Hardy and Textual Biography

ELT: Volume 33:1, 1990 Wilson has been far outnumbered, and Calder, like Morgan, sets Maugham to rights with his peers. Evelyn Waugh called Maugham "the only . . . studio-master under whom one can study with profit." Orwell declared Maugham the writer who influenced him the most "for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills." His genuine admirers included Dreiser, Virginia Woolf, Burgess, Perelman, Raymond Chandler, Isherwood, Garcia Marquez, and nearly all Britain's leading critics before World War II. Calder writes that "When confronted with . . . honesty and warmth, Maugham could let his own guard drop and respond with a warmth often masked when he confronted a more threatening world." He quotes a little-known friend as saying that "to many . . . people like myself with whom he came into contact he was goodness itself." For my wife and myself, no truer words could be spoken. Thirty years ago—the day after Labor Day 1959—we were his guests for three morning hours at his vUla, La Mauresque, on Cap Ferrât. I have retold elsewhere the kindness with which he and Alan Searle treated us that day, the finest of my life: three decades ago and not a shade of its bright memory lost to the palimpsest of time. Richard Hauer Costa Texas A&M University Hardy and Textual Biography Simon Gatrell. Hardy the Creator: A Textual Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. χ + 260 pp. $35.00 FOR ALL THE TALK about Hardy's revisions, the number of full scholarly editions of Hardy's novels remains limited. Simon Gatrell cites two, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, which he co-edited with Juliet Grindle, and The Woodlanders, edited by Dale Kramer. To these three others must be added as recent publications: The Mayor of Casterbridge, also edited by Dale Kramer; Jude the Obscure, edited by Patricia Ingham; and Far from the Madding Crowd, edited by Robert Schweik. Excellent studies of individual works are in print, and Gatrell's complaint, that "each novel has been seen in isolation, and there has been no real sense of a context into which to fit them," seems overstated. As a method of procedure, Gatrell looks closely at the manuscripts before they are printed as serials in periodicals; at the multi-volume editions before they become single-volume printings; and at the texts of the collected works. It is inevitable that the fullness of detail varies from work to work, and that one sometimes 98 Book Reviews recognizes the retracing of the major findings of textual studies that were conducted with more painstaking thoroughness than Gatrell is willing to credit. It is also clear that some of Gatrell's concepts of editing will not please all readers of Hardy, and that the reasoning used to justify the application of these concepts to the editing of a given text will be controversial (Gatrell admits as much). The introduction briefly rehearses the history of parts-publication giving way by the 1860s to serial-issue, and the economics of Mudie's Select Library on New Oxford Street. A review of this material is essential for the appreciation of how the Victorian novel developed as a genre. Gatrell might have profitably expanded his summary beyond a few pages, particularly since the problems he describes were not directed against Hardy specifically but affected all serious writers who hoped to win a large audience. The remainder of several of Hardy's novels (a widespread practice when the first editions did not sell out within a few months) contributed to a growing bitterness about the cultural standards of both periodicals and lending libraries that Hardy shared with Charles Reade, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, George Moore, and George Gissing. More should be said about the signal importance of the founding of the Society of Authors in 1884; also, the reprinting in cheap editions of novels that had outlived their usefulness in more expensive three-decker format deserves fuller treatment. Gatrell's close-up focus on the multiple opportunities that Hardy exploited to revise his text (well over half a dozen, not counting the opportunities provided by the Osgood, Mcllvaine edition of 18951897 and the various Macmillan editions beginning in 1902, several years after he had...