. Biographical 2.1. Hardy s Progress 2.2. Personal Aspects of Tess of the d Urbervilles 3. The Composition of Tess of the d Urbervilles and its Modes of Publication 3.1. Composition and Early Publication 3.2. Subsequent Versions 4. The Opening, the Plot and the Narration 4.1. The Title, Sub-Title and Epigraph 4.2. A Plot-Summary and Its Limitations 4.3. Rape and Seduction 4.4. Characterisation 4.5. Narration 5. Themes and Contexts 5.1. Religion, Scepticism and Morality 5.2. Politics 6. Literary Aspects 6.1. Naturalism and Realism 6.2. Leitmotifs and Themes 6.3. Optical Effects and Defamiliarisation 6.4. Language 7. Rural Representation 7.1. Talbothays 7.2. Flintcomb-Ash 8. Critical Survey 8.1. Contemporaneous Responses 8.2. Subsequent Responses 9. Conclusion 10. Bibliography

5 A note on the author After service in the Royal Navy, Cedric Watts entered Cambridge University and took his BA (Class I, English), MA and PhD there. He has written seventeen critical and scholarly books, including the Penguin Critical Study, Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure, and the Humanities-Ebook, Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent. He has edited Hardy s Jude the Obscure (Broadview Press) and thirty-three other volumes. He is currently Research Professor of English at Sussex University. The epigraph, a text to be fought over, quotes Harvey s words in Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d Urbervilles, ed. Geoffrey Harvey (Cambridge: Icon, 2000), p. 116.

6 1. Preliminary Matter 1.1. Editorial Note and Acknowledgements Between its commencement in 1888 and the Macmillan reprint of 1920, Tess of the d Urbervilles underwent a complex process of evolution. Hardy made numerous changes and revisions, during which the novel s themes were enriched and subtleties increased. For the present study, I have therefore chosen as copy-text that 1920 reprint of the 1912 Wessex Edition. The scholarly Clarendon edition of the novel (Oxford University Press, 1983) and the related Oxford World s Classics edition (2005) have been consulted. Both offer a text which is an amalgam of material from different times and locations: variously the incomplete manuscript, the serial printing, and numerous revisions found in the book texts as they evolved. In my textual preference, the 1920 Macmillan version, the punctuation is sometimes lighter and sometimes heavier than in the Clarendon. This Macmillan text bore Hardy s endorsement, displays what readers saw in his lifetime, and possesses clear historical provenance. Unless otherwise indicated, then, that 1920 volume is the source of my quotations from Tess of the d Urbervilles. For the 1912 edition, Hardy changed the capitalisation of D Urberville to d Urberville, so that the title became Tess of the d Urbervilles. When quoting commentators and citing previous editions, I retain their capitalisations; otherwise I follow Hardy s later preference, d Urberville (and d Urbervilles). Works which proved very useful during the preparation of this Ebook included J. T. Laird s The Shaping of Tess of the d Urbervilles, Michael Millgate s biographies of Hardy, and, of course, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy. Works quoted in the text are (with the exception of some periodicals) listed in the Bibliography. In quotations, a row of three points (or of four to include a full stop) indicates an ellipsis already present in the quoted matter, whereas a row enclosed in square brackets indicates an omission that I have made. Square brackets also enclose editorial insertions.

7 Tess of the d Urbervilles Abbreviations The following abbreviations are used: J Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure, ed. Cedric Watts. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, L The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy (7 vols.), ed. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, LEF Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate. Oxford: Oxford University Press LN The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. Lennart A. Björk. (2 vols.) London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, LW Thomas Hardy: The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, ST J. T. Laird: The Shaping of Tess of the d Urbervilles. London: Oxford University Press, T Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d Urbervilles. London: Macmillan, 1912; rpt., TH Michael Millgate: Thomas Hardy: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

8 Tess of the d Urbervilles Foreword Tess of the d Urbervilles is predominantly realistic, but its realism blends with the poetic, the symbolic and the expressionistic; occasionally it is challenged by the melodramatic, eldritch and bizarre. Indeed, its diversity of effects includes the benign and the bitter, the lyrical and the documentary, the subtle and the blatant, the voluptuous and the didactic. Its occasional harshness mingles with sensitivity, modes of comedy, and tender compassion. Though it is a late Victorian novel, its elements of descriptive frankness and radicalism in ideas anticipate Modernism. Its treatment of sexual desire and moral injustice can still fascinate, trouble, and arouse indignation. Hardy deemed the novel his favourite, and said that he loved Tess best of all his characters. To many readers, she remains a phenomenally vital, seductive and tragic creation, irradiated by Hardy s dogged ethical integrity and his sensuously romantic sensibility. To others, her characterisation is a variable construct or a revealing product of masculine discourses. The work as a whole has remained controversial from its outset as a serial to its present-day establishment as a powerful but problematic literary classic. Nevertheless, A. Alvarez may have spoken for numerous readers when he said: Tess of the d Urbervilles is an extraordinarily beautiful book, as well as an extraordinarily moving one. Tess gave birth only to the ill-fated Sorrow, but Tess has proved fecund, generating an opera, plays, films, and an international chorus of commentators.

9 2. Biographical 2.1. Hardy s Progress Five months after his parents marriage, Thomas Hardy was born on 2 June 1840 in a thatched cottage in Higher Bockhampton, a village about three miles from Dorchester in Dorsetshire, a rural county of southern England. His father was a builder employing bricklayers. Sometimes business was bad; sometimes it prospered. He was also a smallholder, growing vegetables and fattening pigs for slaughter each autumn. Hardy s mother was a former maidservant and cook who had known poverty but retained a resilient personality, furthering her ambitions through her son. Thomas Hardy was thus born into an artisan caste (as he termed it) which was in everyday contact with the humbler workers. He believed that the Dorset Hardys had once been proud estate-owners but had gradually declined: So we go down, down, down, he reflected; and this theme of familial decline would eventually be sounded in Tess of the d Urbervilles. Indeed, the novel refers explicitly to the Hardys (p. 163) in this connection. Rural life had its traditions, pastimes and festivities, but also its poverty, squalor and hardship. Hardy saw both the harshness of the countryside and its consolations: the beauties of the natural cycle, and the pleasures of local music, whether folk-song, dances, carols or hymns. His parents were keenly musical, and Hardy became an adroit, energetic fiddler at village dances. He was also intensely moved by the hymns and rituals of Anglicanism during the family s regular attendance at Stinsford Church. As a child, he recalled of himself, to be a parson had been his dream. Later, his creation, Tess of the d Urbervilles, would reflect at a church-service that a composer wielded godlike power to lead the hearer through sequences of emotion. Hardy claimed that he could read by the age of three, encouraged by his bookloving mother. One of the great achievements of Victorian England was public education: the establishment of a nation-wide educational system and the gradual introduction of compulsory schooling. Hardy entered the local National School, an Anglican establishment, when it opened in His early reading included popular novels by Lord Lytton, poems by W. J. Mickle, and Bunyan s Pilgrim s Progress. There were

10 Tess of the d Urbervilles 10 also some volumes given to Hardy by his mother. One was John Dryden s translation of Virgil s works, which initiated his lifelong study of the classics. Another was Samuel Johnson s Rasselas, that stoically pessimistic novel which, anticipating the older Hardy, declares: Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed. Hardy subsequently attended the British School at Dorchester, which gave him a grounding in Latin and French, while providing practical exercises in mathematics and letter-writing. After his years there, he was articled (for a reduced fee of 40) to John Hicks, a local architect, to be instructed in architectural drawing and surveying. Later, in London, he became an assistant to Arthur Blomfield, a busy ecclesiastical architect. He frequently surveyed churches which were to be restored or modernised to suit Victorian tastes, and he experienced misgivings about alterations that might later be regarded as needless destruction of tradition. Eventually, he would advise the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. While working as an architectural draughtsman, Hardy pursued his study of literature and experimented with journalism, poetry and novel-writing. The late nineteenth century was a golden age for authors: the education system was producing a large popular readership, so that publishing-houses and periodicals multiplied; technological advances were reducing the production-costs of books and magazines; and the burgeoning of systematic advertising increased the viability of numerous journals and the number of best selling novels. Hardy s first published novel, Desperate Remedies, appeared in This was a luridly melodramatic suspense-narrative incorporating an explicit lesbian encounter, the concealed killing by a husband of his alcoholic wife, a mistress later masquerading as that wife, and the last-minute rescue of the heroine from a honeymoon-night with her villainous spouse. The reviews of this vivid thriller were mixed: some were hostile, but others extended high praise. The response was sufficiently encouraging for Hardy to exchange the career of a draughtsman gradually for that of a full-time fiction-writer. There followed Under the Greenwood Tree and A Pair of Blue Eyes. By the time of Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Hardy was famous and acclaimed. Sales, too, were good. The author was able to command high fees for serialisation in magazines, in addition to generous royalty-rates on his books. For The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) he was paid over 1,250, at a time when the average earnings of an adult male in England were approximately 60 a year. There followed The Return of the Native, The Trumpet-Major, A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Woodlanders.

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