The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy

Rosemarie Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317041283
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy, some of the most prominent Hardy specialists working today offer an overview of Hardy scholarship and suggest new directions in Hardy studies. The contributors cover virtually every area relevant to Hardy's fiction and poetry, including philosophy, palaeontology, biography, science, film, popular culture, beliefs, gender, music, masculinity, tragedy, topography, psychology, metaphysics, illustration, bibliographical studies and contemporary response. While several collections have surveyed the Hardy landscape, no previous volume has been composed especially for scholars and advanced graduate students. This companion is specially designed to aid original research on Hardy and serve as the critical basis for Hardy studies in the new millennium. Among the features are a comprehensive bibliography that includes not only works in English but, in acknowledgment of Hardy's explosion in popularity around the world, also works in languages other than English.

PART I
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES

1

Hardy Bibliographies

Charles P. C. Pettit

Richard L. Purdy’s magisterial Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study is the outstanding Hardy primary bibliography, towering over all other publications in the field.1 Moreover, more than fifty years after its first publication in 1954, ‘Purdy’ may be described without exaggeration as the bedrock underlying over half a century of Hardy scholarship. It is as difficult to overestimate the importance of the Bibliographical Study in Hardy studies as it is to point to other examples of scholarly works of its era which maintain a comparable influence today.2 Much of this survey will focus on the particular qualities and achievement of Purdy’s magnum opus. In order to assess it in context I will take a chronological approach, beginning by surveying Purdy’s predecessors and concluding with a consideration of more recent primary bibliographies.

Early Bibliographies

The earliest Hardy bibliographies were not published separately. A number of writers of book-length works on Hardy evidently felt that a rounded assessment of his achievement required the inclusion of a bibliography, even if this entailed obtaining the services of another hand. The earliest production of any substance was John Lane’s ‘Thomas Hardy: A Bibliography’, which formed a separately paginated 46 page supplement to Lionel Johnson’s The Art of Thomas Hardy (1894), one of the very first book-length critical appreciations of Hardy to be published.3 At this early date, even before the end of Hardy’s novel-writing career, it was feasible for Lane to aim at comprehensive coverage of all Hardy’s published writings, though to accomplish his ambitious brief in so few pages, the details provided of each edition are limited. However, the coverage is impressive, including not just the first book editions of the novels and short stories, but their periodical appearances (where relevant) and, most notably, all subsequent UK editions (though US editions are not included). Hardy’s non-fictional contributions to periodicals are also listed, and there is a short secondary bibliography.

While the inclusion of a bibliography was by no means universal in early books about Hardy, Johnson’s lead was followed by many other writers, though none were as substantial as Lane’s work for his volume. Wilkinson Sherren, in The Wessex of Romance (1902)4 featured an eight-page bibliography on much the same lines as Lane’s work for Johnson, again covering UK editions.5 F. Outwin Saxelby’s A Thomas Hardy Dictionary (1911)6 incorporates up-to-date systematic bibliographical lists, including dates of reprints of the recent Macmillan Pocket Editions, contributions to periodicals and a secondary bibliography of books and articles. The bibliography in F. A. Hedgcock’s Thomas Hardy: Penseur et Artiste (1911)7 is rather briefer and is mainly notable (appropriately) for its list of French translations of Hardy’s novels. Harold Child, in his Thomas Hardy (1916) adopted Johnson’s approach, and includes a bibliography by another hand. Whether in response to wartime publishing constraints or to the increasing number of new editions and reprints of Hardy’s works, Arundell Esdaile’s approach was avowedly less ambitious than that of many of his predecessors. Entitling his section ‘A Short Bibliography of Thomas Hardy’s Principal Works’, Esdaile explicitly ‘takes no account of editions intermediate between the first in volume form and collected definitive editions, nor of stories, articles, etc., which the author has not reprinted’. On the other hand, his seven pages include an early ‘American Bibliography’, though this selective listing excludes ‘cheap reprints’.8

The year 1916 also saw Hardy bibliography come of age with the publication of the first two book-length Hardy bibliographies. However, Henry Danielson’s The First Editions of the Writings of Thomas Hardy and Their Values: A Bibliographical Handbook for Collectors, Booksellers, Librarians and Others, despite its separate publication in hard covers, was actually rather slighter than Lane’s contribution to Johnson’s 1894 book, and comprised only forty pages.9 A. P. Webb’s 128-page A Bibliography of the Works of Thomas Hardy 1865–1915 is far more substantial, and is the most significant achievement in the field before Purdy.10 What both these volumes have in common is a shift in focus from bibliography as a part of the assessment of Hardy’s literary achievement to bibliography as a tool for book collectors. This focus is explicit in Danielson’s title (he accordingly includes both the original selling price and the estimated current second-hand value) while Webb’s Introduction states that his publisher ‘desired a book which would appeal primarily to the First Edition collector’. Nevertheless, both authors also had other aims that were both more ambitious and more scholarly. According to a promotional piece in Danielson’s book, he was preparing a full-scale Hardy bibliography covering the years 1865–1916; this ambitious undertaking was also to have included such items as ‘Full Collations of many Hundreds of Reprints and Reissues’, ‘Variant Readings’ and ‘A Comprehensive Bibliography of Hardy Criticism’. However, it was never published. Webb succeeded in combining the collector’s approach required by his publisher with material to appeal to ‘the literary student who will find, I believe, a complete catalogue of the writer’s works’. It is presumably for the assistance of the ‘literary student’ that Webb, like Lane before him, combines his primary bibliography with secondary entries, including lengthy sections on ‘Critical Notices, Essays and Appreciations’ in both books and periodicals. Webb includes a fairly full collation of Hardy’s publications, plus binding data, and gives full bibliographical treatment to the Osgood, McIlvaine edition as well as to the first editions, though like Danielson he completely omits ‘later editions’.

Webb’s work was the last substantial bibliographical work to appear prior to Purdy. By the time the revised version of Johnson’s The Art of Thomas Hardy was issued in 1923, with a chapter on Hardy’s poetry by J. E. Barton (Johnson having died in 1902),11 Lane was finding that ‘bibliography has now become an exact science and altogether too exacting for a busy publisher personally to undertake’, and so the bibliography in this edition, while expanded to cover 1865–1922, is far more restricted in its scope than that in the first edition. It is now essentially a bibliography of first editions, though Lane notes the location of some manuscripts and lists all the poems in Hardy’s volumes.

This, then, was the state of Hardy primary bibliography when Purdy came on the scene, only five years after the publication of Lane’s second bibliography. In describing these predecessors in his Preface to the Bibliographical Study as ‘inadequate and obviously incomplete’ Purdy may appear somewhat harsh, but he was being no more than just. These early bibliographies encapsulate much painstaking hard work and in some cases attempt to cover types of publications that Purdy would omit, such as subsequent editions, translations and of course secondary works. Lane and Webb, in particular, give a valuable picture of editions of Hardy’s works, and published materials about that work, up to the time of their publication. However, none of these predecessors even aspire to Purdy’s comprehensiveness or depth; in particular, none shed significant light on the composition of Hardy’s works or on their road to publication.

Purdy

Composition and Reception: Its Unique Qualities

Although the Bibliographical Study was first published in 1954, its origins lie in the years immediately following Hardy’s death in January 1928. Working with impressive speed, the 24-year-old Purdy prepared a memorial exhibition of Hardy first editions, autograph letters and manuscripts at Yale University Library in only three months. He both assembled all the exhibits and compiled a catalogue of the exhibition which already displayed his extensive knowledge of Hardy and which may be seen as the embryo of the bibliography.12 This catalogue formed a means of introduction to Florence Hardy, whom he met at Max Gate in the following year. In the summer of 1930 Purdy formally requested permission to compile the bibliography, and in February 1931 a letter from him appeared in The Times Literary Supplement stating that he had been authorized by Hardy’s literary executors, Florence Hardy and Sydney Cockerell, to prepare ‘the definitive bibliography of Mr. Hardy’s work’, and asking for information to be sent to him.13 It would appear that he felt ready for publication in the late 1930s, but the Second World War made publication impossible. When Purdy contacted prospective publishers again from 1944 onwards, trying Constable and Macmillan as well as Oxford University Press, the response was that publishing conditions still did not allow them to consider publishing a book that was so specialized and so technically demanding, even though they recognized its quality. A few years more elapsed before publishing conditions had improved sufficiently for Oxford University Press to be able to agree to publication. So despite its later classic status, the bibliography had a long and troubled passage to publication.

But if the road to publication was unexpectedly difficult, the book’s stature and its particular characteristics were recognized from the first. Michael Sadleir wrote in The Library that ‘this book fulfils its purpose so completely that critical comment, beyond straightforward recommendation, is virtually superfluous’. He writes of the ‘thoroughness, the perception, almost the second sight’ with which Purdy deals with the biographical elements. Frederick B. Adams, Jr. described it as a ‘virtually flawless book’ and drew attention to how much it gained from access to ‘unpublished papers and private sources’ and from ‘years of fruitful conversation with Cockerell and with the second Mrs Hardy’. The review in the TLS stated that Purdy had provided ‘not only a definitive bibliography of Hardy, but a model for future bibliographers of writers of the century between 1850 and 1950’.14 If such appreciations are a testimony both to the quality of Purdy’s work and to the perceptiveness of these eminent reviewers, it is remarkable that the passing of over half a century has caused no diminution in the esteem in which the book is held. In books published over the last few years it continues to be praised in such terms as ‘exemplary’ and ‘indispensable and definitive’,15 and to be included routinely in lists of key sources, so that ‘Purdy’ is a ubiquitous reference citation in Hardy criticism.

Purdy was himself a great Hardy collector (following his death in 1990, his important collection of books and manuscripts was bequeathed to Yale University’s Beinecke Library)16 and his detailed and authoritative treatment of first ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• A Note about the Bibliography
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Bibliographical Studies
• Part II Historical and Cultural Context
• Part III An Early Literary Influence and a Late Topographical Construct
• Part IV Bodies of Knowledge and Belief
• Part V Critical Approaches
• Part VI Genre and Case Studies
• Part VII Illustrators and Biographers
• Part VIII The Millennium: Sage Writers in Tribute to Their Muse
• Thomas Hardy Bibliography
• Index