The Collected Short Stories of Thomas Hardy

A Primary Bibliography

by Martin Ray

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The following bibliography gives details of all the publications of Hardy's collected short stories which have textual significance. A note on extant manuscripts is also added.
 

Wessex Tales
A Group of Noble Dames
Life's Little Ironies
A Changed Man
'The Three Strangers'
'A Tradition of Eighteen 
Hundred and Four'
'The Melancholy Hussar'
'The Withered Arm'
'Fellow-Townsmen'
'Interlopers at the Knap'
'The Distracted Preacher' 		 'The First Countess of Wessex'
'Barbara of the House of Grebe'
'The Marchioness of Stonehenge'
'Lady Mottisfont'
'The Lady Icenway'
'Squire Petrick's Lady'
'Anna, Lady Baxby'
'The Lady Penelope'
'The Duchess of Hamptonshire'
'The Honourable Laura'		 'An Imaginative Woman'
'The Son's Veto'
'For Conscience' Sake'
'A Tragedy of Two Ambitions'
'On the Western Circuit'
'To Please His Wife'
'The Fiddler of the Reels'
'A Few Crusted Characters'		 'A Changed Man'
'The Waiting Supper'
'Alicia's Diary'
'The Grave by the Handpost'
'Enter a Dragoon'
'A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork'
'What the Shepherd Saw'
'A Committee-Man of "The Terror"'
'Master John Horseleigh, Knight'
'The Duke's Reappearance'
'A Mere Interlude'
'The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid' 

'The Three Strangers'

A bound manuscript of 'The Three Strangers' is currently located in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. It is written on 33 leaves, with numerous deletions and additions, but compositors' surnames on eight of the leaves indicate that it was the printers' copy for the serial (see Purdy, p. 59). Hardy gave the MS. to Sydney Cockerell on 29 September 1911 to acknowledge his help in distributing his other MSS. among public collections.

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'A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four'
No manuscript of the story is known to have survived.

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'The Melancholy Hussar'
A fragment of an early draft of the story (not noted by Purdy) is in the Charles Aldrich Autograph Collection, located in the Iowa State Historical Department, and a fair copy of the complete manuscript is now in the Huntington Library.

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'The Withered Arm'
No manuscript of the story is known to have survived.

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'Fellow-Townsmen'
No manuscript of the story is known to have survived.

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'Interlopers at the Knap'
No manuscript of the story is known to have survived.

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'The Distracted Preacher'
A manuscript of 'The Distracted Young Preacher', not mentioned by Purdy, was sold at auction in 1973; it is now owned by a private collector and is unavailable for study.

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'The First Countess of Wessex'
R.L. Purdy notes that the manuscript of 'The First Countess of Wessex', written on 50 quarto leaves and signed by Hardy, was sold in New York by the Anderson Auction Company on 29 May 1906, and its current location is unknown.

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'Barbara of the House of Grebe'
The manuscript of the Graphic stories is extant. It was presented by Hardy, through Sydney Cockerell, to the Library of Congress, Washington DC, in October 1911 when he was distributing his MSS. among various public collections. As R.L. Purdy notes, the MS. was foliated and rearranged by Hardy, and 'Barbara' is numbered 6-53; each of the six stories was also independently foliated and 'Barbara' is numbered 1-47.

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'The Marchioness of Stonehenge'
The manuscript of the Graphic stories is extant. It was presented by Hardy, through Sydney Cockerell, to the Library of Congress, Washington DC, in October 1911 when he was distributing his MSS. among various public collections. As R.L. Purdy notes, the MS. was foliated and rearranged by Hardy, and 'The Marchioness of Stonehenge' is numbered 54-73; however, each of the six stories was also independently foliated and 'The Marchioness of Stonehenge' is numbered 1-20. The final leaf, fo. 74, is missing; it contained links cancelled and rewritten when the stories were collected in 1891.

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'Lady Mottisfont'
The manuscript of the Graphic stories is extant. It was presented by Hardy, through Sydney Cockerell, to the Library of Congress, Washington DC, in October 1911 when he was distributing his MSS. among various public collections. As R.L. Purdy notes, the MS. was foliated and rearranged by Hardy, and 'Lady Mottisfont' is numbered 115-36; each of the six stories was also independently foliated and 'Lady Mottisfont' is numbered 1-22.

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'The Lady Icenway'
The manuscript of the Graphic stories is extant. It was presented by Hardy, through Sydney Cockerell, to the Library of Congress, Washington DC, in October 1911 when he was distributing his MSS. among various public collections. As R.L. Purdy notes, the MS. was foliated and rearranged by Hardy, and 'The Lady Icenway' is numbered 85-114; however, each of the six stories was also independently foliated and the second page of 'The Lady Icenway' is numbered 7, indicating that its opening six pages were reduced to the single first page which now survives, some time after the story was finished.2 It is unlikely that this alteration was the result of the Graphic's pressure to bowdlerize the text, since the parts of the story to which they objected occurred at the end.

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'Squire Petrick's Lady'
The manuscript of the Graphic stories is extant. It was presented by Hardy, through Sydney Cockerell, to the Library of Congress, Washington DC, in October 1911 when he was distributing his MSS. among various public collections. As R.L. Purdy notes, the MS. was foliated and rearranged by Hardy, and 'Squire Petrick's Lady' is numbered 102-14; however, each of the six stories was also independently foliated and 'Squire Petrick's Lady' is numbered 1-13, with two leaves, fos. 109 and 110, having passages written on the verso.

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'Anna, Lady Baxby'
The manuscript of the Graphic stories is extant. It was presented by Hardy, through Sydney Cockerell, to the Library of Congress, Washington DC, in October 1911 when he was distributing his MSS. among various public collections. As R.L. Purdy notes, the MS. was foliated and rearranged by Hardy, and 'Anna, Lady Baxby' is numbered 75-83; however, each of the six stories was also independently foliated and 'Anna, Lady Baxby' is numbered 1-9.1 The final leaf, fo. 84, is missing; it contained links cancelled and rewritten when the stories were collected in 1891.

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'The Lady Penelope'
The manuscript of 'The Lady Penelope' is extant. It was presented by Hardy, through Sydney Cockerell, to the Library of Congress, Washington DC, in October 1911 when he was distributing his MSS. among various public collections. As R.L. Purdy notes, the MS. was foliated by Hardy, and is numbered 1-14; 'The Lady Penelope' and the six stories which appeared as A Group of Noble Dames in the Graphic are bound together in the order in which they appeared in the first collected edition of 1891.

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'The Duchess of Hamptonshire'
The three different titles of the story indicate the three distinct versions in which it existed, first in 1878 (the English publication in Light is effectively identical to the American Harper's Weekly), then in 1884 in the Independent, and finally in 1891 in the first collected edition. What is the relationship between these three versions? Purdy notes that 'the version of 1884 is much the longest (and may be the earliest), as the version of 1878 is the shortest' (pp. 63-4). Purdy is correct about the respective lengths of the three versions, but his conjecture about the order in which they were composed is mistaken. A close study of the manuscript of the 1884 publication shows that the sequence of publication is the same as the sequence of composition: the earliest version was the first to be published, and the Independent was an augmented and revised version which Hardy prepared in 1884. He then combined parts from these two earlier versions to produce the collected edition in 1891: the 1878 version was the basis for the first part of the story in the collected edition (up to the point when Hill leaves Emmeline in the shrubbery), while the 1884 version provides the bulk of the second part.

The bound manuscript of the 1884 version of the story, entitled 'Emmeline; or Passion versus Principle', is written on 25 leaves of ruled paper. It is currently located in the Pierpont Morgan Library, which acquired it in 1909.

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'The Honourable Laura'
The manuscript is not known to have survived.

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'An Imaginative Woman'
The manuscript of 'An Imaginative Woman' was presented by Hardy to Aberdeen University Library in 1911 when he was distributing his MSS. among various public collections. Aberdeen University had conferred on him the honorary degree of LLD in April 1905, his first academic distinction.

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'The Son's Veto'
The manuscript of 'The Son's Veto' has survived and is located at the Fondation Martin Bodmer in Geneva. The MS. contains sixteen leaves, and there is, as Purdy notes, evidence of a considerable excision towards the end of the story: the last seven centimetres of the penultimate page have been cut out, and about 3.5 cms are missing from the top of the final page.

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'For Conscience' Sake'
The manuscript of 'For Conscience' Sake' is extant. It probably dates in composition, like most of the other stories in Life's Little Ironies, from the latter half of 1890 and the early months of 1891, when work on Tess and A Group of Noble Dames was largely completed. The 24 leaves of cream paper are a fair copy of the story used to set up the serial publication, although there are a number of alterations within the MS., and there are also a number of variations between it and the serial. The manuscript was donated to Manchester University Library in October 1911.

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'A Tragedy of Two Ambitions'
The manuscript of 'A Tragedy of Two Ambitions' was donated to Manchester University Library in October 1911. It is a fair copy in Hardy's hand. It consists of 36 leaves numbered 1-36 in the top right corner of each leaf. There are numerous minor revisions which Hardy made during the copying. The first leaf has two alternative titles bracketed together, with the rejected one, 'The Shame of the Halboroughs', cancelled underneath 'A Tragedy of Two Ambitions'.

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'On the Western Circuit'
Thomas Hardy presented the manuscript of 'On the Western Circuit' to Manchester Central Public Library in 1911, but this extant manuscript could not have been used as the printers' copy for either of the serialized versions since it shows no indication of the substantial bowdlerization in the serials. The printers' copy for the serials is a revised typescript which is not currently available for study. It was sold at Sotheby's in 1988 and remains in private ownership in the United States. The Sotheby Sales Catalogue for 15 December 1988 reproduces a short extract of eleven typed lines which seems to indicate that the TS. was a direct copy of the MS., which Hardy then revised by marginal or interlined alterations. The catalogue gives the following description of the TS.: The catalogue is mistaken in its assertion that these last two additions did not appear in the serials, and it is further mistaken in suggesting that 'She wished she had married a London man' was not originally in the MS., but it does at least confirm that the rest of the two sentences were indeed autograph additions to the TS.

The TS. was purchased by David J. Holmes, a book-dealer of Philadelphia, who later sold it to Howard Lakin of Lakin & Marley Rare Books, Mill Valley, California. Mr Lakin has kindly informed me that the TS. has no pagination or date, and that it shows 'numerous and substantial autograph changes throughout [...]. In total, 38 of the 43 pages in this slightly worn and soiled but extraordinary manuscript bear Hardy's deletions and insertions.' A facsimile of the TS. is in the British Library (RP 4044), but access to it was reserved until January 1996, and will still require the permission of the owner.

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'To Please His Wife'
The manuscript is not known to have survived.

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'The Fiddler of the Reels'
No manuscript of the story is known to have survived.

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'A Few Crusted Characters'
The manuscripts

A manuscript of these sketches, entitled 'Wessex Folk', is located in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Purdy accurately describes it as 'a very rough hurried first draft (in places hardly more than notes) of a kind Hardy almost invariably destroyed' (p. 84), and Gatrell notes that it is 'the most substantial piece of evidence available to anyone trying to piece together Hardy's preliminary working habits' (1984, p. 11). The manuscript consists of 30 leaves (some of which are cut down to varying sizes), foliated 1-31 by Hardy, although five are missing and four are supplementary leaves. A later fair copy of a manuscript of 'Wessex Folk' may be extant, but its current location has not been discovered. A page of it was reproduced in facsimile in Harper's Monthly Magazine in July 1925 (p. 241), showing the opening of 'Incident in the Life of Mr. George Crookhill'.

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'A Changed Man'
A bound manuscript of 'A Changed Man' is currently located in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. It would seem to be a printers' copy which Hardy sent to C.K. Shorter, the editor of the Sphere. Proofs of the Sphere publication were composed from it, a copy of which was sent to America and became the version of the story which appeared in the Cosmopolitan. However, Hardy must have further revised the proofs after sending off the American version, because the Sphere has a number of substantive differences from the Cosmopolitan, and it is the Sphere version which forms the basis for the story's first collected edition in 1913.

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'The Waiting Supper'
In addition to these, Purdy notes that 'a condensation of the closing episodes of the story (the end of VI, and VII and VIII) was published, with no indication of its earlier existence, as "The Intruder, A Legend of the 'Chronicle' Office" in the Dorset County Chronicle (Dorchester), 25 December 1890'.

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'Alicia's Diary'
In 1923, Hardy twice stated in his 'Memoranda, II' notebook that the manuscript of 'Alicia's Diary' was 'not in existence'.

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'The Grave by the Handpost'
The manuscript of the story has not been located since R.L. Purdy noted that it was owned by a Mr Halsted B. VanderPoel, and the Index of English Literary Manuscripts gives no further information.

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'Enter a Dragoon'
No manuscript of the story is known to have survived.

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'A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork'
A manuscript of the story has survived, and is currently located in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. It is not the manuscript of the Detroit Post story but is a fair copy prepared for the printers of the English Illustrated Magazine. It contains fifteen leaves, and every leaf has a scattering of revisions. It is entitled 'An Ancient Earthwork' and was preserved by the magazine's editor, Clement Shorter.

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'What the Shepherd Saw'
The opening three leaves of the manuscript, measuring 6¼" × 8", are located at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University. The leaves are sewn in a folded sheet of fine paper, on which Hardy has written '"What the Shepherd Saw" A tale written in 1881, & published in English and American Periodicals. Recently included in Collected Works in the volume entitled "A Changed Man". Original MS, being First Rough Draft. (3 pages only - the remainder lost.) Thomas Hardy.' At the head of the first page alongside the title, Hardy has noted in red ink '[First rough Draught] (1881)', and at the end he added '(Caetera desunt)'. This three-page fragment was one of three which Mrs Hardy sent in February 1916 for a Red Cross Sale at Christie's on 26 April 1916.

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'A Committee-Man of "The Terror"'
A bound manuscript of 'A Committee-Man' is currently located in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Corrected proof-sheets of the story are in the Huntington Library.

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'Master John Horseleigh, Knight'
A manuscript of the story is currently located in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

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'The Duke's Reappearance'
The manuscript is currently located in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. It consists of eleven leaves of ruled paper, numbered 1-10 by Hardy with a supplementary leaf, numbered 1a. It is a fair copy of the story as it appeared in the Saturday Review, although every leaf shows some slight revision.

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'A Mere Interlude'
The manuscript is not known to have survived.

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'The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid'
A bound manuscript of 'The Romantic Adventures' is currently located in the Pierpont Morgan Library, which acquired it in 1912. The MS. is written on 116 leaves of ruled paper, numbered 1-115 by Hardy, with one leaf numbered 14a. Eleven leaves have passages on the verso marked for insertion. Four scattered pages are at least partly in Emma Hardy's hand. The MS. corroborates Hardy's comment that the story was hastily written: although it is the printers' copy for the Graphic, there are a number of inconsistencies in the plot, cancelled passages and many unique variant readings which were revised at the proof stage. Originally, the MS. was unparagraphed, as if Hardy were trying to compress as much material as possible on to each page.

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