THOMAS HARDY. His Career as a Novelist

Transcription

1 THOMAS HARDY His Career as a Novelist

2 ALSO BY MICHAEL MILLGATE The Achievement of WiIliam Faulkner The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy (co-editor) The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (editor) Thomas Hardy: A Biography Testamentary Acts: Browning, Tennyson, James, Hardy

3 THOMAS HARDY His Career as a Novelist MICHAEL MILL GATE M MACMILLAN

4 Michael Millgate 1971, 1994 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published in 1971 by The Bodley Head and Random House Reissued in 1994 with a new preface and minor corrections Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS L TD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG2l 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

5 To Robin and Bronwen

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7 CONTENTS PRELUDE The Poor Man and the Lady, 17 PART ONE: APPRENTICESHIP I. Desperate Remedies, "Ce 8axon autodidacte": A matter of Education, Under the Greenwood Tree, Bockhampton and 8t Juliot: The Exploitation of Autobiography, A Pair of Blue Eyes, 66 PART TWO: ACHIEVEMENT I. Far from the Madding Crowd, Puddletown into Weatherbury: The Genesis of We ss ex, The Hand of Ethelberta, On Native Grounds: Kegan Paul and William Barnes, The Return of the Native, 130 PART THREE: RECESSION I. The Trumpet-Major, The Uses of a Regional Past, A Laodicean, 165

8 CONTENTS 4. Hardy's Laodiceanism: Politics and Ideas, 174 S. TTPO on a TOTPer, 183 PART FOUR: RENEWAL 1. Mu Gate, "The Dorsetshire Labourer", The Mayor of Caster bridge, The Evolution ofwessex, 23S S. The Woodlanders, 249 PART FIVE: FULFILMENT 1. Tess of the d'urbervil/es, Candour in English Fiction, The Well-Beloved, Hardy and the Theatre, 308 s. Jude the Obscure, 317 AFTERWORD The End of Prose, 339 NOTES, 363 INDEX, 419

9 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Qyotations from published works of Thomas Hardy are made with the permission of Macmillan & Co. Ltd. Qyotations from Florence Emily Hardy's The Early Lift of Thomas Hardy and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy are made with the pennission of Macmillan & Co. Ltd. and of Archon Books, Hamden, Connecticut.

10 TEXTUAL NOTE Unless otherwise indicated, the 24-volume Macmillan WessexEdition (London, ) has been used throughout as the source of quotations from Hardy's novels and poems and as the basis for page references, whether in the notes or incorporated within parentheses in the text. The Wessex Edition is described in R. L. Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (London, 1954, 1968), pp Also incorporated within parentheses in the text are page references to The Early Life o/thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1928) and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1930), attributed to Hardy's second wife, Florence Emily Hardy, on their tide-pages but known to have been largely the work of Hardy himself: seer. L. Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study, pp ,

11 PREF ACE TO THE 1994 REISSUE When I first started thinking about this book, some time in 1966, I had for several years been working - biographically and textually as well as critically - on the American novelist William Faulkner. Eccentric though such a transatlantic switch may have seemed to many of my academic colleagues, especially as following hard upon a personal removal in the opposite direction, the particular transition from Faulkner to Hardy was for me natural enough. It wasn't just that I had always been 'interested' in Hardy, that Douglas Brown had been one of my Cambridge supervisors, nor even that distance from England was lending enchantment to the view. It was rather that I saw both Faulkner and Hardy as regional and, in the broadest sense, pastoral novelists who addressed to contemporary urban audiences fictions densely recuperative of a local and predominantly rural past that was at once recent and lost beyond recall. I saw them, too, as map-makers, creators of fictional worlds extending over a series of otherwise independent texts, and there were even teasing biographical similarities - including shortness of stature, unhappiness in marriage, a considerable degree of self-education, and an extreme devotion to personal privacy. I had no intention of dwelling upon these later details - I was not writing a biography and Faulkner is only briefly invoked in the book as completed - nor did they in any sense determine my choice of Hardy as a subject. But the fact that I registered them at all is indicative of the eager omnivorousness of my approach. As I said in the original preface to Career, echoing much that I had already said in the preface to The Achievement of William Faulkner, it was my ambition

12 PREF ACE TO THE 1994 REISSUE to write an essentially critical study that would nonetheless - that would centrally - incorporate whatever clarifications and illuminations might be derived from the study of Hardy's fiction 'in the context of available biographical and bibliographical knowledge and in relation to the social and intellectual milieux within which he lived and worked at various periods'. I wanted to explore all aspects of the work and life as fully as I possibly could and to achieve a partial resolution of the standard work/life dichotomy in terms of the unitary concept of a career. Specifically, I sought to ground my critical arguments and their documentation in a thorough familiarity with discoverable manuscripts, notebooks, letters, drawings, books from the Max Gate Library, etc., in public and private collections on both sides of the Atlantic. If I were bold enough to propose such a programme for myself at the present time, I should doubtless speak of the literary product as in some sense determined by the conditions and processes of its production, and in plotting the trajectory of Hardy's career I should certainly have much more to say in both general and detailed terms about the institutions of periodical and book publishing as they existed in his day and as he professionally encountered them. I should also be less openly and unhesitatingly evaluative in my observations on the novels themselves - my somewhat negative comments on The Return of the Native, for example, I can now recognize as attempted rationalizations of an essentially unidentified unease - and correspondingly less likely to structure my ideas in terms of sections confidently denominated 'Apprenticeship', 'Achievement', 'Recession', 'Renewal', and 'Fulfilment'. On the other hand, I cannot find it in myself to regret the specifically appreciative passages in several of the chapters, including those on Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d'urbervilles - my deepest instincts continue to insist that criticism must find its justification in the service of the text and not the other way around - nor am I too much dissatisfied with the way in

13 PREFACE TO THE 1994 REISSUE which the book's underlying chronological continuity works with the alternation of critical and contextualizing chapters to establish at least the principal outlines of Hardy's troubled emergence as a late-victorian novelist. Unfashionable though the chapters on the individual novels may currently seem - they scarcely seemed less so in 1971, during the prevailing if fading dominance of the New Criticism - I believe, and must trust, that the very directness of their language and critical engagement will continue to have a value for students of Hardy and, indeed, for that general audience among whom Hardy retains a position of such extraordinary preeminence. Some of the topics raised in the contextual chapters could certainly have been treated at greater length; on the other hand, several were being treated essentially for the first time, their exploratory invocation in Career constituting an implicit invitation to other scholars to embark upon wider and deeper investigations, perhaps at book length. But if there are things in Career that now seem capable of being done or said differently, I have found reassuringly little that absolutely demands to be unsaid - although it should certainly be recorded that the Hardy-Comyns Carr stage version of Far from the Madding Crowd, incorporating fragments of The Mistress of the Farm, was not permanently lost by the British Library but had only been temporarily mislaid. In this reissue, in fact, I have made only minor corrections of typographical and other errors and nowhere attempted to revise the text in point of either argument or expression. Nor have I cut back on the length of the notes by replacing identifications of actual documents with crisper references to the editions - of the Literary Notebooks, the Personal Notebooks, the Collected Letters, and so forth - in which authoritative transcriptions of those documents are now conveniently available. Given the quantity and quality of Hardy criticism and scholarship in the last two decades, there were certainly a good many points in my 1971 text at

14 PREFACE TO THE 1994 REISSUE which revisions - resulting from agreement with others or argument with my past self - could appropriately have been introduced, but it quickly became obvious that to engage in such piecemeal intervention would be to impair the historicity (so to speak) of the original without replacing it with the equivalent integrity of an entirely new work. I have therefore chosen to let the volume stand, essentially unaltered, as the product of its particular moment in the development of Hardy studies. Career has always been for me something of a favourite book. It was immensely rewarding to research and unusually satisfying to write, and it has proved altogether fortunate in its longterm consequences - in that its publication led directly to my involvement in those major Hardy projects to which so much of my subsequent career has been happily devoted. But I have always felt that for whatever reasons - its title, perhaps, or the fact that its first publishers had no established association with Hardy or Hardy studies - it has remained a little outside the mainstream of Hardy criticism, not an automatic candidate for everybody's reading list. To the simple pleasure, therefore, of seeing the book reissued, twenty-three years after the original publication, I can add the hope of its belated addition to the shelves of Hardyans who had not even known they had a space waiting to be filled. 1994

15 PREFACE This study of Thomas Hardy's career and achievement as a novelist is primarily critical in aim and emphasis: it proceeds largely in terms of independent discussions of the various novels. But my endeavour throughout has been to bring the results of scholarly research directly to bear upon the processes of analysis and evaluation-to consider Hardy's fiction in the context of available biographical and bibliographical knowledge and in relation to the social and intellectual milieux within which he lived and worked at various periods. I have been particularly concerned to explore Hardy's creation and elaboration of the fictional world of Wessex, to determine the imaginative purposes served by that world, and-by invoking actual conditions in Dorset during the nineteenth century-to examine Hardy's credentials as a "regionalist" and as a chronicler of agricultural decline. In pursuing these questions I have drawn extensively upon the rich resources of Richard L. Purdy's bibliographical study and upon material from the early reviews, from the letters and reminiscences of those who knew Hardy, and from his own letters, notebooks, and manuscripts. The limitation of the book's scope to the actual period when Hardy was writing and publishing novels has been determined by its conception not as a biography but as a study of a literary career, and by practical considerations of length; the restriction implies neither a disregard for the importance of Hardy's earlier or later years, nor an insistence upon the superiority of his prose over his verse. Hardy's letters and manuscripts are widely distributed throughout the British Isles and North America, and I should like to thank the following institutions which granted me access to materials in their possession and the members of their staffs who assisted me in my enquiries: Alderman Library, University of Virginia; Beinecke Library, Yale University; Berg Collection

16 PREFACE and Manuscript Division, New York Public Library; Bodleian Library; British Museum; Brotherton Library, Leeds University; Cambridge University Library; Colbeck Collection, University of British Columbia; Dorset County Museum; Fales Collection, New York University; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Henry E. Huntington Library; Houghton Library, Harvard University; Library of Congress; Lilly Library, Indiana University; Magdalene College, Cambridge; Miriam Lutcher Stark Library, University of Texas; National Library of Scotland; Pierpont Morgan Library; Princeton University Library; Q!teen's College, Oxford; Royal Library, Windsor Castle. My thanks are particularly due, not only for access to materials but for generous hospitality, to Mrs Elfrida Manning, Mr Edwin Thorne, the late Miss Irene Cooper Willis, and, especially, Mr Frederick B. Adams, Jr., and Professor Richard L. Purdy. I wish to thank the Trustees of the Hardy Estate for permission to make quotations from Hardy's letters and from previously unpublished materials in notebooks and manuscripts. I am also grateful to Mrs Christina Lloyd-Williams, Mrs Elfrida Manning, and Mr Alexander James for permission to quote letters by, respectively, Edward Arnold, Sir Hamo Thornycroft, and Henry James. I gladly acknowledge the gracious permission of Her Majesty The Q!teen for permission to quote from the manuscript of The Trumpet-Major in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, and the permission of the following to quote manuscript material in their possession: Mr Frederick B. Adams, Jr.; the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Manuscripts Division ofthe Library of Congress; the Dorset County Museum; Magdalene College, Cambridge; Mrs Elfrida Manning; Mr Edwin Thorne. The completion of this study has been materially assisted by the generous and sustained support of the Canada Council in the form of summer research grants and a Leave Fellowship. I should also like to express my warm appreciation of the hospitality extended to me, during the year in which the book was actually being written, by Rutherford College of the University of Kent at Canterbury, and especially by its Master and Bursar. Mrs

17 PREFACE Muriel Waring and her assistants provided cheerful and efficient typing services as, at a later date, did Mrs Freda Gough. Among the numerous friends and colleagues who helped me with particular queries and problems I should particularly like to thank Dr C. J. P. Beatty, Professor Qp.entin Bell, Mrs Shirley Doughty, Professor Leon Edel, Miss Anne Freudenberg, Mr Colin Franklin, Mr E. G. H. Kempson, Mr David Masson, Professor James B. Meriwether, Dr A. N. L. Munby, Professor Harold Orel, Miss May O'Rourke, Dr William R. Rutland, and Professor Robert C. Schweik. Mr Roger Peers and Miss Maureen Samuel, Curator and Assistant Curator of the Dorset County Museum, have been unfailingly patient and helpful during the many visits I have made to the Museum in recent years. And to Professor Richard L. Purdy I am further indebted for advice, assistance, and the constant stimulus of his scholarly example. I have profited in many ways from the opportunity to discuss Hardy with Michael Collie, Ian Gregor, and W. J. Keith; Professors Gregor and Keith both took the trouble to read and criticise drafts of individual chapters, and the latter generously allowed me to make use of the results of some of his own research. The whole manuscript received meticulous and sensitive readings from Henry Auster, Caesar BIake, and Robin Biswas, and their suggestions enormously facilitated the process of final revision. My greatest debt, however, is to my wife, Jane Millgate, from whose wise and perceptive criticism my work has benefited immeasurably at every stage from inception to completion.