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Editing Hardy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Robert C. Schweik  and
Michael Piret
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Extract

The Phrase “editing Hardy” encompasses a range of very different tasks: Hardy's private notebooks, for example, pose some editorial problems not at all characteristic of his correspondence, and there are similar differences in the problems involved in editing his poetry as opposed to his prose fiction. In fact, somewhere in the course of “editing Hardy” one can probably find an example of almost every major kind of problem which editors of Victorian authors are likely to confront. In the space of one essay it would be of course hopeless to attempt a detailed consideration of all the various questions Hardy's texts pose for editors; yet any discussion of editing Hardy that did not attempt to come to grips with at least some of the specific editorial problems editors face would scarcely be more than a summary account of current progress. This essay, therefore, provides a general survey of the present state of the scholarly editing of Hardy's texts, but it also includes a more detailed consideration of current theory and practice in editing Hardy's prose fiction which focuses on the question of copy-text choice and uses examples drawn from the texts of Far from the Madding Crowd to illustrate one aspect of that problem.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 9 , Spring 1981 , pp. 15 - 41
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

NOTES

1. It would be even more hopeless to attempt to enter into a consideration of other kinds of textual scholarship – e.g., descriptive bibliography, manuscript analyses, and the like – which editors must of course take into account. For a critical survey of such scholarship see Schweik's, Robert C. “Thomas Hardy: Fifty Years of Textual Scholarship” in Thomas Hardy after Fifty Years (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 135–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Of more recent textual scholarship not directly related to editing Hardy, two studies are of sufficient importance to warrant mention here. In his fine essay, “Hardy the Creator: Far from the Madding Crowd” – published in Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy, ed. Kramer, Dale (London: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 74–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar – Simon Gatrell has called attention to previously unnoticed sequences of temporary foliation almost completely hidden in the gutter margin of the bound manuscript of Far from the Madding Crowd. This evidence not only helped Gatrell to throw new light on the composition of that novel, but Gatrell's discovery will certainly prompt scholars to look more closely for such hidden temporary foliation in other manuscripts. For example, such temporary foliation sequences, previously unnoticed, are visible in the gutter margin of the manuscript of A Pair of Blue Eyes now in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. A second study of particular importance for editors of Hardy is Laird's, J. T. “New Light on the Evolution of Tess of the d'ur-bervilles,” Review of English Studies, 31 (1980), 414–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Laird discovered that the serial version of Tess which was published in the Sydney Mail in 25 weekly parts from 4 July to 26 Dec. 1891 escaped the bowdlerization imposed on the versions published in the Graphic and elsewhere; hence, at least with respect to its substantives, it is the best witness of Hardy's intentions in those now missing portions of the manuscript of Tess which were used to set the serial version.

2. Hardy, Evelyn, ed., Thomas Hardy's Notebooks (London: Hogarth Press, 1955).Google Scholar

3. Fayen, George S. Jr, “Thomas Hardy,” Victorian Fiction: A Guide to Research (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 352.Google Scholar

4. It may be noted here that in 1976 EP Microform Ltd. published eighteen reels of microfilm of Hardy manuscripts in the Dorset County Museum, including the notebooks, the commonplace books, and the typescript of the Life; these, however, not only sometimes pose problems in legiblity but, of course, lack precisely the detailed annotation and analysis which makes the publication of sound scholarly editions of the notebooks so important.

5. Fayen, , p. 359.Google Scholar

6. Schweik, , p. 146.Google Scholar The Fayen and Schweik essays include brief surveys of the various checklists and printings of Hardy correspondence not of sufficient importance to be discussed here.

7. The publication of a Hardy letter may not imply easy accessibility even to the printed text; there is, for example, only one known copy of Hardy's letter, printed in a limited edition of about 300 copies, in appeal for canteens for French soldiers in 1918. Cf. Purdy, Richard Little, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 209.Google Scholar

8. For a brief survey of the kinds of textual information which have come to light since the publication of the Purdy bibliography, see Schweik, , pp. 137–38.Google Scholar

9. Later “Library” and “Greenwood” impressions of the Wessex Edition, while lacking the original frontispieces, can contain some revisions which Hardy sent to Macmillan in 1920 and 1926 – although not all revisions Hardy desired were incorporated in those printings and his marked copies of the Wessex Edition, now in the Dorset County Museum, contain notes for textual changes never incorporated in any impression. But, considering the revisions they do contain, the “Library” and “Greenwood” impressions have a claim to be at least as authoritative as the earlier “Wessex” text, though anyone using them will ultimately be obliged to resort to comparison with one of the earlier impressions of the Wessex Edition to restore the occasional letters and punctuation marks which tended to drop out of the later printings due to type wear.

10. It should be added that the New Wessex Edition does make accessible some texts – e.g., uncollected short stories in the volumes edited by F. B. Pinion – which are not printed in the Wessex Edition. Neither edition, however, is complete. An account of printings of Hardy's uncollected writings is provided in the Purdy bibliography, and various special editions of Hardy's scattered uncollected works – e.g., An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress, Our Exploits at West Poley, and Hardy's “personal writings” – have been given brief critical surveys by George S. Fayen, Jr., in 1964 or by Millgate, Michael in “Thomas Hardy,” Victorian Fiction: A Second Guide to Research (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1978).Google Scholar A useful survey of the differences in apparatus and variations in the quality of editing of the volumes in the New Wessex Edition is provided in Ousby's, Ian “Hardy Editions,” Arnoldian, 6 (Summer, 1979), 15–23Google Scholar, although from his characterization of it as “a cheaply priced paperback edition” it appears that, like so many others, Ousby was unaware of the two differently paginated formats in which the New Wessex Edition is published.

11. See Johnson, H. A. T., Thomas Hardy: An Annotated Reading List (Manchester: privately printed, 1974), pp. 10–11Google Scholar, and Millgate, , pp. 309–10.Google Scholar Johnson's one-page sheet of addenda praises James Gibson's edition of Hardy's Chosen Poems, a revision Hardy made of an earlier published Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy which he prepared as a volume in the Golden Treasury series in 1916. Chosen Poems, which appeared posthumously in 1929, but then allowed by Macmillan to go out of print, has been also reedited by Puk, Francine Schapiro, Thomas Hardy's Chosen Poems (New York: Frederick Unger, 1979)Google Scholar with an appendix of some of the better-known poems that Hardy omitted; this surely constitutes the best selection of Hardy's poetry available.

12. Hardy, , The Mayor of Casterbridge, ed. Robinson, James K., Norton Critical Ediition (New York: Norton, 1977).Google Scholar The editorial procedure Robinson adopted and the results he obtained are detailed in “A Note on the Text” on p. 257.Google Scholar

13. Following the death of Juliet Grindle, Dr. Gatrell has undertaken to prepare the edition of Tess for publication.

14. The leading ideas of Gatrell's argument are also developed in his “Thomas Hardy and the Aesthetics of Punctuation,” in Essays on Thomas Hardy, ed. Smith, Anne (Edinburgh: Vision Press, 1978).Google Scholar The summary of Gatrell's argument in his thesis follows the text on pp. lxiv–cviii.

15. Hardy, , The Woodlanders, ed. Kramer, Dale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 52.Google Scholar

16. Kramer, Dale, “Revisions and Vision: Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 75 (04–05 1971), 195–230, 248–82.Google Scholar

17. The Woodlanders, ed. Kramer, , p. 36.Google Scholar

18. Prices are those cited in British Books in Print and Books in Print for 1981.Google Scholar

19. Particularly, Schweik, Robert C., “The Early Development of Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 9 (1967), 415–28Google Scholar, and Simon Gatrell's “Hardy the Creator” cited above.

20. In general, later manuscripts like those of Tess and Jude appear to be more carefully punctuated than earlier ones like A Pair of Blue Eyes and Far from the Madding Crowd.

21. Quotations from the Far from the Madding Crowd manuscript are made with the kind permission of its owner, Mr. Edwin Thorne, and the Trustees of the Thomas Hardy estate. References to leaf numbers are provided parenthetically at the end of quotations. In quotations where a punctuation mark is missing, an asterisk is inserted to call attention to the missing mark, but this device is not used to note the very frequent absence of single and double quotation marks.

22. Gatrell, Simon, “A Critical Edition of Thomas Hardy's Novel Under the Greenwood Tree” (unpublished D.Phil, thesis, Oxford, 1973), pp. xcix ff.Google Scholar

23. The Signet Library, Edinburgh, holds Hardy's marked copy of a 1900 Harper and Brothers impression of the Osgood, McIlvaine edition; this was used to set the “sixpenny edition” of Far from the Madding Crowd (London: Harper and Brothers, 1901).Google Scholar Page proof marked by Hardy for this edition is also in the Signet Library. Although Hardy's revisions for the sixpenny edition are primarily of substantives, on one aspect of its accidentals – the use of-ize rather than-ise in verb endings – he was adamantly emphatic, and his other revisions do show a pattern of directing the removal of commas from the text, though by no means so extensively as is the case with the Wessex Edition revisions.

24. Kramer, Dale, “Accidentals Revisions in the Printer's Copy for Thomas Hardy's Wessex Edition.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 71 (1977), 519.Google Scholar

25. Kramer, , p. 521.Google Scholar

26. Kramer, , p. 522.Google Scholar

27. Tanselle, G. Thomas, “The Problem of Final Authorial Intention,” Selected Studies in Bibliography (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979), pp. 310–11.Google Scholar

28. One special problem which an editor of Far from the Madding Crowd must confront is an assessment of the authority of the extensive revisions which Hardy made for the sixpenny edition (see note 23 above) which were not available to him when he revised for the Wessex Edition. Here such considerations as the history of Hardy's subsequent revisions, the context in which the revision was made, and other factors must be taken into account in each instance to help determine whether or not a given revision in the sixpenny text warrants an emendation in the copy-text.