Table Of ContentHARDY'S USE OF ALLUSION
Also by Palgrave Macmillan
EDITH WHARTON AND KATE CHOPIN: A Reference
Guide
WHAT MANNER OF WOMAN: Essays on English and
American Life and Literature (editor)
HARDY'S USE OF
ALLUSION
Marlene Springer
© Marlene Springer 1983
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1983 978-0-333-33395-2
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Contents
Acknowledgements Vlll
Introductory Textual Note IX
1 Style and Thomas Hardy 1
2 Three Experiments in Form 18
3 The Dimensions of Success and Failure 53
4 The Rustic Chorus 82
5 Stylistic Maturity in The Return of the Native 98
6 Aftercourses: Tess of the d'Urbervilles and jude the
Obscure 121
List ofA bbreviations Used in the Notes and Bibliography 175
Notes and References 176
Bibliography 189
Index 196
vii
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank Professors Allan Hollingsworth, Paul
Zietlow, Peter Casagrande and the late J. 0. Bailey for their care
ful reading and useful suggestions during the development of the
manuscript, as well as Professor Harold Orel for his valuable
advice during its last stages. The librarians of the Berg Collection
in the New York Public Library, the Fitzwilliam Museum in
Cambridge, England, the British Library and the Dorset County
Museum (especially Mr R. N. R. Peers) were helpful during my
study of Hardy's manuscripts. I am also indebted to the University
of Missouri-Kansas City Research Council for its financial
support of my manuscript work in England. And finally my
deepest thanks to Haskell Springer for his undeviating support,
fine critical suggestions and willingness to share his life with
Thomas Hardy.
Part of Chapter 2 of this book has appeared in the Colby Library
Quarterly, and Chapter 5 in Inscape.
viii
Introductory Textual Note
All references, unless otherwise stated, are to the New Wessex
Edition, paperback printing (London, Macmillan), based on the
text of 1912 Wessex Edition. Since Hardy did revise parts of the
earlier novels for his Wessex Edition, whenever there is a question
of stylistic development and evidence that he revised his allusions
to accord with a new concept of the novel, a comparison between
the manuscript or the first edition, depending on which is extant,
and the 1912 Wessex, the last authorised version, is included.1
Such revisions fall within the scope of this study of Hardy's allusive
technique in that they support the thesis that he increasingly im
proved his literary talents, and that his allusive method was
stylistically intentional.
ix
1 Style and Thomas Hardy
Even a cursory survey of style in major Victorian writers reveals
that, in contrast to the eighteenth century, the nineteenth is
remarkable for its diversity: Carlyle is recognised for involved
negatives, Pater his affectation, Ruskin his imperatives, Eliot her
didacticism and detachment, Dickens his labelling, Scott his legal
istic distance and Hardy for his study of the London Times. Even
within this diversity, however, many fiction writers of the period
share a common stylistic trait - the abundant use of literary allu
sions. George Eliot even felt called to warn against them in a letter
of 22 April 1873: 'As to quotations, please - please to be very
moderate, whether they come from Shakespeare or any other ser
vant of the Muses. A quotation often makes a fine summit to a
climax. . . . But I hate a style speckled with quotations.' Hated or
not, she used them herself, speckling her fiction, her essays, even
her letters with literary references. Hardy was decidedly of his age
in this respect in that he out-alluded virtually every allusionist -
not only in substance, but in skill as well.
Hardy's style in general has long been the subject of debate.
Even so fine a novel as Far From the Madding Crowd was attacked
by the Saturday Review (9 January 1875, p. 57) for its 'clumsy and
inelegant metaphors', and Hardy was admonished that 'eccen
tricities of style are not characteristic of genius, nor of original
thinking'. More recently Robert Heilman, while admitting that
Hardy's style has compensatory virtues, lists his rhetorical faults as
'disorderly heaps of modifiers, relative clauses with unclear
antecedents, upsidedown when clauses, excess of participial con
structions, awkward absolute and gerund construction, dangling
modifiers of various kinds, faulty parallelism, clumsy passives,
separation of related elements, confused pronoun references'. 1
Critics and readers alike, then, concede that Hardy, like Shakes
peare, was sometimes cavalier about grammar.
However, most critics now agree that Hardy's occasional lapses
in form are far outweighed by his more comprehensive stylistic
