[In the following review of Thomas Hardy from Serial to Novel, Rinaker expresses some doubt that Victorian readers actually compelled Hardy to make changes in the serialized versions of his novels.]

Here is a book [Thomas Hardy from Serial to Novel] that threatens the reputation of Thomas Hardy as a conscientious literary artist, however the facts disclosed by Professor Chase may be interpreted after further study of his life and letters. It shows that Hardy made very radical changes in his novels when they were published serially, changes much more important than the prefaces to the books would suggest. Professor Chase's conclusions are based on a study of three novels, a comparison of the texts of the serial issues with two or more book editions of The Mayor of Casterbridge (Graphic, 1886, 1st ed. 1886, 2nd. English and Harper's eds.), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Graphic, 1891, 1st ed. 1891, 5th Eng. and Harper's eds.), and Jude the Obscure (Harper's Monthly, European ed., 1894-5, 1st Eng. 1896 and Harper's eds.)¹ She has noted changes in incident and plot, in characterization, in setting, minor additions and alterations, and changes in diction. Changes in incident and plot she finds to be most numerous and significant. From their character she infers that they were made “either to add sensationalism and suspense to his story or to eliminate the extremely unorthodox, the unconventional, and the improper” and were “necessitated by the demands of the magazine editor, who had bought Hardy's wares, but who must regard the investment in the light of his reading public.” All the other changes are much slighter and apparently “were made simply because of the author's desire to improve the literary quality of his novel before that novel should be published in book form.”²

Professor Chase is thus disposed to charge Victorian readers—whose living shoulders assumed so willingly the burden of others' morality—with having compelled this author of established reputation, who was in the habit of publishing his novels serially before they appeared in book form, to bowdlerize four of his later novels that they also might appear in serial form. The evidence she adduces that very significant changes were made in the serials is overwhelming. But her assignment of reasons for them can only be regarded as tentative and incomplete until they can be studied in the full light of his literary theories, expressed and implied, and still more with reference to his philosophy and personality.

What is most appalling about the major changes is not the questionable gain in sensationalism or propriety but the undoubted loss in artistic effect and even in probability and adequate motivation. In Tess, for example, the “slight modifications” that Hardy mentions in his preface commence with the substitution of a mock marriage for the forcible seduction of Tess and the omission of the pathetic story of the child, Sorrow. Tess then leaves Alec as soon as she discovers the deception. But Angel Clare repudiates her in just the same way. In the end she is represented as living not with Alec as his wife, but in another apartment as his cousin. Yet Angel's return is still supposed to be tragic and the murder of Alec an act of revenge. If Victorian readers must bear the blame for reducing this novel to such a state, they must also share the credit for its restitution. For they read the omitted chapters “more especially addressed to adult readers” in other magazines in the same year that the mutilated novel was appearing in the Graphic.³ Then Hardy pieced the “trunk and limbs of the novel together” and printed it complete as it had been originally written.⁴ Changes in the other novels examined by Miss Chase are of the same sort and need not be described in a short review. In The Mayor of Casterbridge some incidents are made more sensational and others, dealing with the relations between Henchard and Lucetta, more conventional, but the main plot is not so seriously affected by them. In Jude the elimination of all improprieties and illicit relations makes the remaining action even more illogical than the serial form of Tess.

The questions raised by this study do indeed concern Hardy's “method of work, the demands and prejudices of his reading public, his ability and apparent willingness to meet those demands and prejudices, and … his own conception of his art.”⁵ But the fundamental question is why the preference of magazine readers for sensationalism in incident and plot and for propriety in the relations between the sexes should have led the finest English realist to sacrifice “those very ideals of his art which have made him pre-eminent”⁶ to such preferences. It is easy enough to understand why editors should have considered them; they are concerned only with the success of their magazines. But Hardy had by 1891, when he made Tess a public sacrifice to magazine readers of nineteen years standing, achieved a literary reputation which, even if it had brought with it no great financial success, might have put him beyond such deference to “respectable magazines and select libraries.”⁷ The conclusion seems inescapable that Hardy was much more influenced by such considerations than some literary artists have been. Nor did he always reassert his artistic ideal even in the book version of his novel, as he did in those here discussed. The happier ending that he concocted for The Return of the Native as he said to satisfy “certain circumstances of serial publication” was never replaced by the “more consistent conclusion” that he felt “an austere artistic code” demanded.⁸

Hardy lamented the necessity for compromising with such demands, but he apparently bowed to the decrees of middle-class morality as his characters bowed to the fates he created for them. Indeed it seems not unlikely that his own entanglements with that baleful power determined the pattern for the tragedies of his characters—tragedies that would not have existed had their aims been lower or their wills stronger. Not only his novels but his critical utterances show the conflict in which he was involved. In a magazine article published in 1890 he stated his problem and pronounced judgment upon his own partial defection. “Even imagination is the slave of stolid circumstance.”⁹ To escape popular criticism and financial ruin a writer must “belie his literary conscience … by arranging a dénouement which he knows to be indescribably unreal and meretricious, but dear to the Grundyist and subscriber. If the true artist ever weeps, it is probably then, when he first discovers the fearful price that he has to pay for the privilege of writing in the English language—no less a price than the complete extinction, in the mind of every mature and penetrating reader, of sympathetic belief in his personages.”¹⁰ Perhaps he recanted later. Or perhaps it is just one of life's little ironies that in his birthday speech in 1912 he appealed to the “conscience and artistic honor of the literary craftsman” to avoid just the temptations to which he had yielded. “Deeper than the joy of … ephemeral popular appreciation is the satisfaction which springs from good work. The writer must somehow be got to put an ideal before him, and to labor incessantly for at least some approximation of it.”¹¹

Notes

1. Pp. 1, 9, 10. A fourth novel, The Well-Beloved (Illustrated London News, 1892, 1st ed. 1897) does not form part of the present study but was examined by the author in her master's thesis. Professor Beach, who suggested Professor Chase's study, published the results of his similar investigation of The Return of the Native in the P.M.L.A., Dec. 1921, under the title “Bowdlerized Versions of Hardy” pp. 7-8.

2. P. 182.

3. Pp. 5, 76, 83. The incidents of the seduction and the baptism of the child appeared with very slight changes in the National Observer and the Fortnightly Review with the titles “Saturday Night in Arcady” and “The Midnight Baptism: A Study in Christianity.”

4. P. 5.

5. P. 8.

6. P. 198.

7. P. 205.

8. Preface to The Return of the Native.

9. P. 204.

10. P. 205.

11. P. 200.