Hardy: Essays, Speeches, Prose

Book Reviews equally difficult to appreciate his writings." In The Splintering Frame (1984) I indicated specific instances of Wells's deliberate revision of Pilgrim 's Progress in Men Like Gods, Portrait of a Lady in Meanwhile, The Satyricon in The Autocracy of Mr. Parham, The Prisoner ofZenda in The Brothers, The Twelve Caesars in The Holy Terror, The Anatomy of Melancholy in The Anatomy of Frustration, and The Decline of the West in Apropos of Dolores, among other examples. Such a list is worth noting here because it reveals something about how Wells's creativity was sparked. In none of these instances would it be appropriate to speak of plagiarism . But the boundary between an original source and its revision can become problematic, especially with nonfiction. Wells, in fact, once settled Robert Cromie's lawsuit against him for plagiarizing A Plunge into Space. And Percy John Harwood had long complained to acquaintances that the biology section of his Theory of the Solar System had been appropriated by Wells without acknowledgment in The Science of Life. So did Wells plagiarize Deeks's history? It is altogether likely that he did indeed work from her pseudonymous manuscript. Did he do so villainously or did he mistakenly (and arrogantly) believe that his revision of it amounted to the sort of creative and "original" recasting of texts he practiced throughout his career as a novelist? In either case, he appears to have lied or at least been disingenuous in his testimony about the entire episode. The Deeks-Wells affair casts a peculiar light on an observation in Wells's Modern Utopia. The observation was apparently meant to be a clever witticism, but it now indeed gives pause: "Fools make researches, and wise men exploit them." WILLIAM J. SCHElCK __________________ University of Texas at Austin Hardy: Essays, Speeches, Prose Thomas Hardy's Public Voice: The Essays, Speeches and Miscellaneous Prose. Michael Millgate, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. xl + 500 pp. $110.00 THIS COLLECTION of "public utterances" by a writer conventionally assumed to have guarded his privacy to the point of fastidiousness is an invaluable addition to the outstanding body of scholarship that Michael Millgate has contributed to Hardy studies over the many years during which he has been tranforming them. He has written both the standard biography and what is still regarded by many, thirty years 299 ELT 46 : 3 2003 after its publication, as the single most useful study of Hardy's career as a novelist, co-edited the seven-volume Collected Letters and the singlevolume Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy, and restored to its intended form the Hardy-authored Life and Work of Thomas Hardy. With the publication of Thomas Hardy's Public Voice, Millgate again encompasses a major project that by its very nature he is uniquely qualified to bring to completion. This book's ambitious scope is best summarized in the words of the note on "Editorial Procedures." While excluding "prefaces and annotations to [Hardy's] own writings on the grounds that these 'belong' with the works to which they refer," this collection includes ... all the separately published items of non-fiction prose for which Hardy is known to have been responsible: e. g. essays, speeches, obituaries, letters to newspapers, invited contributions to newspaper and magazine symposia, introductions and prefaces to other people's works, and even the occasional advertising "puff." It further extends to the identification—though not in general the reproduction—of public letters and other documents that he co-signed but did not himself write and of other, unsigned, items for which he can be shown to have been certainly or very probably responsible: e.g. corrections or additions to other people's writings. "Inspired" (i.e. initiated but anonymous) contributions to the literary news and gossip columns of his day are reproduced when there is clear textual evidence for his participation, but simply listed when there is not. Also listed are some of the more interesting of the many societies and causes to which he publicly lent his name, one or two pieces of his writing no longer extant... and occasional instances in which he clearly intended to make a public gesture but was for...