University of Virginia Library

Drawings and Withdrawings: The Vicissitudes of Thomas Hardy's Wessex Poems
by
PAMELA DALZIEL

Wessex Poems and Other Verses, first published in London by Harper and Brothers in mid-December 1898, was and remained unique among Thomas Hardy's works in being extensively illustrated by its author.[1] Hardy's references to Wessex Poems throughout his career consistently contain a detectable tension between, on the one hand, a strong personal and creative commitment to the drawings and, on the other, an uncertainty as to their value either in themselves or as illustrative reinforcements or enhancements of the poems. It was an opposition or ambiguity that Hardy seems never to have resolved and that was clearly related to and sometimes responsible for several curious aspects of the work's publication history.

Although Hardy had been gathering the poems for the volume over a number of years[2]--several of them, indeed, having been at least drafted in the 1860s--the illustrations appear to have been late additions. The title, 'Wessex Poems: With Sketches of their Scenes by the Author', appears in the autobiographical Life and Work of Thomas Hardy against the date 4 February 1897 (p. 302), but much of the work on those sketches seems to have been done during the summer and early autumn of the following year. Hardy noted in the Preface to Wessex Poems, dated September 1898, that the drawings had been 'recently made' (p. viii), and on the 22nd of that month he wrote to his friend Florence Henniker: 'The "mysterious occupation" (which I have now finished) is one you will not have guessed I think. It has been the making of some sketches in possible illustration of some verses of mine which I think now of publishing. I told nobody I was doing the sketches, as I was by no means sure that the attempt wd come to anything' (Collected Letters, ii. 201-202). Writing to the same correspondent on 17 October Hardy downplayed the importance of the sketches ('small pen-& ink [sic] drawings--much the worse from my years of unpractice') even while speaking appreciatively of the interest she had shown in them: 'You please me by your caring about them' (Collected Letters, ii. 203). On 13 November 1898 he again insisted to Henniker:

'The sketches are quite unimportant--as, indeed, are the poems', and while the comment seems on the face of it comprehensively deprecating, the emphasis is clearly, and defensively, on the illustrations, described in the Preface as 'rough sketches' which, 'as may be surmised, are inserted for personal and local reasons rather than for their intrinsic qualities' (Collected Letters, ii. 205; Preface, p. viii).

Hardy evidently took pleasure in reverting to the skills he had developed as an architect[3] and continued to exercise (despite his insistence on 'years of unpractice') in the pages of his pocket-sized diary-notebooks. Three months after publication, when he had had more time to develop a rationale for the inclusion of the illustrations, Hardy told his friend Edward Clodd that he had found in their preparation 'a sort of illegitimate interest--that which arose from their being a novel amusement, & a wholly gratuitous performance which could not profit me anything, & probably would do me harm' (Collected Letters, ii. 217). That there was for Hardy an element of self-indulgence in making the drawings seems clear enough. It is, however, striking that even in writing to Clodd, probably his closest male confidant at this period, he remained unwilling or unable to articulate what he perceived as the function of the drawings as integral elements of Wessex Poems--whether, for example, he saw them as providing needed support to a risky first venture into the publication of verse or as simply constituting a supplementary gesture of expressive independence that would the more clearly mark his abandonment of prose fiction.

Little is known of the composition of Wessex Poems, Hardy having destroyed virtually all textual evidence pre-dating the surviving manuscript he later presented to the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery. In a letter to Edmund Gosse of 14 February 1899 he cited his absorption in 'the novel occupation of making the drawings' as an excuse for having revised the poems 'so perfunctorily' (Collected Letters, ii. 214), but the manuscript, even though fair copy, still shows a considerable degree of authorial textual revision and indecision.[4] The titles of several poems are altered and numerous corrections are made to individual words and lines: the text of 'The Impercipient', for example, is affected in both respects.[5] Similar last-minute decisions seem to have been made with respect to the illustrations. There are thirty-two drawings in the manuscript--all of them almost certainly fair copies (perhaps tracings) of earlier drafts--and the first pre-publication advertisements of the volume announced that it would contain that number of illustrations.[6] The title-page of Wessex Poems as published refers to the presence of thirty illustrations,

but the volume in fact contains thirty-one, the frontispiece having perhaps been left out of account. The missing illustration--a tailpiece to 'The Casterbridge Captains'--was not included in any edition published during Hardy's lifetime and in fact appeared for the first time 'in its proper place' in 1982, in the first volume of Samuel Hynes's edition of The Complete Poetical Works (i. 64, 388).

Hardy was doubtful of the success of his new venture--to the point, according to the Life, of offering to indemnify Harper and Brothers against any losses they might incur through publishing the volume (p. 325). He was, however, no stranger to the use of illustrations in association with written text, having long been accustomed as a novelist to the conventions and assumed advantages of serial illustration. He had also been engaged in selecting the subjects of the frontispieces Henry Macbeth- Raeburn had been commissioned to provide for the Osgood, McIlvaine 'Wessex Novels' collected edition of 1895-96--to which Wessex Poems was, in effect, being added as a supplementary (though unnumbered) volume.[7] Harper and Brothers, who had recently absorbed Osgood, McIlvaine and were therefore now acting as Hardy's publishers on both sides of the Atlantic, were not in fact hesitant about taking Wessex Poems. They allowed Hardy generous terms[8] and issued the volume in a variety of formats--in London in both the dark green 'Wessex Novels' binding at six shillings and a white buckram binding at seven-and-sixpence, and in New York in a light green binding stamped on the front cover with a six-colour 'Wessex' scene derived from one of Hardy's illustrations.[9] Hardy wrote in a 13 November 1898 letter to Henniker of 'waiting for the American issue' (Collected Letters, ii. 205), and in fact it was being reset page for printed page from the London edition, though incorporating American spelling and economizing in length by not necessarily beginning a new poem on a new right-hand page. Because the entire edition was set on high quality art paper, the illustrations were more sharply reproduced than in the British edition. They were slightly redistributed, however, as a consequence of the repagination, and the drawing for 'She, to Him I' became in the process somewhat disturbingly relocated opposite the sestet of 'Revulsion'.[10]

Hardy, at this major turning point of his career, was deeply anxious as to the reception of Wessex Poems, and when the London edition was published in mid-December 1898--a month ahead of the New York edition--he sent out an unusually large number of presentation copies to friends and

fellow authors.[11] Swinburne, one of the recipients, praised poems and illustrations alike,[12] but the volume met with a decidedly mixed reception from the contemporary press, and Hardy had some justification for his complaint--later expressed at length in the pages of the Life--that his reputation as a novelist prevented the poems from receiving a fair hearing: 'There were those prose works standing in a row in front, catching the eye at every attempt to see the poetry, and forming an almost impenetrable screen' (p. 320).

The illustrations, though often ignored by the reviewers, generally fared rather better than the poems themselves. Approval, it is true, was sometimes ambiguously expressed--the Westminster Gazette noting that the effect of the drawings, 'like that of Mr. Hardy's best poems, is curiously in advance of their technical merits'--but the Glasgow Herald, for example, declared that the sketches not only helped to 'give force to the poetry' but were 'themselves poems', while in the Speaker Arthur Quiller-Couch insisted that, for all their stiffness, they possessed an 'intrinsic beauty' and were 'packed with meaning', revealing 'something which the poems they decorate are also trying to reveal'.[13] The Athenæum reviewer, though judging Hardy's success as a poet to be 'of a very narrow range', also saw the drawings as consistent with 'some of the most marked characteristics' of the texts they accompanied: 'Primitive in execution, and frequently inspired by a somewhat grim mortuary imagination, they are still full of poetry, and show a real sense of the decorative values of architectural outline and nocturnal landscape. Even without the verses, they are a new light on Wessex.'[14] The Daily Chronicle reviewer was similarly sympathetic to the drawings, to the point of commenting favourably on a number of specific examples, and even one of the most hostile commentators, in Literature, after pronouncing on the 'unfitness' of verse as a 'medium of expression for Mr. Hardy's genius', sought to drive that judgement somewhat unkindly home by declaring, 'The illustrative sketches which are all of them interesting, and not a few of them singularly powerful little studies of the wide and rolling pastures that he loves, express that genius far more adequately.'[15]

The passage in the Life (pp. 319-325) dealing with the reviews of Wessex Poems makes no reference to the illustrations, and it would indeed seem that their presence in the volume, if not in itself a strongly positive factor, did not have any significant negative impact on the initial reception of the poems. That Hardy failed to illustrate his next volume of verse, Poems of the Past and the Present ([1901]), is perhaps not surprising in view of the very

different character and subject matter of most of the poems included in this collection. As for Time's Laughingstocks, when the time came to prepare the volume for publication in 1909 Hardy had already published the three volumes of The Dynasts as well as the two earlier collections of verse and doubtless thought of himself as solidly established as a poet and of the poems themselves as no longer in need of whatever direct or indirect enhancement illustration might conceivably supply. Individual poems were sometimes illustrated by professional artists on the occasion of their first appearance in periodicals and pamphlets,[16] but--with the special and very limited exception of The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall--Hardy himself never attempted any repetition of the Wessex Poems experiment.[17]

He did not, however, seek to abandon or repudiate any aspect of the contents or format of Wessex Poems, even though in the period immediately following his decision to change his British publisher from Harper and Brothers to Macmillan and Company in 1902 the novels were naturally enough the main topic of his correspondence with Frederick Macmillan. Writing to Macmillan on 9 July 1902, Hardy noted that his final agreement with Harper had specified that at its termination date, 4 October 1902, the plates of his works were to be available at half cost and any outstanding stock at cost, and it was promptly agreed that Macmillan should approach Harper and Brothers on the matter--also that Hardy should have the opportunity to make a number of corrections to some of the novels before reprinting.[18] From Hardy's letter of 14 July 1902 it appears that their discussion of the 'set' of works to be republished had thus far related only to the novels: would it not be advisable, he now asked, 'to get the plates of the 2 vols. of poems from Harpers', even though their rights to the recently published Poems of the Past and the Present had not yet expired (Collected Letters, iii. 28).[19] Evidently assuming that Macmillan might need to be persuaded as to the desirability of adding the poems to the series, he went on to observe that 'as people nowadays are bent on getting complete sets of a writer's books they are necessary to enable you to use the word in your list' (Collected Letters, iii. 29).

Macmillan's negotiations with Harper resulted in an agreement of 7 October 1902 which specified, inter alia, the purchase of a set of plates of Wessex Poems at a cost of thirty pounds and the loan of the moulds of Poems of

the Past and the Present; it also involved the purchase of forty-one copies in the seven-and-sixpenny white buckram binding and fifty-nine copies in the six-shilling dark green bold- ribbed cloth binding.[20] As with the one hundred copies of each of the novels in the six-shilling format which Macmillan purchased at the same time, the idea (as Frederick Macmillan explained to Hardy on 24 September 1902) was to keep the 'edition' available for sale to 'such people as ask for it'[21]--its greater price as compared with the new Macmillan three-and-sixpenny volumes continuing to be justified by its larger paper size, its ribbed cloth binding, and (where the fiction titles were concerned) its inclusion of the Macbeth- Raeburn frontispieces.

Although cheaper, smaller, and less handsomely produced than its Osgood, McIlvaine/Harper predecessor, the Macmillan Wessex Poems of 1903 received careful attention from both its author and its publisher. The several alterations Hardy made to his text of 1898 are conveniently traceable as the 'WP03' level in Hynes's listing of variant readings in The Complete Poetical Works, and while the 'illustrations' for which Hardy expressed concern in his letter to Frederick Macmillan of 11 October 1902[22] were probably Macbeth-Raeburn's 'Wessex Novels' frontispieces rather than his own Wessex Poems drawings, neither he nor Macmillan seems to have suggested that those drawings might now be omitted. Macmillan did obtain from Harper and Brothers the blocks of the Wessex Poems illustrations, but while the illustrations were situated in precisely the locations they had occupied in the original London printing of 1898, there was a general though by no means consistent reversal in the orientation of those whose width exceeded their length and therefore had had to be rotated ninety degrees to use effectively the space of a full page. While in 1898 the illustration to, for instance, 'The Impercipient' (p. [183]) had faced inwards, towards the text of the poem, in 1903 it now faced outwards, away from the text. Visually this might be considered an improvement--the illustration did not have to be looked at from across the distance and disturbance of the text--but it was no less a disruption of that interplay between text and illustration which Hardy had presumably sought to achieve in the volume as a whole. Given that such illustrations face consistently inwards in 1898 and only inconsistently outwards in 1903, it is hard to imagine that the change reflected a deliberate design decision, let alone a decision emanating from Hardy himself.

Another, clearly unintended, discrepancy between the 1898 first edition and its successor resulted from the discovery that the block for the main 'Leipzig' illustration (p. [74]) had somehow been mislaid: 'There seems to be nothing for it', Frederick Macmillan told Hardy on 8 June 1903, 'but to re-engrave the picture and I shall be much obliged if for this purpose you

can lend us the original drawing which Messrs. Harper & Brothers think is in your possession.'[23] This was the occasion of the elaborately painstaking letter which Hardy wrote from London to his wife at Max Gate in the hope that she would manage to find the original drawing without his having to leave London in order to search for it in person.[24] It also produced a plainly visible difference between the illustration of 1898 and that of 1903, even though that visibility is primarily the result of the 1903 decision not to trim the bottom of Hardy's drawing (as had been done in 1898).[25] Characteristically, Hardy was at once deliberate and deprecating in requesting return of the 'Leipzig' drawing some six months later: 'I do not value it,' he wrote to Frederick Macmillan, 'but it will be best to keep the whole set together' (Collected Letters, iii. 100).

It was in this form and--for better or worse--with these features that Wessex Poems became permanently fixed as a work combining text and related illustration. Interestingly enough, the 25 March 1903 order as recorded in the relevant Macmillan 'Editions Book' shows that the figure of 1,000 for the first printing was a substitution for the figure of 2,000 originally inscribed.[26] Precisely the same alteration was made to the order, of the same date, for Poems of the Past and the Present, and while both changes could have been the result of simple clerical error it seems more likely that a publishing decision had been made not to assign the poems the same 2,000- volume print runs as had earlier been ordered for the novel and short story titles. However, the inclusion of Wessex Poems as a separate title in Macmillan's three-and-sixpenny so-called Uniform Edition was clearly of importance to Hardy, and this text remained in print, with minor variation in binding, for the rest of his life and beyond. The first printing of 1,000 copies in 1903 was followed by two printings of 500 copies each in 1911 and 1916 and a final printing of 1,000 copies in September 1923.[27]

The integration of text and illustration was kept alive for a considerably wider audience through the medium of the highly popular Macmillan Pocket Edition, in which Wessex Poems first appeared, in a joint volume with Poems of the Past and the Present, in June 1907. An initial printing of 1,000 copies

was followed by a second printing of 2,000 copies just over a year later[28] and then by seven more printings between then and 1928, to a final total of 22,000 copies[29]--a respectable tally, even though it comes nowhere near the figures for the novels in the same series, some of them reprinted several times in the 1920s in runs of 5,000 and 10,000 copies. Hardy was at first doubtful about the feasibility of including the Wessex Poems drawings in the Pocket Edition format, only to change his mind after inspecting a copy of Thackeray's Vanity Fair as published in Macmillan's Illustrated Pocket Library. On 27 September 1906 he wrote to Frederick Macmillan: 'I am much obliged for the pretty copy of "Vanity Fair". I had not realized that the thin paper would bear the illustrations so well; & there will therefore be no difficulty with the poems' (Collected Letters, iii. 228). He then ended the letter with one of those gestures of shy defiance that so often marked his references to the illustrations: 'Some people say, too, that they like the drawings.'

In view of Hardy's continuing loyalty to the drawings, it seems curious that they should have been excluded from the relevant volume of the Macmillan Wessex Edition--the edition he liked to think of as embodying his ultimate intentions and for which he undertook what were, in most cases, his most systematic revisions. It has generally been assumed, on the basis of Hardy's letter to Frederick Macmillan of 10 October 1912, that he had no particular interest in the inclusion or exclusion of the illustrations from the volume in which Wessex Poems was again to appear in company with Poems of the Past and the Present and that he was easily deterred by the inconvenience of his having already presented the original drawings to the Birmingham Museum: 'I do not myself care much to have them reproduced in the Wessex Edition; but will subscribers grumble if they are not included? I should like the question of sale to decide the matter: if the enhanced sale would make it worth while, we might ask to borrow them; if not trouble would be saved by leaving them out' (Collected Letters, iv. 231). That this was in fact another instance of Hardy's long-standing indecision about the illustrations--his hesitation to insist upon their importance in face of the objections of others--is strongly suggested by the survival of previously unrecorded evidence in the Dorset County Museum.[30]

That evidence takes the form of an envelope, originally addressed to Hardy himself and bearing a 13 September 1926 postmark, on which Hardy has written in blue crayon, 'Illustrations to "Wessex Poems" (from proofs)'. The envelope does indeed contain, individually cut or torn out, a not quite complete set (four are missing) of the Wessex Poems illustrations. It is, however,

clear--from the rough edges along the gutter sides of several leaves, from the weight and quality of the paper, and from the presence of printed matter on both sides of each leaf--that the illustrations have been removed not from proofs but from a copy of one of the published editions. From the presence of stint marks and inky fingerprints on several leaves and from the fact that the segments of text preserved on the reverse of four of the illustrations carry revisions in Hardy's hand it can further be inferred that the copy in question had passed through the printers' hands as setting copy for a new edition.

The revisions themselves are not unfamiliar, in that all of them were incorporated in 1912 into the Wessex Edition volume of Wessex Poems (also containing Poems of the Past and the Present): the most extensive of them involves the replacement of the original opening of the second stanza of 'The Alarm', ''Twas hard to realize on This snug side the mute horizon', by 'It was almost past conceiving Here, where woodbines hung inweaving,'.[31] It is also a straightforward matter to determine (by page size and other such criteria) that the copy on which they are inscribed must have derived from one or other of the printings of the Macmillan Uniform Edition. And since Hardy is known to have used copies of that edition in revising other titles for the Wessex Edition,[32] it seems clear that the Dorset County Museum fragments were detached from the setting copy for the Wessex Edition of Wessex Poems. It seems equally clear--from the ample presence of printing-house marks on the illustration pages and from the simple fact that omission of the illustrations has not been either graphically or verbally signalled--that at the time of his first submitting the corrected copy to Macmillan Hardy's assumption, even his 'intention', was that his drawings would continue to remain in place.

The terms of the 10 October 1912 letter--quoted above--in which Hardy failed to insist upon inclusion of the drawings can perhaps be better understood in relation to the 9 October letter from Frederick Macmillan to which he was replying. Observing that the illustrated Wessex Poems was about to share a single volume of the Wessex Edition with the unillustrated Poems of the Past and the Present, Macmillan asked what Hardy would 'like done' about the situation:

Not only did Macmillan make clear what his preference as a publisher would be in this instance, he made it scarcely less clear that he did not himself regard the Wessex Poems illustrations as in any way intrinsic to the reading of the individual poems or to the integrity of the volume as a whole. The pressure was strong, however courteously applied, and in light of Hardy's long-standing personal ambivalence about the drawings it is perhaps remarkable that in his reply he should have resisted that pressure even as strongly as he did.

Typically, however, it was a tentative rather than an absolute resistance, and after saying that he would 'like the question of sale to decide the matter' he was left in no position to challenge the practical publishing considerations promptly re-invoked by Maurice Macmillan, acting in his brother's absence: 'we do not think the sale of your Poems would be injured in the Wessex Edition by the absence of the drawings, and as the originals are not in your possession we should advise leaving them out'.[34] There was apparently no further discussion of the issue, with the result that while the texts in Wessex Poems were substantially revised for the Wessex Edition they were indeed deprived of the drawings by which they had been previously accompanied.[35] Nor does there seem to have been any suggestion that the drawings should be reinstated in the Mellstock Edition volume of 1920, even though the text itself was, in effect, brought up to date. As Hynes's edition shows, corrections and revisions to Wessex Poems texts continued to be incorporated into various impressions of the Uniform Edition, the Wessex Edition, and the one-volume Collected Poems (first published in 1919), but no occasion arose--or was created--for the restoration of the illustrations.

Hardy did not, however, lose sight of them or of their importance, both to himself personally and to the poems with which they belonged. His very preservation of the envelope of extracted illustrations as late as September 1926 seems evidence of this, as does the distinctly wistful letter he wrote to Frederick Macmillan on 29 January 1927, less than a year before his own death:

Hardy, who had recently been signing the 525 sheets required for insertion into Macmillan's three-volume large-paper edition of The Dynasts,[36] was perhaps envisaging a similar edition of Wessex Poems. Not only was he disappointed in that ambition but there would seem to have been no publication of an illustrated Wessex Poems between that final Pocket Edition printing of 1928 and the appearance of the first volume of Hynes's edition of The Complete Poetical Works in 1982. The drawings in Hynes's edition, however, are with one exception modified in size--from reduction by half to enlargement by a third--and, although skilfully placed and sharply reproduced, their impact cannot wholly replicate the experience of encountering the illustrations in their original locations and proportions. It is therefore both interesting and useful to find closer approximations to that experience being offered by two recent publications--a photographic facsimile of the London 1898 Wessex Poems (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1994) and a page- for-page, line-for-line resetting of the same edition with photographic reproductions of the original drawings (Keele, Staffordshire: Keele University Press, 1995). Hardy himself would doubtless have been gratified by these initiatives, and Hardy scholarship can only profit from the prospect of increased and enhanced exposure to one of his most remarkable and complexly protean works.[37]