An Important Edition of Tess

BOOK REVIEWS 1. AN IMPORTANT EDITION OF TESS Thomas Hardy. Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Juliet Grindie and Simon Gatrell, eds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. $95.00 The Clarendon Press has followed Dale Kramer's critical edition of The Woodlanders (1981) with a superb edition of Tess, and it would be pleasant to report that these are the first two volumes in a series that will eventually give us properly edited texts of all Hardy's fourteen novels. It seems that such is not the case; and though this may not be the cause of great surprise, given the present-day economics of scholarly publishing (and the prohibitive price of the present volume: £50 in the U.K., $95 in the U.S.A., and $142.50 in Canada), it is the cause of great regret. Hardy is a major writer, and these editions bring home to us just how far we are, in the hitherto available texts, from being able to read what he actually wrote. Now that a novel is regarded as no less a proper subject for detailed stylistic analysis than a poem, we need to have an author's ipsisslma verba, down to the last comma, and not merely some approximation to them that has been arrived at as a result of editorial Interference, composltorlal carelessness or whim, and other factors operating over a century or so. The volumes of the Clarendon Dickens that have been appearing since 1966 have repeatedly demonstrated that critical editions of nineteenth-century novels are needed: what a shock it was to find that for a hundred years readers of the opening lines of Edwin Drood had been reading something that Dickens never wroteI Simon Gatrell took over the massive editorial task of this edition from Juliet Grlndle, who had been working on the text of Tess for some fourteen years, shortly before her tragic death in August 1980, and has brought it to a triumphant conclusion. It is, indeed, in all important respects difficult to see how the job could have been better done. The text of the novel is preceded by 103 pages of general and editorial introductions and followed by seven appendices, including 73 pages on "Punctuation and Styling Variants in Tess." At the foot of each page of the text, variants in the manuscript and the various serial and volume editions are concisely but clearly recorded. One minor grumble: since this is an edition that will be used not so much fo.r reading straight through as for checking specific passages, it would have been very helpful to have chapter-numbers placed at the top of each, or every other, page. The introductions survey the writing, publication and revision of the novel, describe the manuscript and the various texts (including two newly discovered), and justify the choice of the manuscript as copy-text on the grounds of its "unique authority." According to the jacket-description of this edition, "Every previous edition of Tess of the d'Urbervilles has been based more or less unthinkingly on the text of the Wessex Edition of 1912." Perhaps "more or less unthinkingly" is a little severe on some of the earlier editors; but the decision in the present edition is certainly a striking one. The editorial introduction informs us that "The crucial factors in this choice are that the manuscript punctuation is authorial and complete. The same claim cannot be made of any of the printed texts" (p. 79), and argues convincingly that the "heavy style of punctuation" imposed by the Graphic 156 157 compositors in the original serial version "often clumsily distorts the meaning as well as the rhythm of what Hardy wrote." A single brief example will show that the argument is well-founded. In the opening chapter of the novel, Durbeyfleld tells Parson Tringham "'And here have I been knocking about year after year from pillar to post as if I was not more than the commonest, dirtcheapest feller in the parish.'" Thus, at least, Hardy's manuscript; but the hell-bent good intentions of the Victorian compositor changed it to "'And here have I been knocking about, year after year, from pillar to post, as if . . .'" which...