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Chronology in Hardy's Novels

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Carl J. Weber
Carl J. Weber*
Affiliation:
Colby College
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Extract

During a recent re-examination of The Return of the Native I stumbled upon a feature in the construction of that story to which I had been for years totally blind. Turning for similar investigation to others of the Wessex novels, I was startled at the hitherto unsuspected evidence of a special kind of careful workmanship.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , March 1938 , pp. 314 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1938

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References

1 It is detailed on page 386 of Far from the Madding Crowd, edited with an introduction and notes by Carl J. Weber (Oxford University Press: New York, 1937).

2 “The Sources of Anthony Adverse,” Saturday Review of Lit. (10: 408), Jan. 13, 1934.

3 “Sinclair Lewis's Art of Work,” Saturday Review of Literature (10:466), Feb. 10, 1934.

4 Bethel College Monthly (Newton, Kansas), Jan., 1932, p. 6.

5 An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress, Hardy's “Lost” Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935), pp. 44–45.

6 Donald Maxwell's The Landscape of Thomas Hardy (London: Cassell & Co., 1928), p. xi.

7 I had already completed this study, and had decided that the comet was, out of numerous possibilities, Encke's, and that the year was 1858, before coming upon an unexpected corroboration of my conclusions in the form of a letter written by Hardy more than a quarter of a century after the novel. On October 24, 1909, Hardy wrote to a speaker at Oxford: “I am honoured by your quoting my little poem about the comet. It appeared, I think, in 1858 or 1859—a very large one—& I remember standing and looking at it as described.” (From an unpublished letter.)

8 For the reasons for this dogmatic assertion, see Far from the Madding Crowd (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937), p. 36.

9 See “Care and Carelessness in Hardy” by the present writer, MLN, l (1935), 41–43.

10 This less familiar reading appeared, in the first American edition (1892), p. 455, in place of the subsequently added and more famous “President of the Immortals” phrase at the end of Tess of the D'Urbervilles.