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“Seraph of Heaven”: A Shelleyan Dream in Hardy's Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Phyllis Bartlett
Phyllis Bartlett*
Affiliation:
Queens College, Flushing, N. Y.
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Extract

In 1866 Hardy bought a small volume published the year before in “The Cottage Library” series at Halifax called Queen Mab and Other Poems by Percy B. Shelley. The “other poems” are “Alastor,” “The Revolt of Islam,” and “Prometheus Unbound.” This book is now in the possession of Frederick B. Adams, Jr., who has most kindly allowed me to copy the numerous markings Hardy made in the text of “The Revolt of Islam” and “Prometheus Unbound.” Under Hardy's autograph, address, and the date “1866” on the title-page is the following inscription written by Sir James Barrie in 1933: “This Shelley and another volume like it were given to me by Mrs Hardy after Τ H's death. In his early days when he was in an architect's office (Blomfields) in Adelphi Terrace he carried these two books in his pockets and often read them aloud and discoursed on them to [sic] the other clerks. All the linings and marks on them were made by him in those days.” “Another volume like it” suggests a matching selection from Shelley's lyrics, but such a book has not come to light and Mr. Adams thinks that the other volume Barrie referred to was the Swinburne that Hardy is known to have carried about with him at the same time.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 70 , Issue 4-Part-1 , September 1955 , pp. 624 - 635
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1955

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References

Note 1 in page 624 I am indebted to Carl J. Weber for directing me to Mr. Adams.

Note 2 in page 624 Rutland, Thomas Hardy, A Study of his Writings and their Background (Oxford: Black-well, 1938), pp. 14–15; Weber, Hardy of Wessex, His Life and Literary Career (New York, 1940), p. 244.

Note 3 in page 624 For further connections between Shelley and Hardy, see my article, “Hardy's Shelley,” K-SJ, 1955.

Note 4 in page 625 Not published in book form during Hardy's life. See Carl J. Weber, “Hardy's Lost Novel,” introd. to An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935); Rutland, pp. 111–133.

Note 5 in page 626 From “When the lamp is shattered.” Elfride sang this song in A Pair of Blue Eyes (iii). The heading to Ch. xviii in that novel is from “Islam” (vi.xx.7).

Note 6 in page 626 Throughout this article Hardy's quotations from Shelley arc left uncorrected.

Note 7 in page 627 Other quotations for descriptive purposes not mentioned in my text are: Indiscretion, ii.7, “Islam,” vi.xxxi.1–2; Far from the Madding Crowd, xliv, “Ode to the West Wind,” l. 3; Well-Beloved, li, “PU,” iv.289.

Note 8 in page 628 Academy, li quoted by Rutland, p. 32.

Note 9 in page 628 viii.ix.6. Shelley had used the same phrase earlier for the Power of Evil, “Islam,” i.xxvii.3. Hardy's attachment to it is further shown in Mr. Adams' Max Gate copy of The Tragedies of Æschylus, Bonn's Classical Library. On p. 8 Hardy underlined the following phrase in “Prometheus,” “But it was not once only that my mother Themis, and Terra, a single person with many titles, had forewarned me of the way in which the future would be accomplished.” In the margin he pencilled, “Cf. Shelley—One shape of many names'.”

Note 10 in page 628 “Islam,” v.xxxix.3, vii.iii.2–4; “PXJ,” i.258, iv.400. Cf. Tess, xx: Tess appeared to Angel Clare as “a whole sex condensed into one typical form.”

Note 11 in page 629 “On ‘The Well-Beloved’,” The Academy, 27 March 1897, in Life and Art by Thomas Hardy (New York: Greenberg, 1925), pp. 133–134.

Note 12 in page 630 “Epipsychidion,” ll. 267–288; cf. Weber, Hardy of Wessex, p. 139.

Note 13 in page 631 The most arresting passage in “An Imaginative Woman” is Hardy's description of the kind of poetry Trewe wrote, for it is remarkably like his own.

Note 14 in page 633 iv. v; “Epip.,” ll. 190–191, 21–22. She quotes out of sequence.

Note 15 in page 634 Edward Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London, 1886), ii, 338; Mrs. Julian Marshall, The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (London, 1889), i, 301.

Note 16 in page 635 Marshall, ii, 163.