Bancroftiana, Number 119 Fall 2001: A Hardyan Pursuit, or, The Frustrations of Scholarship

A Hardyan Pursuit, or, The Frustrations of Scholarship

Among the Bancroft's excellent collection of Thomas Hardy materials is a letter of 9 September 1911 sent by Hardy to F. Outwin Saxelby, an enthusiastic literary amateur, who was proposing to publish A Thomas Hardy Dictionary, consisting primarily of an alphabetically organized guide to the "Characters and Scenes of the Novels and Poems." Hardy knew nothing about Saxelby, and his customary cautiousness about public references to himself left him with little enthusiasm for the projected volume, but since there were no solid grounds for objecting to its publication he had simply insisted, in his earlier correspondence with Saxelby, that he not be represented as having authorized the book in any way.

What the letter in the Bancroft shows is that Hardy subsequently decided to take a precautionary look at the proofs of the Dictionary and in so doing questioned "a few statements" here and there and specified changes that should be made to the preface and to the dedication to himself. The book itself appeared late in 1911, austerely dedicated ("To | Thomas Hardy, O.M. | By Permission | This Book Is | Respectfully Inscribed | By | The Author.") and containing in addition to the actual dictionary a map of Hardy's fictional Wessex, an extensive bibliography, and lengthy plot-summaries of the novels and stories. In fairness to Saxelby, it must be said that his summaries were serviceable, that his bibliography was impressively full and accurate for its date, and that the very absurdities of his dictionary (e.g., its recourse to such entries as "Aunt," "Wife," and "Baby, A" in order to accommodate characters left unnamed by Hardy himself ) testified to the earnestness of his striving towards comprehensiveness.

That the Bancroft letter, though signed by Hardy, is otherwise in the hand of an amanuensis strongly suggests that it was not for him an especially important document, and I confess to having myself regarded it as a relatively trivial item when, in the heady days of the late 1960s, I first visited the Bancroft as a newcomer to the Hardy field, eager to see as many of his manuscripts and related documents as I possibly could. The next time I came, some time in the mid-1970s, my examination of the letter to Saxelby was altogether closer and more careful. I was by this time co-editor (with Richard Purdy, the distinguished Hardy bibliographer) of the seven-volume Clarendon Press edition of The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, and the main purpose of my visit was to check against the originals of the Hardy letters in the Bancroft the typed transcriptions that Purdy and I had prepared on the basis of the photocopies the Library had kindly supplied. But there was also a secondary purpose. Richard Purdy had established that the Bancroft's Saxelby letter had formerly belonged to his deceased friend Howard Bliss—creator during the nineteen-twenties and -thirties of much the finest Hardy collection ever in private hands—and that Bliss had placed it with the set of proofs of the Dictionary that Hardy himself had corrected. Those proofs had somehow disappeared, but since the letter was in the Bancroft it seemed reasonable to think that the proofs were there also. I duly checked the Bancroft's catalogues, but while they listed a copy of the Dictionary itself, they contained no reference to the proofs.

Puzzled but relatively undismayed, I turned to the one other obvious possibility. I knew that the bulk of Bliss's collection had been sold at two Sotheby sales of 23 June 1959 and 29 May 1961, that all the lots from the first sale and all but one lot from the second had found their way (via the New York dealer Lew Feldman) to the University of Texas at Austin, and when I went to check the numerous Hardy letters at Texas I was quietly confident that I would find the Saxelby proofs there as well. Disappointed again, and not knowing where else to look, I abandoned the search for some years. One day, however, a friendly manuscripts dealer happened to give me a little package of papers relating to Howard Bliss's dealings with Lew Feldman subsequent to the two Sotheby sales, and from them I discovered that early in 1963, after the two sales, the Saxelby proofs were still in Bliss's possession and being described by him as bearing "pencilled corrections by T.H." and as having had "inserted" into them "a letter written out in Emma Hardy's copy-book handwriting and signed by T.H., pointing out to Saxelby the necessity for certain alterations." Bliss was wrong about the handwriting, but the information was otherwise authentic enough, and the likelihood that the proofs and the letter had remained together was greatly strengthened by the discovery that Feldman, after making a deal directly with Bliss for the remainder of his collection, had not on this occasion sold everything on to Texas but split the material up among four different purchasers—the Bancroft being one.

I was in Berkeley again shortly afterwards —inspecting for the MLA's Committee on Scholarly Editions one of the magnificent volumes of the Mark Twain Letters—and although I ran out of time in which to visit the Bancroft myself, I asked for another check to be made and received the same reply as before: that there was indeed a regularly catalogued copy of Saxelby's Dictionary on the shelves (PR | 4572 | S39 | 1911) but no sign of any proofs. It was not until some years later, when I was working on an edition of Hardy's public utterances and wanted to list the Saxelby proofs as one of several instances of his silent involvement in other people's writings, that I suddenly had an inspired glimpse of what the humdrum solution to the mystery might be. A longplanned research trip to California afforded an early opportunity to test my theory, and shortly before arriving in Berkeley for a brief visit to the Mark Twain Project in the late fall of 1999 I asked if the Bancroft's known and catalogued copy of the Dictionary could be taken off the shelf and closely examined. I heard no more, but upon my arrival at the Bancroft a triumphant Peter Hanff put into my hand a solidly cased dark green volume that proved upon inspection to contain the bound-up page proofs that Hardy had corrected in 1911, that Saxelby had proudly preserved, that Bliss had somehow obtained and subsequently sold, that someone in the Bancroft—ignoring the "FIRST PROOFS" stamped on the halftitle and indeed on the spine—had incorrectly catalogued some time in the 1960s, and that I should have cottoned on to far, far earlier than I actually did.

Hardy's pencilled corrections, while not especially numerous, turned out to be always characteristic, often interesting, and occasionally significant. He greatly simplified Saxelby's original dedication to "The Greatest Living Master of Our English Language." He introduced into the Preface a specific statement to the effect that "Mr. Hardy" had not authorized the book and took no responsibility for its contents. He corrected or expanded occasional bibliographical details, altering to "reprints," for example, what Saxelby had misleadingly referred to as the second, third, and fourth "editions" of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and disclaiming authorship of the 1882 stage version of Far from the Madding Crowd that seems in fact to have been primarily the work of J. Comyns Carr. Most importantly, perhaps, he read through the narrative summaries and pencilled in one or two adjustments, quite slight in themselves, that nevertheless significantly clarified his own view of crucial plot developments in two or three of the novels.

It might be too much to claim that this long-mislaid set of the Saxelby proofs constitutes a major Hardyan document, but it is most certainly an important and interesting one. Curiously enough, Saxelby's volume retrospectively gains in stature from these revelations of Hardy's direct enhancement of its accuracy and usefulness. Hardy himself, however, never warmed to the Dictionary, and when Saxelby suggested in 1926 that it might be reissued Hardy effectively killed the idea by telling Sir Frederick Macmillan that it would need extensive updating and was in any case "rather a useless book, being a compilation of commonplace ingenuity, for which I imagine there would be little demand." The Humanities Press of New York in fact reissued the 1911 first edition by photo—offset in 1962—just as Howard Bliss was beginning to negotiate the final dispersal of his collection—but the Dictionary has never until now been viewed as belonging in the mainstream of Hardy studies, let alone as a project in which Hardy himself might have been a secret (if irritated) sharer.

—Michael Millgate
University Professor of English Emeritus, University of Toronto.
His most recent book, just out, is Thomas Hardy's Public Voice: The Essays, Speeches, and Miscellaneous Prose.