oxford world s classics

A PAIR OF BLUE EYES

Thomas Hardy was born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, on2 June 1840; his father was a builder in a small way of business, andhe was educated locally and in Dorchester before being articled toan architect. After sixteen years in that profession and the publica-tion of his earliest novel Desperate Remedies (1871), he determinedto make his career in literature; not, however, before his work as anarchitect had led to his meeting at St Juliot in Cornwall, EmmaGiord, who became his rst wife in 1874.

In the 1860s Hardy had written a substantial amount ofunpublished verse, but during the next twenty years almost all hiscreative eort went into novels and short stories. Jude the Obscure,the last written of his novels, came out in 1895, closing a sequenceof ction that includes Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), TheReturn of the Native (1878), Two on a Tower (1882), The Mayor ofCasterbridge (1886), and Tess of the dUrbervilles (1891).

Hardy maintained in later life that only in poetry could he trulyexpress his ideas; and the more than nine hundred poems in hiscollected verse (almost all published after 1898) possess greatindividuality and power.

In 1910 Hardy was awarded the Order of Merit; in 1912 Emmadied and two years later he married Florence Dugdale. ThomasHardy died in January 1928; the work he left behindthe novels,the poetry, and the epic drama The Dynastsforms one of thesupreme achievements in English imaginative literature.

Alan Manford was formerly Head of English at a Birminghamcomprehensive school. For his Ph.D. he prepared a critical editionof A Pair of Blue Eyes and he has published articles and reviewsconcerning Thomas Hardy, as well as his own writing.

T im Dolin is a Research Fellow at Curtin University of Technol-ogy, Western Australia. He is the author of Mistress of the House:Women of Property in the Victorian Novel (1997), and George Eliot(2005), and co-editor (with Peter Widdowson) of Thomas Hardy andContemporary Literary Studies (2004). He has introduced CharlotteBronts Villette for Oxford Worlds Classics.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

THOMAS HARDY

A Pair of Blue Eyes

Edited with Notes by

ALAN MANFORD

With a new Introduction by

TIM DOLIN

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Text, Note on the Text, Explanatory Notes Alan Manford 1985Chronology Patricia Ingham 2002

Introduction, Select Bibliography Tim Dolin 2005

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CONTENTS

General Editors Preface vii

Map of Hardys Wessex viii

Map of Locations in A Pair of Blue Eyes x

Introduction xi

Note on the Text xxxix

Select Bibliography xliv

A Chronology of Thomas Hardy xlvii

A PAIR OF BLUE EYES 1

Appendix: The Opening of the TinsleysMagazine Edition 355

Explanatory Notes 357

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GENERAL EDITORS PREFACE

The rst concern in the Oxford Worlds Classics editions of Hardysworks has been with the texts. Individual editors have comparedevery version of the novel or stories that Hardy might have revised,and have noted variant readings in words, punctuation and styling ineach of these substantive texts; they have thus been able to excludemuch that their experience suggests that Hardy did not intend. Insome cases this is the rst time that the novel has appeared in acritical edition purged of errors and oversights; where possibleHardys manuscript punctuation is used, rather than what hiscompositors thought he should have written.

Some account of the editors discoveries will be found in the Noteon the Text in each volume, while the most interesting revisionstheir work has revealed are included as an element of the Explana-tory Notes. In some cases a Clarendon Press edition of the novelprovides a wealth of further material for the reader interested in theway Hardys writing developed from manuscript to nal collectededition.

I should like to thank Shirley Tinkler for her help in drawing themaps that accompany each volume.

S imon Gatrell

INTRODUCTION

Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot will prefer totreat the Introduction as an Epilogue.

Between professions

A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) was written at an important time inThomas Hardys life, and marks an important stage in his artisticdevelopment. He was in his early thirties, in love, and thinking ofmarriage, a course of action that would compel him to settle on adependable career. But would that career be in literature? When hebegan writing this novel in earnest, Hardy was a practising architect,living in London and working on a series of competition designs forschool buildings for the newly appointed London School Board, setup in the wake of the Forster Act, which had legislated for nationalelementary education a couple of years earlier. But although heapplied himself to architectural work during the winter 187172more steadily than he had ever done in his life before, he was neithervery successful nor very happy.1 He had spent sixteen years trainingfor and working in the professionexactly half his life to then. Yethe was still little more than a well-qualied assistant, who measuredsites and worked up drawings based on the designs of the varioussenior architects who employed him.2

Hardys own ambitions as a writer were largely to blame for thisfailure to advance in the profession, for architecture was not thevocation he had chosen. His mother, a dominant gure in his lifewho was ambitious for her intelligent son, had sent him to be articledto the Dorchester architect John Hicks, while he, for his own part,

1 Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), 89.

2 T. Roger Smith in this case. The most responsibility Hardy was ever given was onthe rebuilding of Turnworth Church near Blandford Forum for G. R. Crickmay, theWeymouth architect, in 1869. See C. J. P. Beatty, The Part Played by Architecture inthe Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (with Particular Reference to the Novels), Ph.D.thesis (University of London, 1963), 11227, and The Architectural Notebook of ThomasHardy (Dorchester: Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society, 1966).

dreamed Jude-like dreams of entering the Church as a university-educated man.3 But he was also cautious and pragmatic, and deter-mined to make the most of his chances to get ahead. His early careershows all the signs that he actively sought advancement in his profes-sion. Working in the oce of Arthur Blomeld in the Strand, heentered (and won) architectural competitions, spent his spare timeresearching the history of Western art in the National Gallery, madesketches and notes from buildings, and prepared for the voluntaryexaminations of the Royal Institute of British Architects.4 But hisliterary aspirations remained foremost, and the mid-Victorianbuilding boom allowed him to pursue them. As early as 1865, a notepencilled inside the back cover of a notebook shows that he wasthinking of cutting Arche if successf: in literature; but then, asif alarmed at his own recklessness, he scribbled another morereassuring note underneath: If lit. fails, try Arch.5

Hardy spent a long time waiting for a clear call . . . which coursein life to takethe course he loved, and which was his naturalinstinct, that of letters, or the course all practical wisdom dictatedthat of architecture6 while he struggled to establish himself as awriter. Although A Pair of Blue Eyes was the rst of his books to bepublished under his own name, it was his fourth novel, and broughtto an end an apprenticeship that had begun six years earlier in 1867with The Poor Man and the Lady. That rst eort was, by Hardysown account, an inammatory social satire which might well havebeen published but for a timely piece of advice from GeorgeMeredith, who read the manuscript for the publishers Chapman andHall and cautioned its young author (who was 28 years old by then)that it might irreparably damage his literary career at the outset.Hardy eventually abandoned the idea of trying to place The PoorMan.7 But like many other writers starting out, he could not bringhimself to let it go altogether, and he kept the manuscript close tohand, plundering it when he needed material for his rst threepublished novels: a sensation melodrama, Desperate Remedies (1871);

3 Hardy, Life and Work, 31.4 See the Schools of Painting notebook, dated 12 May 1863, in The Personal Note-

books of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard H. Taylor (London: Macmillan, 1978), 10514.5 Thomas Hardy, Thomas Hardys Studies, Specimens &c. Notebook, ed. Pamela

Dalziel and Michael Millgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 59, 89.6 Hardy, Life and Work, 61.7 After trying the novel unsuccessfully with Smith, Elder and Tinsley in 1869.

Introductionxii

a pastoral idyll, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872); and this onewhich is, signicantly, much more dicult to pin down to any singlegenre.8 In this respect A Pair of Blue Eyes is quite dierent from itspredecessors, and much more like the ction that would follow it: itnot only cannot be compared with [the work of] other writers, butcannot be classied under any known formula of literary art, as acritic observed in a mid-career survey of Hardys ction in theQuarterly Review in 1879.9

A Pair of Blue Eyes was also Hardys rst attempt at a novelwritten specically to be published rst as a serial in a popular maga-zine. We know from a surviving letter to William Tinsley, principal ofthe rm of Tinsley Brothers, who had published Desperate Remedies,that he had begun work on it as early as October 1871. Having nearlynished a little rural story (Under the Greenwood Tree: alreadycompleted by then, in fact10), he told Tinsley that he had set it asideat the request of criticfriends who were taken with D.R. to make astart on another novel, the essence of which is plot, without crimebut on the plan of D.R.11 The following April he alluded again to the3 vol novel, with which, he wrote, he had decided to proceed asrapidly as possible.12 At that stage, Hardy seems not to have mademuch progress at all, however. His dealings with Tinsley over DesperateRemedies had been far from satisfactory,13 and nothing had comefrom hopeful overtures towards other more prestigious publishinghouses (Macmillan had rejected him three times). By the middle of1872, not hearing back from Tinsley about the proposed new novel,he had descended again into a period of mental depression over hiswork and prospects.14 If we take his own word for it, he was on the

8 Hardy himself described them consecutively as a plot, an idyll, and a romance (thetitle of ch. 5 of the Life and Work). On A Pair of Blue Eyes as a romance, see below.

9 Unsigned survey review, New Quarterly Magazine (Oct. 1879), in R. G. Cox (ed.),Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 60.

10 It had been rejected by Macmillan barely a week earlier than this letter, whichseems to have been written with a view to interesting Tinsley in the more sensationalthat is, TinsleianA Pair of Blue Eyes (Tinsleys had published Mary ElizabethBraddons Lady Audleys Secret, the most famous of the sensation novels, in 1862).

11 The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard L. Purdy and MichaelMillgate, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 197888), i. 1314.

12 Ibid. 16.13 Hardy had paid 75 of his own money up front to cover the initial publishing costs,

and the novel had not done well. Nevertheless, some copies had sold, and he was anxiousthat Tinsley keep his side of the bargain and settle the account.

14 Hardy, Life and Work, 59.

Introduction xiii

verge of abandoning novel-writing altogether and devoting hisenergies to his architectural career when, in July, Tinsley unexpect-edly requested a novel for a serial in Tinsleys Magazine. Put on thespot, Hardy confessed he had nothing ready: On looking over theMS., he wrote back hurriedly, I nd it must have a great deal ofre-consideration.15 Yet by 15 August, barely a month later, the rstinstalment of the novel had already appeared; by the following Marchthe serial version was nished; and by May it had been published,with substantial revisions, in three volumes.16 This gruelling regimeset the pattern for the next two decades or more of Hardys writinglife. Having cut architecture as he had so often dared himselfto do, and with no other earnings or inherited wealth to fall backon, he came to depend upon the additional income earned fromserial publication, despite the constant pressure of deadlines, theinterference of editors, the sacrice of artistic unity to the exigen-cies of the part-issue, and the considerable constraints of populartaste.

With no previous experience of serial publication, and just a fewweeks to produce the rst instalment, Hardy needed to be resource-ful. He nished the School Board drawings at the end of July and leftimmediately for Cornwall to make a start. His intention was to drawsubstantially upon the abandoned Poor Man manuscript for someLondon scenes which he would weave into a story he had thought ofand written down long before, and which he now adapted, withconsiderable inventiveness, to locales, people, and events ready tohand in his own life.17 He settled to work in St Juliot, the Endelstowof A Pair of Blue Eyes, where he had been courting Emma LaviniaGiord, the sister-in-law of the local rector, for eighteen months ormore.18 He made the hero, Stephen Smith, an assistant architect likehimself whose father was a rural master mason and whose mothercame from a (supposedly once wealthy and noble) labouring-class

15 Hardy, Collected Letters, i. 17.16 Tinsley oered Hardy 200 for A Pair of Blue Eyes (then entitled A Winning

Tongue Had He) (ibid. i. 17).17 Hardy, Life and Work, 77. Robert Gittings argues that Hardys cannibalization of

the Poor Man manuscript may be seen in the adaptation of the squires name,Allancourt, to Swancourt (Young Thomas Hardy, 2nd edn. (London: Penguin, 1978),164).

18 Hardy did not marry Emma until 17 Sept. 1874, when Far from the Madding Crowdwas appearing to acclaim in the prestigious Cornhill Magazine.

Introductionxiv

family.19 Like Stephen, Hardy had been sent to St Juliot in March1870 to take measurements and make preliminary drawings for therestoration of the medieval church there, and had been met byEmma on his arrival.20 In a memoir written forty years later sherecalled how her brother-in-law had been laid up with gout andcould not be present to meet the London architect, and how she hadto receive him alone, and felt a curious uneasy embarrassment atreceiving anyone, especially so necessary a person. He stayed a week,but returned, as Stephen does, later in the summer for a three-weekholiday, during which time the courtship ourished. Encouraged, hecame two or three times a year from that time, and Emma rode herpretty mare Fanny with Hardy walking by her side as she showedhim some of the neighbourhoodthe clis, along the roads, andthrough the scattered hamlets . . . to Tintagel and TrebarwithStrand . . . [and] other places on the coast.21 Like Elfride, Emmafound herself falling in love with a mysterious London professional. Afew sentences from their only surviving love letter, written by Emma,is wonderfully redolent of the visionary atmosphere and erotic feel-ing Hardy was trying to capture in the novel: This dream of mylifeno, not dream, for what is actually going on around me seems adream rather. . . . I take him (the reserved man) as I do the Bible;nd out what I can, compare one text with another, & believe the restin a lump of simple faith.22 But the reserved man turned out to be,as Stephen is, her social inferior, and Emma agreed to marry himagainst the express wishes of her family (the scene in whichStephens suit is contemptuously dismissed by the Reverend Swan-court echoes a scene between Hardy and his future father-in-law).23

Over the years A Pair of Blue Eyes became more and more closelyassociated with the St Juliot idyll in Hardys mind, particularly afterEmmas death in 1912 released a ood of Cornwall poemsWhen I

19 Hardy was undecided about the Smiths exact social position in the manuscript andearly editions, where John Smith is variously a journeyman mason and a master-mason.

20 Her recollection of the meeting is recorded in part in ch. 5 of the Life and Work,and in Emma Hardy, Some Recollections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

21 Hardy, Life and Work, 73, 74.22 She later burned the rest: this one escaped only because Hardy transcribed it and

absorbed part of it into Chapter XIX of A Pair of Blue Eyes. See Letters of Emma andFlorence Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 3.

23 Although her father was a retired solicitor, and therefore a professional man likeHardy, her uncle was a canon in the Church of England, and later became Archdeaconof London.

Introduction xv

Set Out for Lyonnesse, Near Lanivet, 1872, and many of thePoems of 191213. To some extent the intimacy of these auto-biographical elements, and their later role in the provenance of someof Hardys greatest verse, have obscured other no less signicantconnections between A Pair of Blue Eyes and Hardys life in the early1870s. In particular, as we have seen, this novel was a product of theuncertainty of his position between architecture and literature.24 It isalso true, however, that Hardy himself associated literature, then aslater, not with ction but with poetry. So it would be truer to say thatA Pair of Blue Eyes was a product of the uncertainty of his positionbetween one profession and anotherwhat fellow novelist GeorgeGissing disparagingly called the profession of letters.25 Before hefelt condent of choosing the literary profession he had to be sure itpaid him well: as well as, or better than, architecture.26 Perhaps,though, choose suggests a resolve which Hardy did not really pos-sess. As Henry Knight tells Elfride in A Pair of Blue Eyes, . . . Idont choose [to write] in the sense you mean; choosing from a wholeworld of professions, all possible. It was by the constraint of accidentmerely. Not that I object to the accident (p. 148). The accidentalconstraints of economic necessity also forced Hardy to put aside anyaspirations to literature in order to make a living. He wrote toLeslie Stephen in 1874: Perhaps I may have higher aims some day,and be a great stickler for the proper artistic balance of the com-pleted work, but for the present circumstances lead me to wishmerely to be considered a good hand at a serial.27 There was nothingvery unusual about this situation. Hardy wanted to be a poet butneeded a steady income: like so many others in England and else-where he was forced to abandon poetry sooner or later for the sake

24 Hardy, Life and Work, 61.25 Ibid. 189. Gissing considered his own (and Hardys) ction to be literature,

however. It has been argued that Hardys claim to have been primarily a poet, and onlyaccidentally a novelist, was a later invention of the Life and Worka case of Hardyre-creating himself as the pure literary man: a piece of petit-bourgeois wish-fulllment(see Peter Widdowson, Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology (London:Routledge, 1989), 154). It should be remembered, of course, that he did write poems inthe 1860s; and that he was already publicly talking down his ction as early as 1900,when he only had one (not very successful) volume of poetry to his name: see WilliamLyon Phelpss recollection in James Gibson (ed.), Thomas Hardy: Interviews and Recol-lections (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 64.

26 Hardy reportedly told Tinsley (no very reliable source) that unless writing ctionpaid him well, he should not go on with it (Gibson (ed.), Interviews and Recollections, 8).

27 Hardy, Life and Work, 102.

Introductionxvi

of literary activities which are much better remunerated, such aswriting novels of manners.28 Still, the image of the literary manaman of cultural authority, university-educated and of independentmeanshad a powerful hold over him. And as we shall see, he founda way of reconciling the man of letters and the popular novelist,cultivating in its place an appealing up-to-date substitute: the imageof the literary professional.

Hardys extreme conscientiousness about the business of being aprofessional literary man has often been remarked,29 but it is lessoften noticed that something of that conscientiousness came out of,or was brought out by, the architectural training which so deeplyinstilled professional values in him. In fact, in the nal analysisHardys architectural training not only made him an architect, itmade him a novelist: it oered him a model of professional identityand culture which bestowed credibility and legitimacy on a careerchoice that was no less dicult to him because it was unavoidable.Fiction allowed Hardyas architecture had, and as it allowsStephen Smith in A Pair of Blue Eyesto move up in the world,retaining the social identity he had already assumed as a practicalprofessional man in London.30 That identity was eectively a sub-stitute for class identity. It both concealed and stood in for his socialorigins. Thus, the Reverend Swancourt assumes that the Londonprofessional man (p. 14) is of good character (he can be trustedwith his daughter) and therefore unimpeachably of good family.The guarantee of integrity . . . is the main distinguishingmark of the professional,31 who asserted his competence in per-formance, reliability, and conduct, and justied the charging ofprofessional fees, by a transparent, standardized process of training

28 Pierre Bourdieu, referring to writers in France at roughly the same time, in TheRules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford,Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 261.

29 See Widdowson, Hardy in History, 138.30 Hardy strongly associated London with practicality. In the Life and Work he wrote:

Hardy used to relate humorously that on the afternoon of his arrival he called to inquirefor lodgings at a house where was employed a bachelor some ten years older than himself,whose cousin Hardy had known. This acquaintance, looking him up and down, wassceptical about his establishing himself in London. Wait till you have walked the streetsa few weeks, he said satirically, and your elbows begin to shine, and the hems of yourtrousers get frayed, as if nibbled by rats! Only practical men are wanted here (p. 40).

31 Barrington Kaye, The Development of the Architectural Profession in England: ASociological Study (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1960), 17.

Introduction xvii

and examination.32 The architectural competitions which Hardyentered and won were just such forms of accreditation, and it issignicant that he valued them highly as professional credentials(not just as architectural credentials), citing them in biographicalentries for the rest of his life.

Professionalism came at a price, however, and Hardys growingdisenchantment with architecture in the 1860s paralleled its rapidlyaccelerating professionalization. Later he recalled nostalgically howhe had set out for fame and fortune in London in 1862, the year ofthe second International Exhibition at South Kensington. Like itsillustrious predecessor, the 1851 Great Exhibition, this extravaganzaof industrial and domestic design associated cultural advancementwith the industrial arts. It was also, more signicantly for Hardysinterests, the rst showcase for the reformist arts and crafts move-ment (William Morriss rm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co.exhibited there). Under the inuence of John Ruskin and the GothicRevival, the Arts and Crafts movement sought to integrate the workof creative artists into the built environment. When Hardy went towork for Blomeld, one of the leading gures in the Gothic Revival,he must have imagined that his future lay as such an artistarchitect.For all his diligent self-education in the history of art andarchitecture, however, he soon discovered that the architect was,

more than any other artist . . . at the mercy of his personal employer, andof Committees. After making the most scientic and skilful plans, eleva-tions, and sections, the result of much immediate study and of longexperience, he nds the whole disorganized or materially injured by thepresumptuous interference of some person or persons in power, whosechief or only qualication arises from ocial inuence and length ofpurse.33

In the 1860s there was already a degree of hostility between artistarchitects and professional architectsthose for whom the provisionof professional services and the promotion of professional valuesoverrode the claims of creative expression.34 Hardy, who describedhimself as a literary architecta person always suspect in the

32 Kaye, The Development of the Architectural Profession in England, 16.33 John Britton and Augustus Charles Pugin, quoted ibid. 117.34 Outright hostilities broke out in the 1890s: see Richard Norman Shaw and

Thomas Graham Jackson, Architecture a Profession or an Art; Thirteen Short Essays onthe Qualications and Training of Architects (London: J. Murray, 1892).

Introductionxviii

profession in those days,35 carried the terms of that conict intohis writing career. The professional writer and the artistwritervied with each other. They were, respectively, the novelist and thepoetor so Hardy would come to insist in his later years, forgettingthat ction was something more to him than a trade, which he hadnever wanted to carry on as such.36 From the beginning he was boththe exemplary professional, proud to be known and relied upon as agood hand at a serial, and the artist faced with the architects olddilemma of artistic autonomy,37 believing his work would always becompromised by the demands of the professional relationship.

Not only did Hardy become a professional novelist, he became, asSimon During has argued, the great novelist of professionalism andprofessional mobility,38 whose ction explores the conict betweenthe rewards and costs of that mobility. The attainment of a profes-sion may have proved to Hardy the most eective means of movingthrough the traditional class/caste system.39 But it brought intensepersonal pressures, as Raymond Williams described them, pre-eminently a loss of continuity from his own customary past and analways uncertain connection with the cultured metropolitan societyhe had entered, pressures described and enacted in his ction in themaking and failing of relationships, the crises of physical and mentalpersonality.40 In particular, During writes, there are three crucialpoints where these pressures erupt in Hardys novels. First, sexualityis dangerous because it cannot be brought under the control of theforces of professionalism, and is not attuned to the career trajectoriesof the professional or the kind of educated woman who mightbecome a professionals or rich mans wife.41 Secondly, Hardyattempts to overcome the decline of old rural life-ways and workpractices by ctionalizing continuities as well as discontinuitiesbetween the peasantry and the professional so as to conjure away thehistory of religious dissent, the centrality of urbanization, the key

35 Hardy, Life and Work, 80.36 Ibid. 189.37 Kaye, Architectural Profession, 31.38 Simon During, Hardy or James? Thoughts on Academic Literary Discrimination

Today, in Tim Dolin and Peter Widdowson (eds.), Thomas Hardy and ContemporaryLiterary Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 61.

39 Ibid. 61.40 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973),

199.41 During, Hardy or James?, 61.

Introduction xix

economic and social function of the industrial proletariat.42 Andthirdly, there is a profound loss of intimacy with nature.

A Pair of Blue Eyes, as it carried Hardy headlong out of oneprofession and into another, brought those personal pressures veryclose to the surface. If they are only imperfectly transmuted intolarger themes in the novel, that was because he was inexperiencedand harried by deadlines. But all the elements identied by Duringare there, and in a particularly overt form: the clash between sexualdesire and professional ambition; and the attempt to fuse artisanaland professional values, and in doing so reintegrate urban profes-sionalism into rural social forms and bring it into closer contact withthe natural world. Like other Hardy novels, the plot of A Pair ofBlue Eyes is motivated by a group (here, as elsewhere in Hardy, atriangle) of socially and sexually mismatched romantic protagonists,and it turns on the tension between their uneven mobility quite asmuch as their unequal standing. The story opensin comic mode,signicantlyas a thwarted romance between a rising professionalin transit from the rural artisan classes to the urban middle classes,and a socially ambitious, educated young woman who is his socialsuperior but whose mobility is curtailed by her sex. She is trapped ingenteel poverty, without access to money or profession (except, notvery realistically, the profession of female author). Her only recourseis to marryabove her own class ideally.

Stephen Smith: the practical man

Stephen Smith is not the rst of his social type to appear in Hardysction. Like Will Strong, the hero of The Poor Man and the Lady,and like Edward Springrove in Desperate Remedies, he is dclass,and cannot speak of his social origins.43 But he is also more sunny-natured and practically minded than his predecessors, and eminentlyadaptable to the dierent worlds in which he nds himself. If he isdiscomted by the discovery of his social deciencieshow chesspieces should be handled, how Latin is pronounced, how to ride ahorsehe nevertheless remains rather proud of his achievements,and condent of professional advancement and the social and nan-cial advancement it will bring. Like Jude Fawley after him, Stephen

42 During, Hardy or James?, 62.43 Widdowson, Hardy in History, 141.

Introductionxx

equates education, social mobility, and wealth: Shant I be glad, hebursts out to Elfride, when I get richer and better known, and hoband nob with [Henry Knight]! (p. 60).44 He is also optimistic aboutthe long-term success of his suit, and assured that when it ultimatelysucceeds it will make all the dierence to his place in the world:Why, to marry her would be the great blessing of my life, hedeclares to his mother, socially and practically, as well as in otherrespects (p. 85). True to the professional ethos, Stephen is perfectlyfrank about the practical advantages of marrying upfranker thanthe equally pragmatic gold-digger the Reverend Swancourt, whosecretively woos and wins the rich widow Mrs Troyton. ButStephens courtship does not go smoothly because the practical manhas almost no practical experience either as an architect or as a lover.He is, as we hear repeatedly, a very blooming boy (p. 23) who,although he grows in professional dignity (p. 33), comes quicklyto be dominated by Elfride. A number of critics have observedthat this relationship reverses normal gender roles. The sociallyinexperienced, feminized Stephen is completely subjugated to themore self-assertive though equally inexperienced Elfride. She hasbeen brought up in remote and solitary parishes by her father (hermother is dead), and has consequently enjoyed a certain tomboyishfreedom from the constraints of femininity which emboldens herin Stephens company. Class, in other words, temporarily overrulesgender, at least until Knight supersedes Smith. Then, her boldnesstrails o into gaucheness, and social and sexual hierarchies return tonormal. Elfride is put back in her placeboth as a woman and as thedaughter of a nouveau riche clergyman.45

However, Hardy also makes the point in A Pair of Blue Eyes thatprofessionalism overrules class, rst by masking itnobody askswho Stephen Smith is until he himself lets Elfride in on the secret ofhis parents: until then it is just assumed that he moves in the ordin-ary society of professional people (p. 68)and then by erasing it.When it becomes known locally that Stephen has been fted bydeputy-governors and Parsee princes and nobody-knows-who inIndia; is hand in glove with nabobs, and is to design a large palace,

44 In the rst-volume edition Stephen looks forward to being richer and bettereducated (A Pair of Blue Eyes, ed. Pamela Dalziel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 65).

45 Class . . . emerges at this stage as a more signicant social factor than gender (ed.Dalziel, p. 23).

Introduction xxi

and cathedral, and hospitals, colleges, halls, and fortications, by thegeneral consent of the ruling powers, Christian and Pagan alike(p. 322), his lowly parents nd themselves suddenly fted by the localpetit bourgeoisie, who had all previously snubbed them. Stephenduly arrives back in England a richer man (p. 338) and a middle-class man: the denite position in which he had rooted himselfnullied old local distinctions (p. 338).46 And all this, he modestlycondes to Knight, is but a natural professional progress (p. 325).

But there is a price to be paid for the rise of the practical man: thesacrice of individuality and originality of thought. The mental con-stitution of the aspiring Stephen, the narrator comments at onepoint, was one rare in the springtime of civilizations which

seems to grow abundant as a nation gets older, individuality fades, andeducation spreads; that is, his brain had extraordinary receptive powers,and no great creativeness. Quickly acquiring any kind of knowledge he sawaround him, and having a plastic adaptability more common in womanthan in man, he changed colour like a chameleon as the society he foundhimself in assumed a higher and more articial tone. He had not manyoriginal ideas, and yet there was scarcely an idea to which, under propertraining, he could not have added a respectable co-ordinate. (p. 88)

Stephens father, on the other hand, in common with most ruralmechanics, had too much individuality to be a typical working-mana resultant of that beach-pebble attrition with his kind onlyto be experienced in large towns, which metamorphoses the unit Selfinto a fraction of the unit Class (p. 83):

There was not the speciality in his labour which distinguishes the handi-craftsmen of towns. Though only a mason, strictly speaking, he was notabove handling a brick, if bricks were the order of the day; or a slate or tile,if a roof had to be covered before the wet weather set in, and nobody wasnear who could do it better. (p. 83)

This concern with the loss of the old broad-based artisanal skillsunder the increasing demand for specialized industrial work prac-tices would occupy Hardy again in The Hand of Ethelberta and Judethe Obscure,47 but here, in its rst expression, it is very close to home.

46 In the rst-volume edition, the denite position in which he had rooted himselfnullied all suckers of derivation from peasant ancestors (ed. Dalziel, p. 363).

47 In both cases it is closely linked with his own situation as a writer. Sol andDan Petherwin take to specialist house-decorating in The Hand of Ethelberta; JudeFawley takes on the life of an artisanal mason to pay his way to Christminster.

Introductionxxii

What he had encountered as a young professional architect was thesame demand for specialization; and what he feared about becominga professional writer was the struggle to reconcile his individualityand originality with what he called in the Life and Work theundoubted pecuniary value of a reputation for a speciality.48 Hewould ultimately solve this problem by specializing in stories aboutthe Dorset countryside and culture of his early life which very oftendramatize the interaction, although not always the continuity,between pre-professional and professional cultures (most obviouslyin the relationship between Henchard and Farfrae in The Mayor ofCasterbridge (1885) and Giles Winterborne and Edred Fitzpiers inThe Woodlanders (1887) ). But until the mid-1880s Hardy was deeplyresistant to being stereotyped as a rural romancer, and deeply resist-ant, as an autodidact in the mid-Victorian tradition, to the special-izing tendencies of the encroaching professional age, believing, as hehad in the mid-1860s, that there was no more painful lesson to belearnt by a man of capacious mind than that of excluding generalknowledge for particular.49 If he constantly returned to Bockhamp-ton to work on the early novels, it was not because he was con-sciously planning to write about life in rural Dorset. Rather, thatlifethe life of a successful rural skilled tradesman like his fatherwas always his refuge from stress50 and oered him, as a hopefulwriter prohibited the privilege of being a poet and uneasy withthe prospect of becoming a commercial popular novelist, a way ofconceiving himself as an artist:

Probably our countryman [John Smith] was not such an accomplishedarticer in a particular direction as his town brethren in the trades. But hewas, in truth, like that clumsy pin-maker who made the whole pin, andwho was despised by Adam Smith on that account and respected byMacaulay, much more the artist nevertheless. (p. 84)

Henry Knight: the literary man

To build a career as a popular writer with a real literary message,51

Hardys aim was to unite the best aspects of his two ideals: the ideal

48 Hardy, Life and Work, 105.49 Ibid. 56.50 Gittings, Young Thomas Hardy, 122.51 Hardy, Life and Work, 105.

Introduction xxiii

of the mid-Victorian literary man (the poet he imagined himself tobe in the 1860s) and the late-Victorian professional literary man (thenovelist he was forced by circumstances to be). If Stephen representsthe danger to an original mind of a pure professionalism, his rivalHenry Knight represents another kind of danger: the intellectual solip-sism of the man of letters. It has been suggested that Smith andKnight are projections of disparate elements within the novelistsown character, the youthful, socially unacceptable architect grad-ually supplanted by the clever, sententious yet sexually immaturewriter.52 But we do well to remember, as Michael Millgate remindsus, that the story, patterned on a series of parallels and rejoindersthe two games of chess, the lost and found earring, the correspond-ing incidents on the tower and the cli face, the return to theLuxellian vaulttraces Stephens ever-increasing assurance andsuccess and Knights growing sense of failure.53 Therein lies a vitalclue to the novels rigidly geometric and ironic pattern of repetitionsand doublings. After the departure of Stephen to Bombay and theadvent of Knights suit, there is little or no forward movement inA Pair of Blue Eyes. Everything hangs interminably in the air, asKnight hangs on the edge of the cli while time closes up like a fanin front of his eyes (pp. 2001). He is socially and intellectually far inadvance of the innocent Stephen (who is meanwhile busily gettingahead in another world, the innocent world of the rst half of thenovel). But although Knight is, strictly speaking, a professionalhimself (a barrister, working out of chambers at Bedes Inn inLondon), he is immobilized by his extreme idealism. He is a fossil-ized remnant, one might say, of another pre-professional life form,the pure life of the mind, and soon to be outstripped by a newgeneration of intellectuals-in-action.

Knight is the rst product in Hardys ction of the potentiallytragic drama of the over-evolution, the over-renement, of con-sciousness. He is the man of contemplative and introspective mindfor whom things do not go well because he possesses none of thatplastic adaptability supposedly more common in woman than inman. J. M. Barrie observed caustically that although he was appar-

52 Introduction to Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, ed. Roger Ebbatson(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), 17.

53 Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (London: Bodley Head,1971), 71.

Introductionxxiv

ently meant to be a very admirable man, Knight was, he thought,simply the most insuerable prig in ction.54 In some ways, he is anaspiring writers fantasy of a London literary man, and representscertain aspects of Hardys (as yet unfullled) ambitions, making asuccessful living and a name for himself in the dazzling world ofmetropolitan intellectual journalism, as his creator had often con-templated trying to do.55 Hardy claimed in the Life and Work thatKnight was really much more like [him] than Stephen was,56 a veryuncharacteristic admission that is partly an attempt at diversion(he has just reproduced passages from Emma Hardys journal thatshow how much Stephen owes to the young Hardy), and partly adeclaration of the signicance of his own renunciation of the purelyintellectual life for the life of a professional writer. For if theunoriginal Stephen is a kind of rationalization of Hardys abandon-ment of the architectural profession, the unadaptable Knight isequally a rationalization of his decision to set aside his aspirations topoetry and belles lettres for a career in popular ction.57

In this respect the inexperienced author of A Pair of Blue Eyes wasto his worldly craft what his heroes are to their worldly situations.Knight, too, is an inexperienced loverand really, he is the morefatally inexperienced of the three because practical knowledge, know-how, counts as nothing to him. Living the uncomplicated and clois-tered life of a bachelor in the distant penetralia (p. 121) of his rooms,in a house that is all soul (p. 122), he concerns himself only withhigher things, safely sheltered from the world going past his window:

Bedes Inn has this peculiarity, that it faces, receives from, and dischargesinto a bustling thoroughfare speaking only of wealth and respectability,whilst its postern abuts on as crowded and poverty-stricken a networkof alleys as are to be found anywhere in the metropolis. The moral

54 Thomas Hardy: The Historian of Wessex, Contemporary Review (1889), in Cox(ed.), Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, 159.

55 He is also, signicantly, a gure of the part-time professional whose involvementwith the law seems extremely cursory. In other words he is, just as Hardy was in the1860s and 1870s, a writer who supports himself by a profession he seems hardly topractise at all, apparently spending most of his time in chambers producing social andethical essays for The Present, as Hardy spent time writing poems in various architectsoces.

56 Hardy, Life and Work, 76.57 Signicantly, Knight bears strong similarities to Hardys Cambridge-educated

friend Horace Moule, who also wrote reviews and essays, and who committed suicide in1873. Hardy gave up architecture against Moules advice.

Introduction xxv

consequences are, rst, that those who occupy chambers in the Inn maysee a great deal of shirtless humanitys habits and enjoyments withoutdoing more than look down from a back window; and second, they mayhear wholesome though unpleasant social reminders through the mediumof a harsh voice, an unequal footstep, the echo of a blow or a fall, whichoriginates in the person of some drunkard or wife-beater, as he crosses andinterferes with the quiet of the square. Characters of this kind frequentlypass through the Inn from a little foxhole of an alley at the back, but theynever loiter there. (p. 120)

A spectator at his own personal Humanity Show (p. 125), themusing unpractical student (p. 273) is animated by a spirit of self-denial, verging on asceticism (p. 318), whose wrongheaded moralrightness (p. 317) brings him undone when sexual desire and loveconspire to involve him in humanity.58 He is not dclass likeStephen, but all the same he struggles to make sense of a socialreality he does not fully live inside. What he knows he knows onlyabstractly, coldly, in theory. When he falls in love, he nds his theor-etical convictions and ideological heterodoxy turned on their heads(like Angel Clare and Jude Fawley, who long to be able to quarantinethe life of the mind from the life of the body). A radical in matters ofsocial and ethical inquiry (p. 60), and a leading contributor to aradical journal, The Present, his relationship with Elfride reveals himto be in practice a deeply, instinctually conservative man.

The critique of intellectual idealism focused on Knight in A Pairof Blue Eyes is also carried out in the ironic counterpoint set upbetween a generalizing discourse about women and a plot whichturns on the limitations of mens knowledge of women. Much hasbeen made of the tendency of the narrator to oer platitudes aboutwomen: A woman must have had many kisses before she kisses well(p. 56); Women accept their destiny more readily than men (p. 74);women are cooler than men in critical situations of the passive form(p. 96); Elfride had her sexs love of sheer force in a man (p. 118).59

Most of these occur early in the novel, signicantly enough (as if thenarrator were changing with the characters). There are also occa-sional generalizations about men (shrewdness in love usually goes

58 Hardy describes it as moral purity in the rst-volume edition (ed. Dalziel, p. 341).59 See e.g. Dalziel (ed.), p. xxvii, and Mary Rimmer, Club Laws: Chess and the

Constructon of Gender in A Pair of Blue Eyes, in Margaret R. Higonnet (ed.), TheSense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993),20320.

Introductionxxvi

with meanness in general, p. 258). Moreover, a great deal of senten-tious generalizing is indulged in by the characters themselves, maleand female, with profound consequences for the plot. Elfride, forexample, is attracted to Stephen Smith because she takes at facevalue her fathers generalizations about men of business and theircharacter. The arch-generalizer, however, is Knight. He boasts com-placently to Stephen about his ignorance of women: it is only thosewho half know a thing that write about it, he says, happily confess-ing, All I know about women, or men either, is a mass of general-ities (p. 124). The narrator later conrms this weakness: In truth,the essayists experience of the nature of young women was far lessextensive than his abstract knowledge of them led himself and othersto believe. He could pack them into sentences like a workman, butpractically was nowhere (p. 161).

Ironically, Knights excessive sexual fastidiousness prevents himfrom falling in love with any woman who is not as inexperienced ashe is. Needless to say, an experienced woman is something verydierent from an experienced man. His slavish devotion to the pureidea implies a knightly devotion to sexual purity, embodied in thevirginal maiden. Elfride must be, he demands, as unpractised as I(p. 271). In earlier editions Knight says as unused as I, suggesting inthe double meaning of unusedinexperienced and not previouslyowned by any other mansome questionable assumptions aboutwomen that Hardy later subdued. Knights obsession with Elfridesvirginity, her raw state (p. 271; her unused state in earlier editions),is not primarily about mens objectication of women, but about theexclusion of womena rising social group, like professionalsfromthe newly available professional trajectories. If, as During notes, theprofessional man is the social type against which all other charactersare implicitly measured in Hardy, where does that leave women,whose destinies must continue to be worked out through love andmarriage and not through professional advancement?60 The socialimmobility of women outside marriage is stressed by one of thenovels eloquent theorizers, Mrs Smith, in Chapter X:

Every woman now-a-days . . . if she marry at all, must expect a father-in-law of a rank lower than her father. The men have gone up so, and the

60 During, Hardy or James?, 62. Hardy tackles this question most directly in TheHand of Ethelberta (1876).

Introduction xxvii

women have stood still. Every man you meet is more the dand than hisfather; and you are just level with her . . . . men all move up a stage bymarriage. Men of her class, that is, parsons, marry squires daughters;squires marry lords daughters; lords marry dukes daughters; dukesmarry queens daughters. All stages of gentlemen mate a stage higher; andthe lowest stage of gentlewomen are left single, or marry out of their class.(pp. 857)

Elfride, like Bathsheba Everdene, Eustacia Vye, and Sue Brideheadafter her, is unsure of what she wants, what she is entitled to, andwhat she can command: what is in her power to be and do. Herindecisiveness cannot be solemnized, as Knights is, by the clash ofideal ambitions (p. 304) and worldly circumstances (he is, the novelrepeatedly hints, a Hamlet gure). Elfrides ambitions are broughtup short by the same constraints, but her indecisiveness can beconstrued only as coquetry, even though the narrator points out thatwomans ruling passionto fascinate and inuence those morepowerful than she (p. 179)is subdued in her.

It is ironic, too, and revealing of the ideological deadlocks in thisnovel, that Elfrides belated pragmatism cannot avert her tragedy:indeed it is rather helped along by the sacrice of ideal ambitions topractical compromises. At rst she suers from having too little ofthe plastic adaptability of her sexshe has more of Sue Brideheadthan Arabella Donn, to look forward to Jude the Obscurebecause, asshe is well aware, a pragmatic woman is taken as a scheming woman.Knight wished earnestly to direct his powers into a more practicalchannel, and thus correct the introspective tendencies which hadnever brought himself much happiness, or done his fellow-creaturesany great good (p. 304). But Elfride is too imaginative and notpractical enough to inuence him in her favour (p. 296). Ultimatelyshe falls victim to her one and only pragmatic decisionto marryLuxellian in order to help her family and turn her useless life tosome practical account (p. 351).

Comedy, tragedy, romance?

Elfrides story presents signicant formal challenges for Hardy. Asthe heroine of a rudimentary Bildungsroman, A Pair of Blue Eyes iscentrally concerned with her growth and development, which ittraces, however, through a clumsy transition from one dramatic

Introductionxxviii

mode to another, as the comedy of inexperience gives way to thetragedy of experience. But for many readers A Pair of Blue Eyes isneither properly comic nor properly tragic, but something inbetweenand something other than a tragicomedy. It is true thatnothing in the development of the story or in Elfrides characterprepares us for the catastrophe. Her death by miscarriage is almostan afterthoughtan unfortunate accident, but not dramaticallydependent upon anything that has gone before it. The novel ismore successful at invoking an idea of tragedy, or rather an idea ofthe relationship between comedy and tragedy, an idea that pre-occupied Hardy throughout his life: that comedy is tragedy if youonly look deep enough.61 Wanting to look deeper into the comicthemes of Under the Greenwood Tree, which had captured the essenceof its Shakespearian title (taken from As You Like It) in the melan-choly sweetness of the courtship between Fancy Day and DickDewy, he begins A Pair of Blue Eyes with the same intention: toexplore the impermanence of youth and young love. Hence thebooks epigraph:

A violet in the youth of primy nature,Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,The perfume and suppliance of a minute;No more. (Hamlet, i. iii. 710)

The initial love scenes between Elfride and Stephen, presenting avery interesting picture of Sweet-and-Twenty (p. 17), invite us tonish Festes song from Twelfth Night: Youths a stu will notendure. But the epigraph comes from Hamlet, and hints darkly atsome incipient tragedy. Young love may be sweet, not lasting, but itmay also be something to fear. In the scene from which the epigraphis taken, Laertes warns Ophelia about Hamlets triing attentionsand counsels her to fear them. Compressed in the epigraph, there-fore, is the brief love of Elfride (the violet echoing her blue eyes)and Stephen, both in the youth of primy nature, and the moreominous arrival of Knight, with his Hamlet-like xations andsuspicions. It also acts as the prologue to a number of relatedallusions to mutability: the power of time to destroy everything ofhuman value. Echoes are heard in Shelleys When the Lamp is

61 Hardy, Life and Work, 381.

Introduction xxix

Shattered, a setting of which (set to music by her mother) Elfridesings for Stephen in Chapter III:

O Love! who bewailestThe frailty of all things here,

Why choose you the frailestFor your cradle, your home, and your bier! (p. 21)

Shelleys poem laments the inescapable dependence of transcendentthingsbeauty, love, music, splendour, and poems themselvesontheir expression in fragile material forms: a cloud, a human body, alute, a lamp. Lines from it foreshadow Elfrides fateshe is theweak one . . . singled | To endure what it once possessedandKnights torments, when loves passions will rock thee and Brightreason will mock thee.

The shift from comic to tragic mode is in keeping with the novelsother patterns of repetition: characters and scenes introduced in thecomic rst half return or are repeated in the second half as grimdoubles of themselves. Mrs Jethway is notable in this regard. Shestarts out as an insignicant gure of fun. Elfride blithely sits withher new lover on Felix Jethways grave (he died, his mother believes,of unrequited love for Elfride). As the novel proceeds, Mrs Jethwaygradually becomes more prominent and sinister, and is ultimatelytransformed into a Gothic avenger, a piece of stage machinery(necessary to Hardy) to bring about Elfrides downfall. Similarly, theepisode in which Elfride loses her earring in the alcove on the cliwhen she and Stephen rst kiss begins as an inconsequential love-game between the two comic lovers. When Elfride remembers wherethe stray jewel must have dropped, she recalls a faint sensation ofsome change about me (p. 62). It is not until much later that thesexual implications of her lossand the sensation of changeareforcefully, and very eectively, realized. In the companion scene inChapter XXVIII, when Knight kisses Elfride, she is again dis-composed and claps her hand to her ear, saying involuntarily: Ah,we must be careful! I lost the other ear-ring doing like this (p. 259).By Chapter XXX, when Knight, ushed with jealousy, recalls theincident and realizes its signicance, the jewel lost in the alcove hasbecome the worm in the bud. Elfrides concealment of her rst loveris transformed into her concealment of her lost otherher virginity:We must be careful. I lost the other by doing this! (p. 284).

Introductionxxx

These Gothic appurtenances and strained coincidences are all of apiece with what Michael Millgate describes as the novels persistentalternations of mode, and . . . general failure to establish functionalrelationships between disparate elements of the total ction.62 ToMillgate it is less a tragicomedy than (borrowing from HamletsPolonius) a comicaltragical novel, a designation which has theadvantage of emphasising the separation of the two elements and ofsuggesting, even so, no more than an approximation to authenticallycomic and tragic eects.63 Indisputably A Pair of Blue Eyes fails inachieving dramatic unity: do we put that down to the novelsimmaturity in its views of life and in its workmanship, as Hardy didin the 1912 postscript to the Preface? Or was he, pressed for time,forced to stitch together incongruous elements from earlier novels: atendency towards melodrama and sensationalism, clumsily mani-fested in the daring sexuality, jittery tone, and laboured coincidencesof Desperate Remedies; a rare talent for vivid poetic description; aninterest in the ction of ideas and a self-conscious literariness; and anew elementthe intimately known and closely observed life-waysof village working folk so much admired by a handful of readers ofUnder the Greenwood Tree? The answer, I think, lies with the novelstwo heroes. Neither man can be entertained as a satisfactory partnerfor Elfride, and Hardy is determined that both shall end up unhappyand incomplete: hence the necessity for the denouement. But whathappens at the level of the story is also happening at the level of thenovels discourse. Neither the litratteur nor the professional tri-umphs because neither is complete: each has something the otherneeds. Played out in the plot of A Pair of Blue Eyes is a drama ofthe inadequacy of the purely literary and the purely professionalstandpoints for a writer taking the plunge at last as a popular novelistwith a real literary message.

Hardy must have believed he had just failed to synthesize literaryand commercial imperatives in A Pair of Blue Eyes because he nallydecided, hesitantly, against including it among the Novels ofCharacter and Environment in his classication of his works for the1912 Macmillan Wessex Edition. Instead he settled it at the top ofthe second category, the Romances and Fantasies, and linked it

62 Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist, 74.63 Ibid.

Introduction xxxi

back to Tess of the dUrbervilles, The Woodlanders, and the othermajor novels by remarking in his 1912 postscript to the Preface thatit represented the romantic stage of an idea which was furtherdeveloped in a later book (p. 4).64 However, as Pamela Dalziel haspointed out, A Pair of Blue Eyes is indeed as much a novel ofcharacter and environment as a romance because, while its plotmight be highly articial, character in fact determines events ratherthan vice versa.65 It is, as Hardys friend Horace Moule declared inhis Saturday Review notice, a book of really tragic power which, hewrote, had been evolved out of simple materials.66 By simplematerials Moule meant, presumably, the simple-minded materialsof run-of-the-mill serial romances such as Tinsleys Magazine nor-mally published (A Pair of Blue Eyes was, according to John Suther-land, the only novel of literary note to appear in its pages67). Hardysnovel is abundant in the stock plot devices and rhetorical ourishesof the magazine story: secrecy and mystery; thwarted love; impas-sioned and highly conventionalized declarations of desire (as whenElfride swoons as she summons up those divinely cut lips of his:p. 39); elements of adventure and suspense, including a (literal)clihanger; and the loves and woes, expectations and despairs,of imaginary beingsall in a high-melodramatic register (seeAppendix). The self-consciousness with which the novel handlesthese orthodox romance ingredientsHardy had one eye on therequirements of the form and another on its artistic possibilitieshas been somewhat diminished by the layers of revision he laterlavished on A Pair of Blue Eyes (this novel was revised more oftenand more thoroughly than any other). The original Tinsleys

64 Of the seventeen volumes released in 1912, nine were Novels of Character andEnvironment, ve were Romances and Fantasies, and three were categorized asNovels of Ingenuity. The later book Hardy refers to could be nearly any one of theNovels of Character and Environment: after all, his story is [almost] always the storyof one woman in her relations to two or three men, as the New Quarterly surveyobserved in 1879. Cox (ed.), Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, 62. The scheme isreversed in Jude the Obscure, where one man is shown in relation to two women.

65 Introduction to Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, ed. Dalziel, p. xx.66 Horace Moule, Saturday Review, in Cox (ed.), Thomas Hardy: The Critical

Heritage, 15. The awkward use of the passive voice here seems to insinuate that Hardywas not altogether in control of this process.

67 John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (London: Longman,1988), 631.

Introductionxxxii

Magazine version of the opening of Chapter I juxtaposes a dense,ironic, prefatory apology for the signicance and insignicance ofthe beings in the story (somewhat in the manner of Sir WalterScotts prefaces), with an opening scene in which Elfride Swancourtis reading a romance (see Appendix). That she is reading a Tinsleyromance seems to be indicated from the crimson covers of thevolume (lavishly and colourfully bound three-deckers were a hallmark of Tinsleys68) which so absorbs her:

The title of the novel it is not worth while to give, but it detailed in itsconclusion the saddest contretemps that ever lingered in a gentle andresponsive readers mind since ction has taken a turnfor better orworsefor analysing rather than depicting character and emotion.(Appendix)

The original function of this abandoned beginning was to placewhat is now the opening description of Elfride as a girl whoseemotions lay very near the surface (p. 7) rmly within the context ofthe conventionalized woman reader of romances (a function taken upby the later characterization of her as a conventional silly ladynovelistauthor of The Court of Kellyon Castle69). Its purpose wasalso to update the conventional eighteenth-century warning againstthe reading of romance by womenas in Charlotte Lennoxs FemaleQuixote (1752), for exampleand place Elfride in the company ofother heroines who are avid consumers of romance, overly imagina-tive girls on the brink of womanhood whose only experience of life isthrough ction (as Austen did in Northanger Abbey and Sense andSensibility; and Flaubert in Madame Bovary). She never forgot thatnovel, the narrator of the Tinsleys version observes, not because itwas the most powerful she had ever read but because it was the lasttime in her life that her emotions were ever wound to any height bycircumstances which never transpired (Appendix).

Circumstances: this key word in Hardys vocabulary drawstogether his conceptions of tragedy and romance. As PeterWiddowson has argued, tragedy is really something closer to satire

68 Sutherland, Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, 631. Hardy may have omittedthis opening from the three-volume rst edition because he fully expected A Pair ofBlue Eyes to appear in crimson covers itself.

69 See George Eliot, Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, in Essays of George Eliot, ed.Thomas Pinney (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963).

Introduction xxxiii

in Hardy: a form of ction in which the farcical absurdity of thehuman lot in the general scheme of things is made predominant.70

A Plot, or Tragedy, Hardy wrote in a note attributed in the Life andWork to April 1878, should arise from the gradual closing in of asituation that comes of ordinary human passions, prejudices, andambitions, by reason of the characters taking no trouble to ward othe disastrous events produced by the said passions, prejudices, andambitions.71 But the events themselves do not always take place in aprobable universe. We see for the rst time in A Pair of Blue Eyesthe distinctive quality of Hardys tragic romances: the power ofmere events on certain kinds of character, Moule noted, calling thenovel a tragedy of circumstancean expression that would haveits later signicant echo in Hardys own expression the satire ofcircumstances.72 Hardy was fascinated by strange conjunctions ofphenomena, particularly those of a trivial everyday kind (p. 65),and deliberately introduced especially unusual or striking events,events that seem scarcely plausible in realistic stories. For him itwas not improbabilities of incident but improbabilities of characterthat matter.73 For this reason, his absurdist tragedies are never faraway from farce: If you look beneath the surface of any farce yousee a tragedy, a note of 1888 records; and, on the contrary, if youblind yourself to the deeper issues of a tragedy you see a farce.74

And for the same reason, Hardys realism is never far away fromromance.

A Pair of Blue Eyes is almost more Hardyan than any of Hardysnovels because it teeters so precariously between tragedy and farce,and between realism and romance. This is the only occasion onwhich methods, concerns, and motives that are, in subsequentnovels, almost diametrically opposed, coalescealbeit uneasily. Thebalance between improbable incidents and probable characters isnot yet very well struck in A Pair of Blue Eyes. As a result, it

70 Peter Widdowson, Thomas Hardy at the End of Two Centuries: From Page toScreen, in Dolin and Widdowson (eds.), Thomas Hardy and Contemporary LiteraryStudies, 182.

71 Hardy, Life and Work, 123.72 Moule, in Cox (ed.), Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, 60. The term satire of

circumstances was rst used by Hardy in The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), and as the titleof his 1914 volume of verse Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries.

73 Hardy, Life and Work, 183.74 Ibid. 224.

Introductionxxxiv

allows us to see clearly in one work the two directions of Hardysctional imagination, towards the tragic novels, on the one hand, andtowards those romances of contemporary life that are more properlycomedies or satires of manners, on the other: most especially TheHand of Ethelberta (1876), but also A Laodicean (1881), and Two on aTower (1882). Like these other so-called minor novels, A Pair ofBlue Eyes is set more rmly in the here and now than Hardysbest-known ction.

Most of all, the callowness of A Pair of Blue Eyes gives us aremarkable insight into the importance of romance in Hardys c-tion. It is, we might say, a romance of character and environment,and prompts us to read the major novels afresh in this light. Hardyslife and the rst phases of his work were framed, after all, by the twomajor revivals of romance during the modern period. He was born inthe immediate aftermath of the romance revival associated with SirWalter Scott and the Romantic poets, and dominant between 1780and 1830; and he established himself as a novelist in the yearsdirectly before the resurgence of romance in the 1880s associatedwith Robert Louis Stevenson, Rider Haggard, Andrew Lang, andothers, which led on to a boom in mass-market ctional romance inthe 1890s and beyond.75 The epigraph to his rst published novel,Desperate Remedies, was from Scott, and introduces what willamount to a cardinal principle of Hardys ction: Though anunconnected course of adventures is what most frequently occurs innature, yet the province of the romance-writer being articial, thereis more required from him than a mere compliance with thesimplicity of reality.76 Here he openly identies himself as aromance-writer, something he became increasingly unwilling todo as romance ction ourished in the commercial marketplace,preferring ultimately to call romance by another name: artice.77 But

75 Epitomized by writers as diverse as Marie Corelli, Hall Caine, and John Buchan.76 Scott, Introduction to the 1830 edition of The Monastery (1820). It was misquoted

by Hardy in the rst edition of Desperate Remedies: Though a course of adventureswhich are only connected with each other by having happened to the same individual iswhat most frequently occurs in nature, yet the province of the romance-writer beingarticial, there is more required from him than a mere compliance with the simplicity ofreality.

77 Until he was no longer selling new ction into a market dominated by popularromance in the late 1890s, at least. Writing as an established poet in the 1912 Preface toA Pair of Blue Eyes, and of course in his 1912 Wessex Edition denomination Romancesand Fantasies, Hardy openly acknowledges the romantic dimensions of his ction.

Introduction xxxv

he means by artice what Stevenson meant by romance when thelatter wrote: the novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by itsresemblances to life, which are forced and material . . . but by itsimmeasurable dierence from life, which is designed and signi-cant.78 Hardys ction puts on display its immeasurable dierencefrom life, invoking one denition of romance in Johnsons Diction-arya lie; a ctionin its fascination with the fanciful andimprobable. And like Scotts Essay on Romance in the 1822 sup-plement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (which describes it as actitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turnsupon marvellous and uncommon incidents79), Hardys use of theword uncommon in a passage in the Life and Work teases out therelationship between realism and romance in his writing:

The real, if unavowed, purpose of ction is to give pleasure by gratifyingthe love of the uncommon in human experience, mental or corporeal. . . .

The writers problem is, how to strike the balance between the uncom-mon and the ordinary so as on the one hand to give interest, on the otherto give reality.

In working out this problem, human nature must never be madeabnormal, which is introducing incredibility. The uncommonness must bein the events, not in the characters.80

A Pair of Blue Eyes shows Hardy trying to strike that balancebetween the uncommon and the ordinary, striving for a high theatri-cality in painterly scenes of human and natural landscapes in whicheects of light predominate, and in vividly rendered incidentsodd scenes in which the viewer is drawn by curiosity to some com-bination of eects and by strange conjunctions of phenomena.This novel is full of remarkable vignettes, which have a kind of lightand warmth all of their own: they stand out like small lyric poems(which, in a way, they are), of such intense interest to Hardy inthemselves that they betray a certain reckless indierence to thewhole of which they are supposedly a part. As I have suggested, thisis not altogether a by-product of Hardys hurried and inexpert job of

78 A Humble Remonstrance (1884), in Edwin M. Eigner and George J. Worth (eds.),Victorian Criticism of the Novel, Cambridge English Prose Texts (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1985), 217.

79 Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott,Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 10.

80 Hardy, Life and Work, 154.

Introductionxxxvi

putting this ragbag of elements together under the superheated,articial conditions of serial publication.81 A reviewer of Far from theMadding Crowd counselled him the following year to revise withextreme care, and refrain from publishing in magazines if he was towrite a rst-rate novel.82 But really, the brilliance of his writing isdicult to disentangle from its badness, and almost every one ofHardys contemporary critics recognized very early on that this waswriting so clevera word that turns up in virtually every review inthe 1870s, and suggests one important link between Hardy andKnight, whom Elfride dismisses as Mr Clever83writing so ori-ginal in atmosphere and in character, that its brilliant qualities arelikely to neutralise the glare of its equally prominent faults.84 Thereviewers were nonetheless inclined to give those faults a great dealof prominence, so that Hardys growing fame was accompanied by anotoriety for bad writing: a tendency to clumsy and inelegantmetaphors, and . . . mannerism and aectation,85 improbabilitiesand articialities of plot, chance and coincidence, and poor charac-terization. (Who can forget Henry Jamess telling jibe in his reviewof Far from the Madding Crowd: Everything human in the bookstrikes us as factitious and insubstantial; the only things we believe inare the sheep and the dogs?86) In recent decades critics have come torecognize in these faultswhich many of his contemporariescondemned as the lapses of taste of an arriviste and an autodidactsomething of the subversive genius of Hardys imagination. Thatsubversiveness was not a product of his audacity (he was not in theprivileged position of the avant-garde, free to break with aesthetictraditions) nor an unintended side-eect of his vulgarity. It is true:he was denied a university education and the social capital itdelivered. Just as Stephen cannot pronounce his Latin or ride ahorse, so Hardy did not knowsuperior critics saidwhen not touse absurd coinages like prelusively (p. 14), or synthetised (in

81 Millgate, Thomas Hardy, 67.82 Unsigned review, Athenaeum, 5 Dec. 1874, in Cox (ed.), Thomas Hardy: The

Critical Heritage, 20.83 Reminiscent, too, of John Morleys opinion of The Poor Man and the Lady in 1868

as some clever lads dream (Hardy, Life and Work, 60).84 Andrew Lang, Academy, 2 Jan. 1875, in Cox (ed.), Thomas Hardy: The Critical

Heritage, 35.85 Unsigned review, Saturday Review, 9 Jan. 1875, in Cox (ed.), Thomas Hardy: The

Critical Heritage, 39.86 Nation, 24 Dec. 1874, in Cox (ed.), Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, 31.

Introduction xxxvii

Chapter VII of the rst edition; Hardy later substituted cried).Whether he believed, as Knight did, that a time was coming whenevery man will pronounce even the common words of his owntongue as seems right in his own ears, and be thought none the worsefor it; that the speaking age is passing away, to make room for thewriting age (p. 49), is unclear. He would soon have learned thatwriting could not completely conceal the irrepressible cloven foot ofthe upstart (p. 81). But what matters is that he did nally achievewhat he set out to do: to make a good living as a professional, andmake great art.

Introductionxxxviii

NOTE ON THE TEXT

The editor of A Pair of Blue Eyes faces a dicult but interestingchallenge when determining a copy-text. The textual history of thenovel is exceptionally long: the relevant witnesses span some half acentury. It is also quite complicated. There is a relatively straight-forward ancestral series of texts with each succeeding one containingsubstantive authorial revisions and its fair share of transmissionalerrors; but there is evidence too of authorial attention to the novelsstylingits spelling, punctuation, and so on. Thus, the further eachtext is removed from the manuscript, while it is nearer to containingHardys nal intentions, it will also contain a greater aggregate ofcompositorial corruption: each resetting of the novel introduces newauthorial revision and correction, but at the same time also a freshbatch of compositorial deviation from copy.

The relevant texts are, in chronological order: the manuscript(MS); the serialization in Tinsleys Magazine (TM); the rst edition,published by Tinsley Brothers (TB); the second edition, publishedby Henry King (HK); the Osgood, McIlvaine edition (OM); theWessex edition, published by Macmillan (WE); and the Mellstockedition, published by Macmillan (ME). No editions printed inAmerica, Europe, or the British Colonies have any authority (manyin any case merely used OM or WE plates), nor does the last re-setting of type within Hardys lifetime (the 1927 Uniform edition).There are in addition two extant lists of authorial revisions and twoauthorially marked texts which have considerable bearing on ourunderstanding of Hardys nal intentions.

The presence of Emma Giords hand on some half-dozen leavesin the MS (fos. 81, 82, 82 verso, 87, 102, 105 verso, and 106a) raisesslight doubts about its absolute authority (see Suleiman M. Ahmad,Emma Hardy and the MS. of A Pair of Blue Eyes , Notes andQueries, new series, xxvi (1979), 3202), but they are negligible incomparison with the problems caused by the fact that the holographMS is not complete. Only three of the eleven parts are now extant,those representing the copy for the September, October, and Januaryinstalments of TM (that is, Chapters IVIII and XVXVIII). Thismakes it extremely dicult to use the MS as copy-text because of

the impossibility of reconstructing entirely its styling (although thestyling of the extant MS is quite adequate).

The rst printed text of A Pair of Blue Eyes is the text serialized inTinsleys Magazine. It appeared in eleven monthly parts fromSeptember 1872 to July 1873. Although TM is the nearest printedtext to the authors MS (this itself is not entirely true, as will bemade clear), the amount of compositorial interference in the threeinstalments compared with surviving MS copy does not inspirecondence.

The rst edition, of which there was taken only one impression,was published in three volumes in 1873 by Tinsley Brothers. Theprinters copy for TB was a combination of the September to AprilTM text and the MS for the rest. In other words, for Chapters IXXVIII the copy for TB was TM and Hardy made revisions to thisin the TB proofs; for Chapters XXIXXL the TB text derives notfrom TM but directly from the now lost MS and contains substantivereadings qualitatively superior to TM.

The second edition was published by Henry King in one volumein 1877. It was reissued by Kegan Paul, and the same plates wereused by Sampson Low. It seems likely that the printers copy for HKwas a copy of TB, marked by Hardy, in that the publishers letter of13 April 1877 states that he would like to know the extent of anyalterations when the book is sent. As quite a number of these revi-sions were made by Hardy in reaction to criticisms made in 1873, itis probable that these accompanied the copy of TB submitted toHenry King. There are a few variants between the editions using theHK plates, mainly corrections made to the plates for the 1880reprint and for the Sampson Low edition (probably made in 1886)and punctuation dierences caused by type wear. The 1880 correc-tions may be authorial but are probably editorial: however, in eachcase they show a return to TB readings. One of the 1886 variants isalmost certainly an authorial revision (namely, in his face becomesimmediately); two others might be, but are both acceptable in anycase (the misprint damned becomes dammed; and fartherbecomes further, which is consistent with Hardys practice).

Osgood, McIlvaine published A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1895 as vol-ume iv of their uniform edition of The Wessex Novels. The OM textis a revision of HK, both of its substantives and its styling.Unfortunately, internal evidence suggests that the OM compositors

Note on the Textxl

were not always too careful. OM plates were used by Macmillan fortheir Uniform edition (1902, and reprints) and Pocket edition (1906,and reprints).

Macmillan published A Pair of Blue Eyes as volume x of theWessex edition in 1912. The same plates were used in America forHarpers Autograph edition (1915) and Anniversary edition (1920),and revised for the 1920 reprint of the Wessex edition in Britain.The printers copy for the 1912 WE was probably a 1908 printing ofthe Uniform edition marked by Hardy: a volume corrected byauthor was sent by Macmillan to Clark, the printer, on 8 June 1912.There are some 375 styling variants between OM and WE (includingthe omission of approximately 175 commas). That most of these arelikely to be authorial is indicated by the existence of the printerscopy for the Wessex edition of The Woodlanders in which Hardymarked over 400 revisions to styling (including the deletion ofapproximately 440 commas). It is also interesting that a comparisonof these variants (in A Pair of Blue Eyes) with the MS reading inthose cases where the MS is extant shows that three-quarters of theWE readings revert to what was in the MS.

For all of Hardys other novels the 1912 WE marks the nal stageof revision. However, this is not the case with A Pair of Blue Eyes. InJune 1919 he sent to the publisher a list of revisions for A Pair ofBlue Eyes to be included in the Mellstock edition (a copy of this listis extant). ME was printed in two volumes, using WE as printerscopy and incorporating the 1919 revisions. Further revisions werealso made at the proof stage. In April 1920 Hardy sent a further listof revisions to be incorporated in a reprint of WE (a copy of this listis also extant).

This situation is made even more complicated by the fact thatsometime after this Hardy marked study copies of both WE (1912)and ME. The ME study copy contains authorial annotations pen-cilled on four pages of volume ii: three are corrections and oneinforms us that the ME proofs were not read further than p. 48 ofthat volume. The WE study copy has revisions marked which wereobviously entered at several dierent times: Hardy used greencrayon, pencil, blue crayon, red crayon, black ink, and glued onpatches from the proofs of the 1920 WE reprint. On the recto of thefree endpaper at the front of the copy Hardy wrote several com-ments, including the date 1924 and a list of page references to

Note on the Text xli

Errata still uncorrected. It is a sobering thought that this presentedition, originally appearing sixty years after Hardy wrote thesewords, will be the rst to include all these emendations.

There is indeed much evidence concerning Hardys nal inten-tions. To an extent this is reassuring, but it does bring its own dif-culties in that there is a certain amount of disagreement betweenthe witnesses, and taken together they show Hardy continually tin-kering with the text, considering a revision, working out how itshould be worded, sometimes changing his mind and reverting to aprevious reading, adding revisions even after a list had been sent tothe printer. A fuller account of the later textual history is given in myarticle Thomas Hardys Later Revisions in A Pair of Blue Eyes,PBSA 76 (1982), 20920 (although I do not mention there themarked copy of ME).

Given this textual situation, the choice of copy-text is not an easymatter. To reiterate, the particular and chief diculties are these:lack of a complete extant MS, a great deal of compositorial interfer-ence with the styling of the rst printed text, no one printed textbeing nearest in its entirety to the MS, and demonstrable authorialattention to the styling of the text. Faced with misgivings about anearly text as copy-text and the strong argument that WE does pres-ent something near to Hardys nal intentions concerning styling(except for a few later alterations which are easily taken intoaccount), I have decided to take WE 1912 as the basis for the stylingof this edition. Into the text are admitted the authorial revisions forME, WE 1920, and those marked in the two study copies.

This decision, however, has not absolved me from the responsibil-ity of examining all authorial texts before WE, tracing each variant,and readmitting to the text any reading which may have been oustedwithout authorial knowledge or sanction. In other words, by givingthe text the attention that the author would not have had the leisurefor, to aim towards what he might have wished had he been able tocollate all the texts himself.

This has led to a number of emendations to the styling of thecopy-text: for example, where a possibly hyphenated word can beshown to have a form in WE which deviates from MS because ofhaving been split over a line in a previous edition rather than becauseof authorial revision. Spellings and hyphenations which accord withHardys demonstrable practice (allowing of course for deliberate

Note on the Textxlii

authorial variationas in checkmate/check-mate, which mightbe intended to show dierences of stress and tone in emotionallycharged scenes) have been restored, as have certain other MS prac-tices. Thus, for example, rather than follow the standardized form oflayout used in the printed texts for letters (such as capitalized head-ings and signatures), it was thought preferable to retain the non-standardized format of MS (including idiosyncratic punctuation),which may be intended to reect the individualities of the supposedwriters.

The reasons for my choice of copy-text and discussion of how itshould be treated are given in greater detail in my doctoral thesis, ACritical Edition of Thomas Hardys A Pair of Blue Eyes (Universityof Birmingham, 1980), which also contains a full historical collation.

A. M.

Note on the Text xliii

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

BiographyGibson, James, Thomas Hardy: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan,

1996). (ed.), Thomas Hardy: Interviews and Recollections (Basingstoke:

Macmillan, 1999).Hands, Timothy, A Hardy Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992).Hardy, Emma, Some Recollections, ed. Evelyn Hardy and Robert Gittings

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).Hardy, Thomas, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael

Millgate (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984).Millgate, Michael, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2004).

Letters and notebooksThe Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard L. Purdy and Michael

Millgate, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 197888).Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1996).The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. Lennart A. Bjrk, 2 vols.

(London: Macmillan, 1985).The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy; with an Appendix Including the

Unpublished Passages in the Original Typescripts of The Life of ThomasHardy, ed. Richard H. Taylor (London: Macmillan, 1978).

Bibliography and textual studiesDraper, Ronald P., and Martin S. Ray, An Annotated Critical Bibliography

of Thomas Hardy (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989).Gatrell, Simon, Hardy the Creator: A Textual Biography (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1988).Purdy, Richard L., Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1954).

TopographyKay-Robinson, Denys, Hardys Wessex Reappraised (Newton Abbot:

David & Charles, 1972).Lea, Hermann, Thomas Hardys Wessex (1913; London: Macmillan, 1977).

General critical studiesBayley, John, An Essay on Hardy (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1978).Cox, R. G. (ed.), Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970).Goode, John, Thomas Hardy: The Oensive Truth (Oxford: Basil

Blackwell, 1988).Ingham, Patricia, Thomas Hardy (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989).Kramer, Dale (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).Millgate, Michael, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (London:

Bodley Head, 1971).

On A Pair of Blue EyesGreen, Laura,