Famously, Hardy's ‘lost’ first-written novel was never published and the manuscript at some point destroyed. It was to have been entitled The Poor Man and the Lady ‘By the Poor Man’ – and the only discrete remnant of it that has survived is the (reworked) long short story, ‘An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress’. How, then, do we know anything about it? The answer is that in the 1920s, in his eighties and approaching the end of a long and now internationally renowned career as novelist and poet, Hardy devoted several sympathetic pages to it in what we have seen earlier to be his last ‘fiction’, The Life of Thomas Hardy. As always with The Life, we should treat what it tells us with care; but what we are left with, nevertheless, is an account, composed towards the end of Hardy's life, of a (seemingly favoured) ‘first’ novel which thus positions itself as a kind of self-reflexive gloss on all Hardy's published fiction after The Poor Man. The comments on it in The Life, then, repay close attention.

It first refers to the work as ‘a striking socialistic novel’, adding ‘not that he mentally defined it as such, for the word had probably never, or scarcely ever, been heard of at that date’ (Life, 56); but we should register that that is precisely how Hardy did ‘mentally define’ it in the 1920s. The Life then reproduces generous praise for aspects of the novel by the publisher, Alexander Macmillan, who first read the manuscript, and similar comment by another reader, John Morley, who nevertheless noted – perceptively perhaps, given Hardy's obsession with social status – that the ‘wildly extravagant’ scenes in it ‘read like some clever lad's dream’ (Life, 59). George Meredith then looked at the manuscript for Chapman & Hall – Hardy was fortunate with his early readers – and the account of their meeting contains the most illuminating description of that first lost novel: