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XXIX.—Bowdlerized Versions OP Hardy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Joseph Warren Beach
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Extract

“Tess of the D'Urbervilles” was greeted with a storm of criticism, which did not abate on the appearance, four years later, of “Jude the Obscure.” Mr. Hardy seems rightly to have anticipated, in the preface to “Tess,” the feelings of the “too genteel reader who cannot endure to have said what everybody nowadays thinks and feels.” And it is true that he does exhibit in these novels a frankness of tone on all that pertains to sex somewhat unusual in England in the early nineties. But Hardy was by no means the kind of writer to disregard the predilections of his public on this or any other point of taste. There are but too many evidences of his willingness to meet them half way. And there is nothing which shows more strikingly his respect for the public taste, especially in the earlier stories, than his great delicacy, according to present standards—not to say his conventionality—in regard to matters of sex.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , December 1921 , pp. 632 - 643
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1921

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References

1 For information concerning the changes made for the magazines in “The Mayor of Casterbridge,” “The Well-Beloved,” and “Tess of the D'Urbervilles,” I am indebted to the studies of one of my advanced students. I am in hopes that eventually the whole investigation may see the light in the form of a Doctor's thesis.

2 P. 250. Cf. pp. 136, 219, 236, 263, 432, 435. The story first appeared in Belgravia from January to December, 1878; the first edition in book form was published presumably late in the same year, three volumes bearing the imprint of Smith, Elder & Co. Page references in this article are all to the present standard editions, Harper's in America, Macmillan in England, which are identical in pagination. These seem both to represent the revision made by Mr. Hardy in about 1895 when issuing his collected works, first under the imprint of Osgood, McIlvaine & Co. The Macmillan issue I have consulted bears the date 1902. The more recent edition de luxe (the “Wessex Edition,” 1912 for this novel) has a different paging; but the passages quoted are identical with those in the earlier Macmillan edition.

3 For example, passages on pp. 73, 75, 98, 99, 100, 353, 425.

4 P. 410.

5 P. 298.

6 P. 300.

7 P. 72.

8 P. 74. Other slight but significant changes, in the same sense, are to be found on pp. 250, 425, 427.

9 P. 442.

10 The same reading will be found on p. 69 of the edition de luxe.

11 These novels are now listed under the name of “Bertha M. Clay.”