The Personal Notebooks Thomas Hardy

THE PERSONAL NOTEBOOKS OF THOMAS HARDY THE PERSONAL NOTEBOOKS OF THOMAS HARDY with an appendix including the unpublished passages in the original typeseripts 01 THE LIFE OF THOMAS HARDY EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTIONS AND NOTES, BY Richard H. Taylor Copyright © The Trustees of the Thomas Hardy Memorial Collection 1979 Editorial matter © Richard H. Taylor 1979 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1979 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First edition 1979 Reprinted 1979 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in Delhi Dublin Hong Kong ]ohannesburg Lagos Melbaume New York Singapore Tokyo Phototypeset in Great Britain in V.I.P. Palatino by Western Printing Services Ud, Bristol British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Hardy, Thomas, b.1840 The personal notebooks of Thomas Hardy 1. Hardy, Thomas. b. 1840 I. Title 11. Taylor, Richard H. 823'.8 PR4753.A/ ISBN 978-1-349-03599-1 ISBN 978-1-349-03597-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-03597-7 This book is sold subject to the standard conditions 01 the Net Book Agreement For PAMELA and P.T. and I.H.T. Contents Acknowledgements ix INTRODUCTION xi General Xl The 'Memoranda' Notebooks xii 'Schools of Painting' Notebook xviii The 'Trumpet-Major' Notebook xx TEXTUAL INTRODUCTION xxvii 1 Physical Description xxvii 2 Principles of Transcription and Annotation xxviii 3 Editorial Conventions xxx 4 Calendar of Pagination xxxi 'MEMORANDA, I' 1 'MEMORANDA, 11' 41 'SCHOOLS OF PAINTING NOTEBOOK' 103 'TRUMPET-MAJOR NOTEBOOK' 115 Appendix: Typescript Passages Omitted from 'The Life 0/ Thomas Hardy' 187 INTRODUCTION 189 TEXTUAL INTRODUCTION 203 1 Inventory of Typeseripts and Manuscripts 203 2 Physical Description 205 3 A Note on Deletions 208 4 Original Chapter Titles 209 5 Editorial Conventions 209 IdentiEication oE the Context oE Omitted Passages 213 THE LIFE TYPESCRIPTS: THE OMIITED PASSAGES 217 ANCILLARY DOCUMENTS 288 fu~ m Acknowledgements I wish to thank the Trustees of the Hardy Estate, the Executors of the late Miss Eva Dugdale and the Trustees of the Thomas Hardy Memorial Collection for kindly granting me permission to edit and publish the material in this volume, and Mr A. D. Martin of Lloyds Bank Trust Division for his ready assistance and co-operation. I am equally grateful to the Faculty of Arts, University of Edinburgh, who extended to me special research grants in support of visits to Dor chester. At the Dorset County Museum, where I have worked extensively in the Hardy Collections, the patience, helpfulness and good humour of the Curator have helped to make such visits a delight; I am greatly indebted to Roger Peers, and I should like to offer hirn and his excellent staff my warm appreciation and thanks. My wife Pamela has been a splendidly lively support throughout the preparation of this book; her consistent interest and sense of humour have been great things and it is hard to thank her adequ ately. I also wish to record my great gratitude to Mr T. M. Farmiloe of the Macmillan Press for his enthusiastic encouragement and invari able courtesy, and to Mrs Judy Marshall for seeing a rather intricate text through the press so expertly. Special thanks are due to Profes sor Kenneth J. Fielding and Mr T. R. M. Creighton, of the Depart ment of English Literature, University of Edinburgh. Tom Creigh ton's unrivalled knowledge of, and feeling for, Hardy has informed our many conversations to very stimulating effect. Similarly, Ken neth Fielding's scholarly expertise and advice have been invaluable; I am most grateful to hirn for the detailed and generous interest he has taken in my work on this book, and for his personal kindness. Many of my friends, colleagues and students in Britain and Canada have been good enough to take an interest in this work and our friendly discussions, like those I have had with Hardyans met in Dorchester and elsewhere, have always been a happy stimulus towards its completion. For the same reason I am grateful to those who have written to me about the project, from both sides of the Atlantic, during the last few years. Finally, I am extremely grateful to the following for their kindness and courtesy in assisting my work on this book in many and varied x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ways, and it gives me greqt pleasure to thank them here: Professor J. o. Bailey, University of North Carolina; Mrs D. Bartlett; Professor Lennart Björk, University of Stockholm; Mr D. W. Blake, Head Postmaster, Dorchester, and Mr F. C. Hamblin; Dr Ivan T. Borda; Professor Harold Brooks, University of London, and Mrs Jean Brooks; Professor Kenneth Cameron, University of Nottingham; Mr Kenneth Carter, County Librarian, Dorset, and the Reference Lib rarian; Professor Peter J. Casagrande, University of Kansas; Lord David Cecil, Professor Emeritus, University of Oxford; Messrs Christies, St James's, London; Messrs J. S. and G. S. Cox; Mr Peter G. Croft; Miss Brenda Davies, Head of Information, National Film Archive; Mr Bob Dixon; Mr John Elwell; Mr Michael Fardon; Miss Diane G reenwood; Professor Ian G re gor, U niversi ty of Kent; Misses Marian, Olive and Dorothy Hudson; Major B. G. Kirby, Clerk to the Governors, Hardye's School, Dorchester; Mrs Winifred Lucas, English Place-Name Society; Professor Michael Millgate, University of Toronto; Mr Patrick Montague-Smith, Editor of Debrett; Professor N orman Page, U niversity of Alberta; Mr F. B. Pinion, formerly of the University of Sheffield; Professor Richard L. Purdy, Yale University; Mr Stanley Reed, former Director, British Film Institute; Miss Sheila Strathdee; Miss Jill Strobridge; Mr John Taylor; Mrs Phyllis Taylor; Miss Joan Walmsley; Mrs Angela West; the Revd R A. Wheeler, rector of Holy Trinity Church, Dorchester; Miss Ann Williams; Mr Reginald Williams, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum; and, by no means least, the Revd John Yates, Vicar of Haselbury Plucknett and the efficient, scholarly and convivial sec retary of the Thomas Hardy Society, for his generous helpfulness on several occasions. All those of us who work on Hardy owe a special debt of gratitude to J. O. Bailey, F. B. Pinion and R L. Purdy for their comprehensive published works, and I should like to add this to my personal thanks to them. London RH.T. June 1977 Introd uction GENERAL In one of his commonplace books Hardy noted, with implicit affini tive feeling, Diekens's anticipation of a time after his death 'when my personal dustiness shall be past the control of my love of order'. * The ironie thought must have appealed to Hardy, whose own anti cipation of that eventuality, tempered by discretion, led hirn in later years to destroy many of his notebooks and diaries, and to leave instructions (carried out by his widow) for the burning of others after his death. But there was another stimulus to these activities too. Hardy had been pained and offended by the intrusions of speculative biographers and he was driven by their attentions to a caution similarin spiritto that ofMelbury in The Woodlanders (eh. 30): 'No man so furtive for the time as the ingenuous countryman who finds that his ingenuousness has been abused.' If Hardy now developed a new furtiveness regarding his papers, that quality had much to build upon, for he had always essentially been the reticent and elusive countryman, anxious to give no more away about him self than he needed to, before or after his death. The price of having such holocausts in the garden is paid in the provocation of post humous speculation that dark secrets have gone up with the flames, and Hardy has certainly not been immune from this. But to insist upon such imaginings in the absence of any empirical evidence is to chase shadows. The bonfires probably contained nothing so stirring as we might wish to think, and are more likely to have been the product of a naturally evasive temperament surprised into exag gerated caution by biographers who had touched upon some of their subject's personal sensitivities. And after all Hardy was furtive in an ingenuous way: he left a trail of c1ues behind hirn, from easily decipherable shorthand symbols when making notes about his will to the distinctive calligraphie hand of the architect with whieh he ·'Literary Notes, I' (Dorset County Museum). Hardy takes the observation from a letter to John Forster, quoted in G. Hogarth and M. Dickens, eds The Letters of Charles Dickens (London, 1880), Vol. I, p. 191. xii THE PERSONAL NOTEBOOKS OF THOMAS HARDY rather nalvely sought to disguise his work on the Lite typescripts. It seems fair to say that he was devious by rural intuition rather than by polished calculation. But whatever the motives for Hardy's per fectly legitimate sprinkling of a little sand in the eyes of his biog raphers, we are left with one certain fact: among his own papers we have no more than he wanted us to have. Only eleven of Hardy's notebooks are extant, and of these six are commonplace books. * One notebook is in the private possession of Richard L. Purdy: it is dated 1865 and was used by Hardy to collect words and phrases from his reading to enlarge his literary vo cabulary, and was entitled by hirn 'Studies, Specimens &c'. This is the only notebook not held in the Hardy Memorial Collection at the Dorset County Museum. The remaining four notebooks are per sonal notebooks in Hardy's own hand, and are transcribed in full in the present volume. Since they are varied in purpose and content I shall introduce each of them in turn.

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