A Benchmark for the Scholarly Editing of Hardy's Fiction

179 REVIEWS 1. A Benchmark for the Scholarly Editing of Hardy's Fiction Thomas Hardy. The Woodlanders. Ed. by Dale Kramer (Oxford: Clarendon P, 19"ST). $69.00 3=25. Seventy years have elapsed since the authoritative Macmillan Wessex Edition of Hardy's works was published in 1912, and during that period not one of Hardy's novels appeared in an edition which could confidently be used in place of the Wessex Edition texts for serious scholarly purposes. That is no longer the case. Dale Kramer's edition of Hardy's The Woodlanders provides a text and accompanying apparatus scrupulously prepared in conformity with the highest standards of contemporary scholarly editing; it is more authoritative than that provided by The Woodlanders volume in the Wessex Edition and hereafter should be used as the standard text for scholarly reference. In preparing this edition, Professor Kramer had unusually good fortune : for, in the case of The Woodlanders alone, Hardy's marked pointer's copy used to set the 1912 Wessex Edition volume is preserved in the Dorset County Museum, and, as a result, Kramer could proceed with much more assured knowledge about precisely which variants that appeared in the Wessex Edition were authorial. The evidence of Hardy's revisions in the printer's copy makes clear that he reviewed the novel carefully, altering both substantives and accidentals, and that his several hundred changes in the punctuation of the novel involved an extensive clearing-away of commas which had often been introduced by the house-styling to which The Woodlanders was subjected in the successive editions it went through between 1886 and 1912. But, in spite of the evidence that Hardy carefully scrutinized the accidentals as well as the substantives of the Wessex Edition, and that he had control of both, Professor Kramer chose the conservative course of adopting only those accidentals which Hardy introduced into the Wessex text by marking his printer's copy or which might be inferred to be authorial revisions in proof; in other cases, he generally followed the accidentals in Hardy's manuscript used to set the serial version of the novel in 1886, arguing as follows: Even the carefully prepared 'definitive' text, that of the Wessex Edition, is not free from printer's errors, although its primary weakness is its embodiment of the non-authorial readings which accumulated over twentyfive years and four (five, counting its own) typesettings. In consequence, the editorial decision has been to employ the manuscript as copy-text, corrected (for obvious oversights ) according to the text in Macmillan's Magazine (which represents the typesetting closest to the manuscript ) and incorporating the revisions in accidentals marked in the printer's copy for the Wessex Edition and the substantive variants which are in the text of the Wessex Edition. 180 Given the fact that the manuscript of The Woodlanders was pointed by Hardy with relative care, Kramer's choice was certainly consistent with the most commonly accepted modern editorial theory - though it should be emphasized that there is very great variation in the evident attention and care with which Hardy pointed his manuscripts, and, consequently, in the confidence with which an editor may accept the accidentals of any particular manuscript to represent Hardy's deliberate preference. Even in the case of The Woodlanders. Kramer's choice of copy-text required considerable correction of manifestly unsatisfactory pointings by resorting to what were in all probability non-authorial choices made by the Macmillan's Magazine compositors. Nevertheless, Professor Kramer's concern to recover as much as possible of Hardy's own pointing has resulted in a text that is more openly punctuated than that provided in the Wessex Edition, and the effect is sometimes to alter significantly the flow and pace of the narrative. In this respect, Professor Kramer has not only provided what is the sine qua non of scholarly editions - an authoritative text and a full apparatus which makes explicit every aspect of the procedure by which the text was derived - but also a text whose differences are aesthetically important. But if the text of The Woodlanders provided by Professor Kramer is the closest embodiment we have of Hardy's final deliberate intention, in every...