When Tess of the d‘Urbervilles was first serialized in a British magazine in 1891, readers encountered a story quietly stripped of its rougher edges. A scene in which Angel Clare carries several young women across a flooded lane, cradling Tess longer than the others, was altered to have him wheel them across in a barrow instead—considered safer, presumably, than the physical intimacy of the original. Elsewhere, an illegitimate baby‘s makeshift baptism was cut entirely. Only when Thomas Hardy prepared the novel for publication in book form did he restore these passages and others, revealing just how much of his fiction had been shaped, softened, and reshaped again to survive the demands of Victorian editors and readers. The novel most people now think of as Tess of the d‘Urbervilles is, in a real sense, one version among several Hardy actually wrote.
That instability runs through nearly all of Hardy‘s fiction. Across his fourteen novels and four collections of short stories, he moved between magazine serialization, multi-volume first editions, single-volume editions, American editions, and later collected editions—revising, cutting, and restoring material at almost every stage. By the time he assembled his collected “Wessex Novels“ edition in the 1890s, he had spent decades quietly rewriting his own literary legacy, even adjusting the geography of his fictional Wessex to make it more internally consistent across books written years apart.
Most readers never encounter this instability at all. They pick up a single paperback edition of Tess or Jude the Obscure and assume they are reading Hardy, full stop, unaware that the text in their hands may differ meaningfully from what first appeared in a magazine, or from what Hardy considered his final, definitive version. That gap between the popular idea of a fixed, finished novel and the messier reality of Hardy‘s actual working process is exactly what a new scholarly edition has set out to close.
Richard Nemesvari, Professor of English and former Dean of Arts at Wilfrid Laurier University, is the General Editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Novels and Stories of Thomas Hardy, a landmark scholarly project tracing Hardy‘s revisions across every stage of publication for each of his novels and stories. He has personally edited Hardy‘s Desperate Remedies and The Trumpet-Major, co-edited Wessex Tales, and is the author of Thomas Hardy, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode, a study of the popular, sensational, and melodramatic traditions running underneath Hardy‘s literary reputation. In the conversation that follows, we talk about what it means to edit an author whose texts were never quite finished, and what the Cambridge Edition reveals about Hardy that a standard paperback never could.
Charles Carlini: The changes Hardy made to Tess of the d‘Urbervilles between its magazine serialization and its book publication are striking—the flooded-lane scene, the baby‘s baptism. What do those changes tell us about the pressures Hardy was writing under?
Richard Nemesvari: Hardy was fully aware of the publication process required by Victorian fiction and understood that he needed to work within its strictures to succeed as a novelist. When composing his first major success, Far from the Madding Crowd, serialized in the Cornhill Magazine, he famously wrote to its editor, Leslie Stephen, that he wished “merely to be considered a good hand at a serial,“ although in that same letter he also observed that he “might have higher aims some day.“ As those higher aims were achieved over time, Hardy found the pressure of Mrs. Grundy increasingly irksome, but he was unwilling to forgo the revenue that serialization provided, especially as his increasing fame made it more lucrative.
However, it is important to recognize that the magazine stage of writing was also a significant element of his creative process, so it wasn't just about the money. What Hardy could do about the situation was make revisions that covertly expressed his disdain for what was being required of him. The flooded-lane scene you mention, in which Angel individually trundles each of the milkmaids through a large puddle in a wheelbarrow, is intentionally ridiculous. It is very much Hardy mocking the editors at the Graphic by, in essence, saying, “Do you see just how foolish you are making us all look?“ By that point, of course, he was the dominant novelist in Victorian England, so he could afford this type of gesture. And the removal of “The Midnight Baptism: A Study in Christianity,“ which was then separately published in the Fortnightly Review, was an additional comment on the Graphic‘s timidity.
CC: You took on the Cambridge Edition as a “major contribution to Hardy scholarship.“ What made you feel that job needed doing, that existing editions of Hardy weren't good enough?
RN: It isn‘t so much that existing editions weren‘t good enough as that they weren‘t complete in bibliographical terms. There is only so much one can achieve in a “Note on the Text,“ which is intentionally kept short in versions of a novel meant for classroom use or general readership. I can speak from experience on this, having prepared just such notes for Brontë‘s Jane Eyre, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Aurora Floyd, and indeed for the Oxford World‘s Classics edition of The Trumpet-Major.
In contrast, the Cambridge Edition‘s entire purpose is bibliographical, or, to use an older word, philological, in that the recording of textual revisions and the tracing of textual development is its main goal. Its intended audience is different from that of existing editions and provides information for in-depth Hardy scholarship that simply isn‘t available anywhere else. Comprehensively recording Hardy‘s authorial revisions provides specific insights into potential readings of his narratives that can only be achieved by dedicated scholarly editions.
CC: Hardy revised his fiction at nearly every stage of publication—serial, first edition, collected edition. For a general reader, how different can these versions actually be? Are we talking word-level tweaks, or entire scenes coming and going?
RN: This question directly relates to the previous one, allowing me to elaborate. Many of Hardy‘s texts contain changes that significantly impact the reader‘s understanding of and response to the narrative. The first edition of Desperate Remedies, for example, strongly suggests same-sex female desire, which Hardy progressively weakens through revisions until it can be entirely denied. Even minor changes in wording can radically alter meaning, and Hardy‘s constant return to his texts has both granular and wide-ranging effects. The Cambridge Edition‘s value lies in allowing users to immediately see the specifics of these alterations, large or small. The Advisory Board and I were very pleased that the Press agreed to list the substantive variants (i.e., the word changes) as footnotes at the bottom of the appropriate pages rather than in an appendix, making them immediately accessible to the reader. While the inclusion of this bibliographical information can seem intimidating, the target audience is not a general readership but rather those with a scholarly interest in the specifics of Hardy‘s evolving engagement with his novels and stories.
CC: You personally chose to edit Desperate Remedies, Hardy‘s first published novel and, notably, a sensation novel, the same genre at the center of your own book on Hardy and melodrama. Was that a deliberate pairing?
RN: The very short answer to that is yes. Although Hardy has been the obvious focus of my research, I have also published widely on sensation fiction, including co-editing the recent Cambridge essay collection Wilkie Collins in Context with William Baker. This particular novel provided a natural linkage with my overall scholarly interests. It also led to the fortuitous result that the first two volumes of the Cambridge Edition were Desperate Remedies and Under the Greenwood Tree, Hardy‘s first two entries into Victorian novel publication. As it turned out, The Woodlanders was also ready at the same time, so the project had a triple launch.
CC: Your scholarship argues that sensationalism and melodrama run through Hardy‘s fiction far more than his reputation as a somber rural realist would suggest. Where do we see that most clearly, and why do you think it gets overlooked?
RN: Melodramatic and sensational elements are pervasive throughout Hardy‘s fiction. To offer a few examples: Contemporary reviewers noted that Alec d‘Urberville is a stage villain directly from Victorian melodrama, and his blood leaking onto the floor and dripping through the ceiling after Tess murders him is pure sensationalism. Even more overtly, Little Father Time‘s child murder/suicide of his siblings in Jude the Obscure is more grotesquely sensationalist than anything in the writings of Collins, Braddon, or Charles Reade. Furthermore, many of Hardy‘s short stories are sensational and gothic. This approach was encouraged by short-form narratives and connected to the sometimes-grisly rural tales he heard as a child. “The Withered Arm,“ “The Fiddler of the Reels,“ and “Barbara of the House of Grebe,“ for instance, all contain anti-realist aspects that contradict Hardy‘s broader literary reputation.
The long-standing oversight of these aspects can be attributed to Hardy himself and to later literary critics. By the mid-1890s, when he transitioned from novels to poetry, realism was firmly established as the only form of “serious“ literature. Associating his work with the realist project was crucial for securing his legacy. In the General Preface to the Macmillan Wessex Edition, Hardy categorized his novels into three groups. The “Novels of Character and Environment“ are listed first, emphasizing “verisimilitude in general treatment and detail“—in other words, they are realistic. This category includes what are generally considered his “major works.“ The explicitly identified “third class“ comprises the “Novels of Ingenuity,“ a term often used for sensation fiction, which “depend for their interest mainly on the incidents themselves.“ By the time this collected edition was published, it was widely accepted that emphasizing plot was inferior to character development. By placing Desperate Remedies, The Hand of Ethelberta, and A Laodicean in this grouping, Hardy largely marginalized them, suggesting they should not reflect negatively on him as “The Historian of Wessex.“ For the most part, subsequent critics were willing to treat these novels as “minor“ and embarrassing anomalies in his oeuvre, largely ignoring them. Only relatively recently, with the recognition of the legitimacy of “genre“ fiction, have these works become available for serious academic study. This, in turn, has revealed that they are not anomalies at all, but rather represent a significant aspect of Hardy‘s fiction in general.
CC: In Wessex Tales, you and your co-editor restored “An Imaginative Woman,“ a story Hardy had once removed from the collection. What made you decide to put it back?
RN: This is a complicated question that usefully reveals the reality that an editorial project always necessitates subjective decisions. The first edition of Wessex Tales contained only five stories, and “An Imaginative Woman“ wasn't included. With the publication of the Osgood, McIlvaine Wessex Novels collected edition, Hardy added “An Imaginative Woman“ to Wessex Tales and placed it first in the volume. Then, for the later Macmillan Wessex Edition, he changed his mind, moving “An Imaginative Woman“ to the volume Life‘s Little Ironies, and taking two stories from that collection (“A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four“ and “The Melancholy Hussar“) and adding them to Wessex Tales. The overall editorial policy of the Cambridge Edition is to use British first editions as copy-text, but “An Imaginative Woman“ had to go somewhere. Since Hardy‘s original decision was to insert it in Wessex Tales, we chose (after a great deal of discussion) to place it at the end of that volume. This was because it was a later addition to the text, but appeared earlier than its inclusion in the Wessex Edition. Neil Reeve, Alan Manford (who edited Life‘s Little Ironies), and I believed this was a defensible position, although we also realized it was open to argument.
CC: You've also written about masculinity and homosocial tension in Hardy‘s fiction, reading Tess of the d‘Urbervilles alongside Melville‘s Billy Budd, for instance. What does that angle reveal about Hardy that a more traditional reading of his female characters might miss?
RN: Hardy‘s striking representation of his female characters has been a key critical focus since he first began publishing, so feminist analysis provided strong readings from the start. Increasingly, it‘s become clear that masculinity studies need to accompany and complement such readings, and Hardy provides fertile ground there as well. The question of what it means “to be a man“ recurs in his fiction, from Gabriel Oak, to Clym Yeobright, to Michael Henchard, to Angel Clare, to Jude Fawley. This can be connected to the sometimes unnoticed triangulated desire generating homosocial/homoerotic tension, which complicates the sexual relationships that often drive Hardy‘s plots.
Having said that, my essay on Tess and Billy Budd was generated by my noticing the startlingly similar plot parallels between two outwardly dichotomous authors/texts and wasn‘t meant to have any immediately broader implications for Hardy. It did, however, subsequently start me thinking along queer theory lines that I have continued to pursue.
CC: Coordinating scholars across Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia to edit fourteen novels and four short-story collections is an enormous undertaking. What has surprised you most about overseeing a project on that scale?
RN: The project didn‘t so much surprise me as confirm what I already knew: the international Hardy community is incredibly generous. Both editors and non-editors were willing to visit nearby archives to assist with manuscript work; individuals loaned rare texts from their private collections to those in need, and expertise for difficult editorial decisions was always available upon request. All of this was made possible through email—I have a hard time imagining how such an edition could be achieved without it.
CC: When the full Cambridge Edition is finally complete, what do you think it will let scholars, and maybe even general readers, see about Hardy that‘s been invisible until now?
RN: That Hardy was an inveterate tinkerer with his texts has been well known for some time, but the sheer scale of his interventions over the years is now manifest in ways it wasn‘t before. Additionally, Hardy‘s unique style of punctuation was often modified by compositors who introduced (some would say imposed) publisher house styling (often erratically) into his prose. Although the apparatus recording his original pointing is rather dense, the edition nonetheless provides it for anyone who wishes to explore this level of bibliographical detail.
CC: If Hardy himself could see the Cambridge Edition—his own drafts, revisions, and cuts laid bare for scholars to study—what do you think he’d make of having his creative process exposed so thoroughly?
RN: As he got older, Hardy became increasingly irritated by what he saw as people intruding without permission into his life, particularly concerning early biographical efforts. To some extent, then, he might have viewed the Cambridge Edition as another expression of that intrusion, albeit in a different mode. However, he also understood that the interest in his life and works was an expression of his fame and success, both of which were important to him. Overall, I think he would recognize this intense scholarly effort as a compliment to the importance of his writing and to his continuing stature as a major figure in English literature with admirers around the world.
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