Thomas Hardy and His Readers: Contradictions of the Rebellious Serial Writer
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Thomas Hardy and His Readers: Contradictions of the Rebellious Serial Writer Adelina Sánchez Espinosa The ambiguous relationship established between Thomas Hardy and his readers marked the three decades in which his career as a novelist took place. Looking into this aspect is essential if we want to fully comprehend his novels. We can approach this rapport in two different manners: one way is to attend to what Hardy himself have to say about his novels in their prefaces; the other leads us to a tracing of the differences between the serial publication of each one of the novels and their final publication in volume form. Such differences respond to Hardy's editing, revising and deleting material from the original manuscripts when it came to serial publication in family magazines followed by a persistent attempt to reconstruct his original intentions when it eventually came to the volume publications. Such cutting and pasting operations could only result in contradictory versions of the same novel, as can easily be appreciated when comparing the serial versions of his novels with the final volume versions, something we can now do thanks to the fundamental scholarship by earlier textual critics such as R.L. Purdy, F. B. Pinion and John Paterson in the 1950s and 60s and the later seminal studies by John Laird, Patricia Ingham and Rosemarie Morgan on Tess, Jude and Far respectively. All these works contrast the various versions of Hardy's novels and allow us to trace the evolution of each one of them Between, vol. VI, n. 11 (Maggio/ May 2016) Adelina Sánchez Espinosa, Thomas Hardy and His Readers from its primitive manuscript conception, through its serial publication, to the finally authorised 1912 Wessex edition1. Hardy's artistic oscillation between ripping his manuscripts (in obedience to the standards of decorum imposed by popular magazines) and rebelliously reconstructing them for volume publication has attracted ample scholarly attention. Three relevant instances of this, at three different stages in the history of Hardyan scholarship can be D. H. Lawrence's “Study of Thomas Hardy” in 1914 which referred to Hardy's contradictions as “Prédilection d'artiste”; R. P. Draper who states, in the 1970s, that, [Hardy's] instinctive sense of the falsity of conventional values asserted itself in forms that increasingly disturbed his attempts to write for the market, and particularly alarmed the editors of magazines to which Hardy sold the serial rights of his novels. (Draper 1975: 13) And Peter Widdowson who remarks in the 1990s that, Perhaps the most striking contradiction in Hardy's novel- writing career is his willingness to accommodate these pressures, to change, revise, cut suppress, to play the system for all its worth and, conversely, to produce novels which time and again reject fictional stereotypes...and which were bound to shock the Victorian moral conscience. (Widdowson 1989: 136) On the one hand, Hardy would do anything to succeed, whether or not that involved initial mutilation of his texts in order to have them accepted for serial publication. On the other, he felt an imperious need to stand his ground and defend his original themes and his convictions about the role of the novel. This was, obviously, an almost impossible feat of prestidigitation, which he, nevertheless, practiced for thirty 1 See Purdy 1954; Paterson 1960; Pinion 1968; Laird 1975; Ingham 1976; Morgan 1992. 2 Between, vol. VI, n. 11 (Maggio/May 2016) years, the time span which separates his first novel from his last one, at the turn of the century. After that he decided to devote his talent to the writing of poetry, which proved to be a much less troublesome task. The whole process is marked, as I say above, by the response of his readers. When Hardy's first novels are published, in the 1870s, conventional readership demands entertainment, melodramatic, happy ending plots and the strictest adherence to moral “decorum” which is to be expected from any prim and proper mid-Victorian writer. These were the readers who devoured instalments published every fortnight in one of the popular magazines of the times2. They were often men reading episodes out to the female members of the family well before television would replace them. Nevertheless, from the 1880s onwards Hardy starts catering also for an alternative readership, aesthetic readers who take pride in their different taste. As R. g. Cox points out in his study of the reception of Hardy’s novels, It was only as his work progressed that it became clear that he was aiming at a more intellectually advanced public, though in some respects, such as sensationalism of incident and plot development, he appeared to be influenced by popular expectations up to a late stage. (Cox 1970: xxi) Throughout the evolution of his career as a novelist, Hardy combines the elements taken from his most popular novels with others intended to simultaneously attract a more demanding audience who 2 Since the study of 19th Century serialisation and readership has already received ample scholarly attention, and given the space contraints of this article, it is not my intention to go into it here further than offering a short selection of contributions along these lines. On serialisation see, for instance, Altick 1957; 1998; Vann 1985; Hughes and Lund, 1991; Langbauer 1999; Law, 2000 and his contribution to Brake and Demoor 2009; Payne 2005 and Rodensky 2013 (particularly section II on “publishing, reading, reviewing, quoting and censoring”). On readership see Jordan and Patten 1995; glavin, 1999; Waller 2006; Rooney and Gasperini 2016. 3 Adelina Sánchez Espinosa, Thomas Hardy and His Readers would prefer quality to moral decorum. This weird ménage à trois can only be attained by writing what I have elsewhere described as “palimpsests”, i.e., texts which could aptly be read in two different ways by two different types of reader3. We, therefore, come across two different authors when we read his serialised novels and the final volume versions. Hardy can be the conventional writer who willingly submits to the expectations of an equally conventional reader. On the other hand, Hardy is also the rebel whose opposition to the established canons of late Victorian literature is intended to be received by a similarly rebellious reader, relentlessly emerging in his fiction. The evolution of this contradiction can be seen at four climatic moments represented by his four most important novels: Far from the Madding Crowd (1974), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), Jude the Obscure (1895) and The Well-Beloved (1892 & 1897). The love-hate relationship established between Hardy and his readers started with the rejection of his first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, en 1869, a novel which, according to his own words in The Life of Thomas Hardy, was exceedingly bold «the tendency of the writing being socialistic, not to say revolutionary», since it presented A sweeping dramatic satire of the squirearchy and nobility, London society, the vulgarity of the middle class, modern Christianity, church-restoration, and political and domestic morals in general. (Life : 56) 4 3 I have studied the mythological subtexts in Hardy’s novels since my MPhil and PhD dissertations at University of Birmingham (1993) and University of granada (1995), respectively. A recent publication on the novels as palimpsests is in Monnickendam and Owen 2013. 4 Although The Early Life of Thomas Hardy 1840-1891 and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy 1892-1928 were published in 1928 and 1930 respectively by Florence Emily Hardy, it is general knowledge that these works are Hardy's autobiography. All references to these two works from now on will be included in the text and abbreviated to Life. The edition used is Millgate 1984. 4 Between, vol. VI, n. 11 (Maggio/May 2016) Can we then be surprised that conservative Alexander Macmillan should have rejected it? or that george Meredith, censor for Chapman and Hall, would also refuse to publish it and advise Hardy to change direction «for if he printed so pronounced a thing he would be attacked on all sides by the conventional reviewers, and his future injured» (Life: 63)? Hardy had no way out other than follow Meredith's advice. He discarded the novel and ventured to write a second one: Desperate Remedies, published anonymously by Tinsley's Magazine in 1871. Positive reviews to the novel appeared in Athenaeum and The Morning Post but there were also negative reviews in The Spectator, which accused Hardy of immorality, advised readers against it and suggested that the writer should remain anonymous until he managed to write better novels5. Indeed some scenes in the original manuscript had had to be removed before final publication in Tinsley but even this had not been enough to fit the type of fiction Meredith had recommended. Thus, although this was the beginning of a pact with the conventional reader which would make Hardy one of the most popular writers with mass Victorian audiences, this pact was never solid, not even at this moment. Also apparently the result of this search for harmony with the conventional reader are the following two novels: Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) which define Hardy as the chronicler of rural bliss, a cliché which would set his fame and make the delights of generations of readers reaching our days. In both novels Hardy cultivated the image of the pastoral writer, as testified by their prefaces6. The preface to Under the Greenwood Tree, for instance, comments on the importance of rural traditions such as church choirs, (which explains the subtitle of the novel, The MellstoCk Quire). A Pair of 5 «we have said enough to warn our readers against this book, and, we hope, to urge the author to write far better ones» (Anonymous review in The Spectator, 22 April 1871: 481-3).